An iPad App About Gertrude Stein's Visit to the USA

We developed The Gertrude Stein Chronicles, an iPad app designed to look like a newspaper because  reporters, delighted by her wordplay, wrote about her constantly. Readers can review over 40 articles, peruse albums containing many caricatures, quotes from her lectures and several rare photographs.

To provide instant gratification to those who were curious about where she went on her trip, we designed an interactive map based on Gertrude’s diary, that allows visitors to follow her trip through 23 states over a period of six months, by date, or by state.

There were also three videos. Stein Through the Years is a video portrait of the artist created from a photo morphing sequence that starts with Stein as a child of three, and ends just before her death at 74. You can watch it below.

The Wars documents her life with Alice B. Toklas in Paris during WW1, where they drove an ambulance for the wounded, and WW2, when they survived in the French countryside, and afterwards entertained American GIs.

The third video, Ballets and Operas is an arresting compilation of footage from a variety of performances of Four Saints in Three Acts, the opera for which Stein wrote the libretto.

The Outcome

Visitors could swipe through the iPad newspaper to discover, or remember, the sensational reaction to her opera when it was first presented in the U.S. Visitors, even those who did not enjoy her work, were able to connect with Stein as a person, watching her grow up and grow old in portrait video.