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.
Marie Laurencin
Apollinaire and His Friends
1909
Musee National d’Art Modern, Paris
Left to right: Gertrude, Fernande Olivier, unidentified, Apollinaire, Picasso Marguerite Gillot, Maurice Crmnitz, and Laurencin
And even though Marie Laurencin included Gertrude Stein in
her group portrait, Apollinaire and His Friends, 1909, neither she nor her siblings became members of the infamous circle
that formed around Picasso, known as la
bande à Picasso (Picasso’s Gang) – mostly notably: Salmon, Apollinaire, Max
Jacob and Georges Braque, among others.
“And also and so and so and also,” Gertrude Stein might
retort, quoting herself in “If I told him would he like it? A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923).
Indeed, Ms. Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and her
sister-in-law Sara, were a curious family among the artists, writers and
intellectuals who gathered at their studio on Saturdays at 27 rue de
Fleurus. Not everyone admired their
lifestyle, but almost everyone admired their taste. Together they assembled one of the finest
collections of modern art that ever graced the planet. And to drink at the fountain of such
ambrosia inspired even more exceptional works of art and art collections (The
Barnes in Philadelphia and the Cones in Baltimore).
Readers of the New
York Review of Books who perused Michael Kimmelman’s recent article
“Missionaries” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde, and
Barbara Will’s book Unlikely
Colloboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fäy and the Vichy Dilemma (Columbia
Press, 2011) may feel a bit less enchanted with Ms. Stein too, now that we know
how this Jew in Paris survived the Nazi Occupation.
How can one rationalize?
I’ll leave that to you. For now,
I recommend taking advantage of this rare occasion to view all these great
works of art in one venue—and soon! The show in New York closes on June 3rd.
Gertrude Stein, 1905–6
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)
Oil on canvas
39 3/8 x 32 in. (100 x 81.3 cm)
Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946 (47.106)
© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The real heroes of The
Stein Collection are the curators
Janet C. Bishop, Curator of Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art; Cécile Debray, curator, Centre Pompidou; and Rebecca Rabinow,
associate curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art, who assembled over 200 works
from near and far.
In the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition takes over 10 rooms including the capacious entrance which features a giant photograph of Leo, Gertrude, Michael, Sara, their son Nathan, and a cousin. Once inside, a space equal in dimensions to their famous studio on the rue de Fleurus serves as a screen for several slides that project the different arrangements on the walls – from ceiling to painted socle—crammed in Salon-style. (One might imagine there must have been paintings in the bathroom.)
In the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition takes over 10 rooms including the capacious entrance which features a giant photograph of Leo, Gertrude, Michael, Sara, their son Nathan, and a cousin. Once inside, a space equal in dimensions to their famous studio on the rue de Fleurus serves as a screen for several slides that project the different arrangements on the walls – from ceiling to painted socle—crammed in Salon-style. (One might imagine there must have been paintings in the bathroom.)
The extraordinary range of
significant early masterpieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard,
André Derain and other important members exceeds our expectations: Matisse’s Blue Nude of 1907, Picasso’s La Soupe of 1903, and, of course,
Picasso’s famous Portrait of Gertrude
Stein of 1906, which did not resemble her at first, but ( as the artist
predicted) she slowly turned into it.
Numerous other portraits of GS fill the last gallery, including Jo
Davidson’s beautiful Buddha-esque sculpture of 1922-23.
If you are not able to visit the Metropolitan Museum before June 4 or would like to find out more about the Steins, here is a video that may serve as an adequate introduction:
*André Salmon, “From Plaisance de l’Opéra,” in L’air de la Butte, published in English
in Source: The Online Publication of
Literary Division, American Translation Association, No. 51 (Spring 2011): http://www.ata-divisions.org/LD/newsletter/2011/Spring2011SourceJune2.pdf
(translated by Beth Gersh-Nešić and Jacqueline Gojard).
With the current controversy about Gertrude Stein and after the Edward Burns's answer it is interesting to Know one of the last Gertrude Stein's vew before dying when she speaks about art it is also politic .
