The Steins in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus, ca. 1905,
From left, Leo Stein, Allan Stein, Gertrude Stein, Theresa Ehrman, Sarah Stein, Michael Stein
Bancroft Library, Berkeley
The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian
Avant-Garde, February 28-June 3, 2012, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The poet/critic André
Salmon wrote in his memoir L’air de la
Butte (1945): “When we went to poor Rousseau’s home, we dressed as
carefully as when we were invited to visit the high society couturier and arts
patron Paul Poiret. We dressed even better than when we went to see the Steins,
the brother and sister millionaires who came from San Francisco, posed as
transatlantic bohemians and lived near the Luxembourg Gardens. On those
evenings on the rue de Fleurus, in a study adorned by [Picasso’s] excellent
Saltimbanque Period canvases and in a boudoir studded, like stars, with little
Renoirs, an ordinary suit from the wardrobe would do.”*
According to John Richardson, in his second volume of
Picasso’s biography, Gertrude Stein was
as capable of following a conversation in French as the artists were capable of
following her writings in English – that is, not very well.
