The Steins Collect. Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde

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At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

When studying modern American literature Gertrude Stein, the experimental writer, comes onto the stage as the doyenne of a literary atelier in 1920’s Paris, mother superior to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Pasos, et al. In those literary years her salon was physically dominated by her portrait by Picasso, which gave her the imprimatur of modernity, and while they had been friends for many years, he was only now and then to be met there. It was also known that she was friendly with Matisse and that she had two brothers, Leo and Michael, who shared her interests in modern art.

When seen from the perspective of Paris, 1905, and the explosive appearance of modernism in the arts, Gertrude Stein is a beginning art collector and a very important one among the first supporters of Picasso and Matisse. In almost every telling Gertrude was the instigator of the collection put together by Claribelle and Etta Cone, her friends from Baltimore. (The famous Cone Collection.) It was also known that Gertrude, and her brother Leo, a would be artist, had an older brother, Michael, who shared their interest in art.

From whichever perspective the story has been told, it has been a constant that the Gertrude Stein residence at 27 Rue de Fleurus was a place where wonderful examples of modern art could be seen. Always as the background to the story of writers or painters that collection has attained legendary status. It would seem evident that eventually someone would have the idea of locating all of those art works and of recreating those historically important moments.

The Steins Collect is the result of that obvious thought, but strangely almost 70 years after the last of the Steins has died. In the catalogue overview, when seen from the perspective of the Stein family, Gertrude is now but one of three each of whom has equal importance. At last we get to know what Leo and Michael were up to!

In sum there were seven Stein siblings. Two died in infancy. Michael was the eldest and Gertrude, ten years later, the youngest. A sister, Bertha, accompanied Gertrude to Radcliffe and another brother, Simon, died in his early thirties. In this telling once Michael, Leo, and Gertrude are ensconced in Paris, Bertha and Simon disappear from the historical record. (Perhaps there is yet more to this Stein family saga.)

During the years when the Stein parents were alive the family had defined the word peripatetic. There was much relocating from city to city in the United States and at one time they spent four years in Europe, (the father was German born), most of them in Paris. Upon the parents’ death, when the children were all young adults, Michael took over the family business in San Francisco and very soon thereafter had established it so well that all of the siblings had a comfortable income for the rest of their lives.

The education of these peripatetic siblings could be described as equally peripatetic …the three of them studied, among other things, law, medicine, psychology, and philosophy, at a number of universities in the United States…Harvard, Radcliffe, USC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins …these were brilliant children. But with an educational emphasis on science and medicine, one might well ask, why did they buy art works? And how did they know with such certainty which art works by what unknown artists to buy?

This exhibition makes it clear that Leo is the key to that understanding. He was the first to leave the United States as a young adult and to travel widely …he made an around the world trip with a friend in 1895. As an urbane, educated, and cultivated person with independent financial means, certainly he had entre to those social environments that appreciated the arts. Early on, through his summers resident in Italy, he became friends with Bernard Berenson and through him, Roger Fry, one of the leading exponents of the work of Cezanne.

By 1902 Leo had decided to become an artist …hence the apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus which had a studio for his painting. Gertrude, after much educational shifting about, came to live with him in 1904 dedicated to trying her hand at writing. And in 1904 Michael and his wife Sarah moved permanently to Paris as well.

Three important events at that time should be kept in mind. Since 1880 it was more and more accepted that the academic style of painting had fallen into decadence …the Ecole de Beaux Arts was no longer held in high esteem. Secondly, the recent work coming out of Munich was creating a high level of excitement: Picasso’s first choice for the move out of Spain had been Munich but because of his limited funds he had to settle for Paris. And, third, in 1905 a career retrospective of Cezanne’s work convinced many, many people that the French route to modernism had been found ...Matisse, Braque, and Picasso among them.

In his book, The Nude, the 1952 Mellon Lectures, Kenneth Clark, at the very end of the study, introduces Matisse and Picasso and tells us that both were extremely ambitious for fame and success as painters. Both of them understood that this was a transitional period and both of them, academically trained, understood that a new tradition had to be created. We know their names because they were successful, and, being successful, they reinvigorated the art of painting. Their revolutionary works Clark names were Matisse’s Blue Nude, included in this exhibition, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, at MOMA, but the studies for that painting are here as well. Both works reference art which the two artists had seen in Parisian ethnographic museums and in both works the human figure has been reconfigured as the motif for creating expressive form.

