Home > LECTURES & LITERATURE > Rose Is A Rose A Rose...Or Is It? If Empress Josephine Met Gertrude Stein

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Rose Is A Rose A Rose...Or Is It? If Empress Josephine Met Gertrude Stein

Presented by Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts and American Philosophical Society Museum at American Philosophical Society Museum

April 14, 2011

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Roses exotic and roses erotic; roses botanical and roses theoretical. A girl named Rose who became Napoleon’s wife and Empress of France. A famous American expatriate in Paris who called Alice B. Toklas her Rose. This program will include lively presentations and discussion between rosarian Stephen Scaniello and modernist scholar Barbara Will (Dartmouth College). It will be moderated by APS Museum Director Sue Ann Prince, who curated the museum’s exhibition Of Elephants and Roses: Encounters with French Natural History, 1790-1830. In the early 19th century, Empress Josephine cultivated 250 varieties of roses at her Malmaison estate, and the rose soon became a symbol of love. One hundred years later, modernist expatriate Gertrude Stein declared, “Rose is a rose is a rose.” Her resonate repetition referred to Alice B. Toklas, upended the romantic rose, and offered up an icon of avant-garde modernism. What a rose was to Josephine was decidedly not what a rose was to Gertrude. This event is part of the 2011 Philadelphia International Festival Of The Arts (PIFA).