are living in Paris and begin buying art from the dealer Ambroise Vollard, in 1904.  Matisse calls Vollard fifi voleur.  Which means thief.

 27 rue de Fleurus.

I went to visit B. yesterday in her father's apartment which is very much like this picture of Gertrude's, but more so, with pictures up to the ceiling and hung on doors and dark with the drapes pulled against the California sun (except there hasn't been much to speak of yesterday or today) and lots and lots of groupings of Louis Seize and occasional tables and stools and rugs and throws and objets d'art because her father is 99 and has been collecting for a long time and so there is a great deal to admire everywhere except in B's studio which is white and spare and therefore refreshing and admirable in a different way, like an oasis in reverse.

I have been rereading Gertrude Stein's Wars I have Seen which she wrote in Bilignin during the German Occupation of France and I have been toying with doing an entry on Stein again (there was one before a long time ago I think) but the problem with Stein is she is so imitable I finally realized I had to do something quickly because otherwise I might slip into her syntax and get stuck and go mad.  Why, you ask, and here I say, here is why, here is the first line:

"I DO NOT KNOW whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember."

Which as you know is a sentiment I strongly identify with and struggle with all the time.

And then here is Stein on 1904, writing in 1943: "...the Russo-Japanese [1904] war completed the work of Christopher Columbus, it made the world all one, it made the East no longer a mysterious something, not so much later any American woman could make a home for a year in Pekin and then go home again to America just as she might go to Paris [which Stein did in 1904] or to California, and so the work of Christopher Columbus was fnished, the North Pole was found and the South Pole was found, and the work of Christopher Columbus was over and so the nineteenth century which had undertaken to make science more important than anything by having finished the work of Christopher Columbus and reduced the world to a place where there was only that, forced the world into world wars to give everybody a new thing to do..." 

Stein is also extremely quotable, as you know, along with being imitable, but most of all, it is her writing about being in the midst of a war and the midst of an enemy occupation which makes the book worth reading, and it would be interesting to compare the Wars I Have Seen with the wars I have seen and experienced in my life or in yours, from this vantage point, the point of view of the 21st century. 

Because she writes, "...history does repeat itself, I have often thought that that was the really soothing thing that history does.  The one thing that is sure and certain is that history does not teach, that is to say, it always says let it be a lesson to you but is it.  Not at all because circumstances always alter cases and so although history does repeat itself it is only because the repetition is soothing that any one believes it, nobody nobody wants to learn either by their own or anybody else's experience, nobody does, no they say they do but no nobody does, nobody does. Yes nobody does."

History is soothing and does not teach and nobody wants to learn from experience, yours or theirs.  That alone is worth stealing, isn't it.  fifi voleur, c'est moi.