July/Aug 2024 (Volume 16, Issue 4)
By Roy R. Behrens
It was Sept. 8, 1907, in Paris, and a 30-year-old American woman named Alice Babette Toklas was terribly nervous. She had arrived in Paris from the U.S. just three weeks earlier. The day after her arrival, she had been introduced to an American writer named Gertrude Stein.
Stein was an expatriate who had moved to Paris in 1903. She was three years older than Toklas, but both had spent part of their childhood in California. During that first conversation, Stein invited Toklas to an upcoming gathering at the apartment she shared with her brother, Leo Stein, at 27 rue de Fleurus.
Toklas had good reason to be nervous. She did not speak French, and she worried that she might have trouble mixing with guests at the party. Another concern was the prominence of the other guests. She had heard that Stein was fond of inviting talented writers and artists, some of whom were already half-famous. This turned out to be the case, since among the guests that evening were Pablo Picasso and his mistress Fernand Olivier, along with Georges Braque, Guillaume Appollinaire, Marie Laurencin and various others.
After the successful publication of her best-known book, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” Gertrude Stein reluctantly agreed to return to the U.S. for a six-month book promotion tour. This famous news photograph shows Stein and Alice Toklas when they arrived from Paris at New York Harbor in 1934.
Once the guests began to arrive and the gathering was ongoing, Toklas became so nervous that she made the mistake of assuming, based on appearance, that George Braque was an American. But when they attempted to talk, his English confirmed that he wasn’t. Moments later, Toklas recovered from that faux pas when she approached a man whom she described as “a real American.” He was a young artist from Iowa named William Edwards Cook, who was born on Aug. 31, 1881. He was the son of a lawyer, and he enjoyed teasing people. Whenever he was introduced, he liked jokingly to claim that he was an “Ohio farmer,” because uppity citified people were known to confuse Iowa with Ohio and Idaho.
William Edwards Cook.
Toklas liked Cook, and she wasn’t thrown off by his joking. In fact, as she explained to him, she was well-acquainted with Iowa. His hometown, she quickly learned, was Independence. While Toklas had been growing up in San Francisco, that same Iowa town had frequently been featured in the national news. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Independence had briefly been a prominent horse racing center, with an unusual kite-shaped track. It was sometimes referred to as the “Lexington of the North.”
The public reveled in the story of how an unknown telegraph operator and creamery owner named Charles Williams, from nearby Jesup—with no experience in horse racing—had purchased two mares in 1885. Within a single year, those mares gave birth to two stallions, named Axtel and Allerton, both of whom would break world trotting records.
“Cook used to tell us,” Stein and Toklas would later recall, how his Iowa hometown had “turned into a wonderful place when the trotting races took place…” As was noted by a journalist then: “Independence is a world-famed little city…[There is] No need now, when speaking of Independence, to add Iowa; [since] everyone knows what is meant.”
While Cook was not an Ohio farmer, he might half-truthfully have said that he was an Iowa farmer. His father was a lawyer who also owned at least 10 Iowa farms, and, as Cook was growing up, he spent a lot of time on farms. He especially liked working with horses, and he apparently briefly worked as a stable boy for the trotting horses, when the kite-shaped track was thriving.
But by far his most passionate interest was in drawing and painting. Despite his family’s preferences for careers in law and medicine, Cook was determined to go into art. In 1899, when he completed high school, he was already painting portraits, and his talent for art was apparent.
In those days, colleges and universities did not train artists. They offered only drawing, art history and art appreciation. To be a professional artist, one was expected to study at a vocational art school or art academy, which, in the Midwest, were located in such cities as Chicago, Minneapolis and Cincinnati.
Cook’s family was well-to-do, and his parents were acquainted with prominent society members in Chicago, so it comes as no surprise that Cook chose to enter the Art Institute of Chicago in 1899. He studied there for more than a year, and then moved on to New York, where he spent additional time at the National Academy of Design. His next destination was Paris, which was then considered to be the undisputed art capital of the world. He arrived there in 1901, two years ahead of Stein.
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