CLIL CLIL CLIL LITERATURE WHEN LITERATURE MEETS ART Through the 20th century, art became one of the main themes of historical fiction and inspired several famous novelists. Among them, two women from different periods and with different approaches emerged: Gertrude Stein and Tracy Chevalier. Gertrude Stein and the modern art Gertrude Stein was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays. She moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the rest of her life. As a literary innovator, Stein s work broke with the narrative, linear and temporal conventions of the 19th century. From 1903 until 1914, Gertrude and her brother, Leo, lived near the Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank of Paris, where they accumulated a great collection of works of Modern Art. In 1906, Picasso made a portrait of Gertrude Stein; when someone commented that she didn t look like her portrait, Picasso replied, she will . This quotation, as many others about modern artists living in Paris in those years, is reported in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933. It was a kind of chronicle of her Paris years, written in the voice of Toklas, her life partner. In spite of her usual complex and hermetic writing, for this book Gertrude used an accessible style in order to appeal to a wider audience. Effectively, the book became a literary bestseller, and, in 1998, Modern Library ranked it as one of the 20 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. Being based on direct experience, the book has been also used as a reference in studying the development of Modern Art. Gertrude Stein often underlined her important role as illuminated art collector, as we can read in one of the most interesting parts of the book: It is very difficult now that everybody is accustomed to everything to give some idea of the kind of uneasiness one felt when one first looked at all these pictures on these walls. In those days, there were picture of all kinds there, the time had not yet come when there were only Cézannes, Renoirs, Matisses and Picassos, Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, nor as it was even later only Cézannes and Picassos 1. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Tracy Chevalier: Girl with a Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier was born on October 19th, 1962, in Washington, D.C. She is an AmericanBritish historical novelist who has written seven novels until now. Tracy Chevalier pulls stories from paintings and historical episodes, finding the human side behind opaque images. Her most famous novel, entitled Girl with a Pearl Earring, was published in 1999. The work, which was based on the famous painting by Jan Vermeer (1665), has been translated into 38 languages. In 2003, a film based on the novel, starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth, was realized and received three Academy Award nominations in 2004, along with two Golden Globes. 1. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Harcourt, Brace and Company, United States, 1933. 112