Shortly after her arrival Gertrude and Leo decided to pool their resources and to collect as they were able …none of these drawings and paintings was very expensive. The burgeoning collection served two purposes: one; it identified them as not philistines, and two; as these artists gained fame the value of those works would increase, they could be traded up or sold as funds were needed. It was Leo’s understanding of the art world transitional moment that gave him the certainty that these were the right works to buy that made the collecting a sensible enterprise and explains why certain painters were their focus.

As the collections grew and as more and more people called wanting to see the works, it was decided that a regular At Home would be held on Saturdays at 27 Rue de Fleurus as Gertrude and Leo had known the Cone sisters to do back in Baltimore. At these times Leo would guide the guests through the collections and expound on art and modern art and the new tradition as it was being defined. Despite encouragements to write his comments down and publish them Leo was not a writer, neither it turned out was he a painter, and it was not until many years later that he was able to publish his ideas. I have never read his book, I have never known anyone to quote him, and there is but little mention here of any specific insights he might have had about the new art…so I am doubtful that his book has been very widely appreciated over the years. He comes off as a rather tragic figure and I couldn’t help wondering if he might not have been the inspiration for his sister’s well known remark: You are all a lost generation. And his dual lack of development might account for the fact that Gertrude is generally the star of the biographies and histories of the period, that and the self serving Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

With the arrival of Alice B. Toklas in 1910, Leo left to go on his own and he and Gertrude divided their collection. When Picasso entered his cubist period, Leo lost interest in his work and eventually focused on Renoir. That left Gertrude as the Picasso collector but as his fame indeed increased and as his prices soared, she was no longer able to buy his work. (She continued to support the work of other young artists, however.) She bought her last Picasso in 1924 but had to sell several earlier works in order to finance the purchase. It’s an odd Picasso; a Still Life with a guitar and many off putting black lines, as if to say “The way is barred.” Except that it suggests Picasso was suffering “painters” block, a rare condition for him, I can’t think that she made the right decision.

From their beginnings as collectors, Michael and Sarah focused on the work of Matisse and ultimately became his closest Stein friends. After seeing it in the Salon of the Independents in 1905, Michael and Sarah, who had studied the arts in college, bought Matisse’s Lady with a Fan, one of the greatest paintings in the Stein holdings, a Cezanne remade in the fauve palette. (Gertrude and Leo owned Cezanne’s Lady with a Fan.) Later Sarah assisted with the establishment of the Matisse school and studied with him.

Unlike the Cone Collection there is no extant Stein Collection: it was an accumulation over the years of many paintings that came and went. One very important piece of information about the Steins we learn here is that they were great proselytizers of modern art, not only inviting perfect strangers into their homes but encouraging exhibitions and loaning works to exhibitions and especially exhibitions in the United States. At the outbreak of World War I Michael and Sarah lost 16 of their Matisse paintings when they were confiscated while on exhibition in Germany. Thus not only was their pictures important but the Steins are important for having done so much to promote the new tradition.

In the catalogue photographs of 27 Rue de Fleurus are shown giving us an impression of the number of works owned by the Steins and of their placement within the small apartment. In a large empty gallery within the exhibition those photographs are projected onto the bare walls giving us a better sense of the physical size of the collection. This gallery can be seen in the web page video.

In walking into the exhibition I suppose one should try to imagine what it must have been like all those many years ago to enter a space where such unimaginable art works were hanging as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Unfortunately so many of them are now so well known that to imagine that one has never seen such things is impossible The closest I can get is to remember how, back 50 years ago, I first walked into the Museum of Modern Art and saw many of these and similar paintings there for the first time. Despite my having at that time a very rudimentary education in art appreciation 101, I was shocked, amused …by my shock and by the works both …and humbled by a display of authority for I did not know what. But certainly I felt like an outsider, a feeling, having lived with these works for 50 years now, I can no longer muster.

What is so immediately astonishing here is that so many of these works were very small. Several of the Cezanne bathers are only about 12 by 16 or 8 by 13 inches. Accustomed as I am to the Philadelphia room-sized Large Bathers it was pure delight to discover that Cezanne could work on such a small scale and create a work that in reproduction had all of the information of the larger, indeed grander work. Even smaller is his painting of five apples, 4 by 10 inches.

