Alice B. Toklas

Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967) was an American writer and the lifelong partner of the modernist author and collector Gertrude Stein. Together they hosted a celebrated salon at their home at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, which became a gathering place for expatriate American writers—among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson—as well as leading avant-garde painters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque. After Stein’s death in 1946, Toklas continued to live in Paris and remained the custodian of Stein’s renowned art collection.

In 1949, Ellsworth Kelly and Ralph Coburn visited Toklas and were able to see works from the Stein collection. Among them, the work that drew Kelly’s most sustained attention was Pablo Picasso’s Student with a Pipe (winter 1913–14), a collage composed of oil, charcoal, paper, and sand on canvas.