The Wives of Genius Club

“Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris), 1992, ed. 1/4+1AP plus some other prints now considered non-work, but which are conceptually very fecund, this one sold at Christie’s in 2005 One of the great surprises in the exhibition catalogue for Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Always To Return)—which I brought up to curators Charlotte Ickes and Josh T. Franco in our conversation yesterday—is the essay by Joshua Chambers-Letson about Felix’s 1992 photo of flowers, “Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris). Chambers-Letson discusses the work as portraiture, and in the context it’s traditionally been seen in, of “queer death, queer grief, and queer love.” But then pivoting to the work as an affirmation of queer life, he proceeds to expand on Stein and Toklas’ relationship as a complicated but revolutionary and rather boldly open example of queer companionship in a hostile world. Chambers-Letson traces the contours of Stein & Toklas’ relationship IRL and in…