I am pleased (albeit exhausted) to say that, as of yesterday, I
completed what may be my most ambitious undertaking in recent years. It
is a sixty-minute documentary voice-over film biography of the life of William Edwards Cook
(1881-1959), an American expatriate artist, who grew up in Iowa, but
spent his adult life in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, and Mallorca.
Titled COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive, the film is freely available to everyone here online. More specifically, it is a detailed account of the life-long friendship of Cook with the American writer Gertrude Stein.
It is based on her frequent adulation of him in her writings, as well
as on the contents of 250 pages of their unpublished correspondence.
Cook
was never a well-known artist, but he did acquire some renown for two
other reasons: In 1907, he was the first American artist to be allowed
to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Later, in 1926, he used his inheritance to commission the then-unknown Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to
design an early Modernist home (the "first true cubist house") in
Boulogne-sur-Seine, which is still intact, and widely known as Maison Cook or Villa Cook.
The
friendship of Gertrude Stein and William Edwards Cook (including the
roles of their partners, Alice B. Toklas and Jeanne Moallic Cook) was
first documented in (my earlier book) COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier (Bobolink Books, 2005). This new documentary film corrects, updates, and adds to the information in that book.
This film project (as well as the earlier book) was made possible by the earlier work of such Stein scholars as Ulla Dydo, Bruce Kellner, and Rosalind Moad, as well as the Stein / Cook correspondence in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
In 2005, when COOK BOOK was released, Ulla Dydo (the pre-eminent expert on Stein, and author of The Language that Rises) praised it in the following way: "This
book jumps out at my eyes, my ears. It comes from everywhere, never
drags those even blocks of print that dull the mind. Look at it, read
it, let it tease you: It's researched with all the care that keeps its
sense of humor and its visual and voice delights. Travel with it, leave
home, go and explore the many ways for a book to be a house for living."
The distinguished critic Guy Davenport wrote: "This is as good as topnotch Behrens gets!"
This
film is not without humor, and at times it shares surprises. It may
prove of particular value to viewers (both scholars and the rest of us)
who are particularly interested in American literature, Modernism,
Gertrude Stein, art, architecture, horse racing, Harvard, William James,
art collectors, expatriates, Paris, Mallorca, the American Midwest,
Iowa, art history, the training of artists, Cézanne, Cubism, Picasso, Le
Corbusier, LGBT, and gender identity issues.