ReplyDeleteStein's preface to the exhibition by Francisco Riba Rovira at Roquepine Gallery in May 1945:
« It is inevitable that when we really need someone we find him. The person you need attracts you like a magnet. I returned to Paris, after these long years spent in the countryside and I needed a young painter, a young painter who would awaken me. Paris was magnificent, but where was the young painter? I looked everywhere: at my contemporaries and their followers. I walked a lot, I looked everywhere, in all the galleries, but the young painter was not there. Yes, I walk a lot, a lot at the edge of the Seine where we fish, where we paint, where we walk dogs (I am of those who walk their dogs). Not a single young painter!
One day, on the corner of a street, in one of these small streets in my district, I saw a man painting. I looked at him; at him and at his painting, as I always look at everybody who creates something I have an indefatigable curiosity to look and I was moved. Yes, a young painter!
We began to speak, because we speak easily, as easily as in country roads, in the small streets of the district. His story was the sad story of the young people of our time. A young Spaniard who studied in fine arts in Barcelona: civil war; exile; a concentration camp; escape. Gestapo, another prison, another escape... Eight lost years! If they were lost, who knows? And now a little misery, but all the same the painting. Why did I find that it was him the young painter, why? I visited his drawings, his painting: we speak.
I explained that for me, all modern painting is based on what Cézanne nearly made, instead of basing itself on what he almost managed to make. When he could not make a thing, he hijacked it and left it. He insisted on showing his incapacity: he spread his lack of success: showing what he could not do, became an obsession for him. People influenced by him were also obsessed by the things which they could not reach and they began the system of camouflage. It was natural to do so, even inevitable: that soon became an art, in peace and in war, and Matisse concealed and insisted at the same time on that Cézanne could not realize, and Picassoconcealed, played and tormented all these things.
The only one who wanted to insist on this problem, was Juan Gris. He persisted by deepening the things which Cézanne wanted to do, but it was too hard a task for him: it killed him.And now here we are, I find a young painter who does not follow the tendency to play with what Cézanne could not do, but who attacks any right the things which he tried to make, to create the objects which have to exist, for, and in themselves, and not in relation.
This young painter has his weaknesses and his strengths. His force will push him in this road. I am fascinated and that is why he is the young painter who I needed. He is Francisco Riba Rovira. »
Gertrude Stein
Perhaps you have something to tell about when Gertrude Stein tells us on Cezanne, Riba-Rovira, Matisse, Picasso, Juan Gris.
ReplyDeleteBecause why did she help Riba-Rovira ?
Was she only fascinated by his art ?Was it a politic mistification and manipulation to make on his back a new vitginity for her...
Because as she tells ,he was persecuted by the nazi .Certainly arrested after "sabotages" in coke working in St Etienne ,if he would not escape from Vannes in a transit camp where the ss wera from Holland he would be send to Mathausen as a red and republican spanish .
But in all that when we saw in the Met the portrait of Gertrude Stein he did we can read in his way of painting a kind touch of something hieratic ,very straight ,as you must to be after beeing down .
Running and running more to escape when you not even a diamond to have a glass of water .All his life fighting the faschism as you him with Picasso when they did the book to support coke miners in the Asturies who were on stricke in Spain at the same moment Franco killed Juan Grimao in the sixties ...
Perhaps you have something to tell about when Gertrude Stein tells us on Cezanne, Riba-Rovira, Matisse, Picasso, Juan Gris...
ReplyDeleteBecause why did she help Riba-Rovira ?
Was she only fascinated by his art ?
Was it a politic mistification and manipulation to make on his back a new vitginity for her...
Because as she tells ,he was persecuted by the nazi .Certainly arrested after "sabotages" in coke working in St Etienne ,if he would not escape from Vannes in a transit camp where the ss wera from Holland he would be send to Mathausen as a red and republican spanish .
But in all that when we saw in the Met the portrait of Gertrude Stein he did we can read in his way of painting a kind touch of something hieratic ,very straight ,as you must to be after beeing down .
Running and running more to escape when you not even a diamond to have a glass of water .All his life fighting the faschism as you him with Picasso when they did the book to support coke miners in the Asturies who were on stricke in Spain at the same moment Franco killed Juan Grimao in the sixties ...