And the same goes for Matisse whose work here in the Collioure series are all oil sketches for later well known works. Several of the Picassos are miniscule …the self portrait from the same period as the Gertrude portrait is only 10 by 7 inches. A beautiful cubist still life, Guitar, is 6 by 7. His painting of one Cezannesque apple is only 5 by 6 inches! However, Boy Leading a Horse, a mainstay at MOMA, is very large and the nude portrait of Fernande from the summer in Gosol, which I have only ever seen in reproduction and which I assumed to be half life size, is in reality nearly full life size. And while in reproduction it is one of the interesting works referencing prehistoric Spanish art, when seen face to face it glows with luminosity. Picasso often achieves this effect although it is never suspected when seeing reproductions. Perhaps it should be emphasized from this that when one collects art works it is not the reproducible image that he buys, the composition, but the first hand experience and response to the actual object.

Over the years my enthusiasm for Matisse has waned considerably …I generally find him too slap dash and slap dash on purpose as if he had set out to create an anti-art. Kenneth Clark’s comments about creating a new tradition are probably relevant here. In some of the paintings on view we are made very aware of his process, that process being as it were a part of his technique. In particular we see in the portrait of the young Boy with a Butterfly Net, Allan Stein, the son of Michael and Sarah, that the pose has been changed and that the changes were made by painting out the original and over painting the revisions. It reminded me somewhat of the ethics of restoring a painting in which passages that have been repainted are of a purpose not quite the same color. As a conceit I suppose this is permissible but as a painting it seems to me to suggest a rather eccentric arrogance…which is pretty much what I have come to think of this person.

There are many other artists in the exhibition both masters and wannabes and it’s interesting that while the younger artists made wonderful paintings, when seen in situ with the innovators and the masters, they lack the masters’ passions; they take on the aura of the also-rans. Perhaps if they had lived longer and had made more paintings we might think differently: very few artists can achieve greatness on a handful of works …one thinks first of Vermeer and then…

In the first gallery there are some paintings that the Steins did not own and I believe they are only shown to remind us of the world in which the family moved. Among them are two Renoirs which represent what it is about the man’s work that I dislike …boneless over-stuffed sausage casings slathered with orange and blue polka dots to suggest …The Female! When Leo Stein began to focus on Renoir’s work Roger Fry commented that it indicated he had lost his interest in art. If he meant by that what I think he meant, I completely agree.

Despite the fact that this is an exhibition of the artworks collected by the Stein family, the highlight is the section devoted to the house Michael and Sarah commissioned from Le Corbusier. This was built in 1928 outside of Paris when they had ended their collecting days. They had seen his work at the 1925 International Exposition and decided to offer him the commission.

Here we see his drawings, his plans, photographs of the work in progress and photographs of the finished structure. Seeing this made me aware that for an architect who is considered one of the three great architectural geniuses of the first half of the century, and considering my love of architecture and my travelling to see examples and gallery exhibitions, this is the first time that I have seen one of his drawings face to face. (I have seen his one building in the United States, the building on the campus of Harvard University next door to the Fogg Art Museum.) In contrast to his staid classical modernism these evident hand made drawings spring to life. It was a delightful discovery and I can recommend this section of the exhibition as being worth the price of the ticket …which at the Met is no longer cheap. I suppose we should all be complimented that the new management considers all of us as comfortably within the 1%. But it is only a suggested contribution, even though there are no longer posted signs to that effect, which I suspect is in violation of New York State law, and one may still offer what he wishes to offer.

To end on a personal note: when I took my first art class in the eighth grade the teacher explained to us that most artists learned to paint by going to museums and copying the masters. As we had no museums in Kansas, at our immediate disposal, he suggested that we could use reproductions in books and magazines. For a reason now lost to me I decided to copy Picasso’s portrait of Leo Stein. The project was very successful and I was certain that it bore a striking resemblance to the original. I carried it around with me for many years and I suspect that I still do have it buried somewhere in the flat files. It was a great thrill for me to step to the wall here at the Met, to live for a moment in both the present and the past, and to study the original gouache, sixty years later, for the first time face to face. I continue to believe that my work, which I executed in poster paints, is an excellent copy. And of course it puts me in company with so many twentieth century artists…all of us guilty of having made careers copying Picasso. Alas, that genius is so rare!

But give credit where it is due that some recognize geniuses when they see them and that they support their efforts, as well as the efforts of those who show only “a spark”. Here’s to the Steins! Hip hip…

The exhibition web page:
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/steins-collect