“Tender Buttons has made it into a Modern Library selection of Gertrude Stein’s writing, but how many people have actually read it and of those how many can claim to have gotten anything at all from it? Despite lip service, her achievement, though present, is somehow endangered, and it will be a long time before a true evaluation of it will be possible. Matisse’s work is secure; Gertrude’s and Picasso’s, ubiquitous as it is, remains excitingly in doubt and thus alive. This is why the show of the Steins’ collections turns out to be not only very beautiful but at times almost painfully exciting to witness.”

(John Ashbery, “Gertrude Stein”, originally in ArtNews, May 1971, collected in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987, p. 111)