“In Gertrude Stein’s writing every word lives and, apart from concept, it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced that if we read it aloud and receive it as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous music. Just as one may stop, for once, in a way, before a canvas of Picasso, and, letting one’s reason sleep for an instant, may exclaim: “It is a fine pattern!” so, listening to Gertrude Steins’ words and forgetting to try to understand what they mean, one submits to their gradual charm.” -Literary Critic, Mabel Dodge Luhan, in Speculations (1913) 

Hers was a personality writ large on the pages of early 20th century cultural history. Whether in physical stature, intellectual prowess, life-style choices, the artistic and literary sphere-of-influence drawn to her, or that expansive ego, this was a figure to be reckoned with. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), is one of the most influential Americans of her day, perhaps most famous as a modern writer and the creator of such oft-repeated phrases as , ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ and ‘There is no there, there.’ But Stein¹s reach across the arts was extraordinary, extending well beyond literature to include collaborations in opera, ballet and more, and her influence as a style-maker, art collector and networker was considerable. 

(Above, left): Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1905–06; oil on canvas; 39 3/8 x 32″; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946; © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. fine arts magazine 

 

Currently, two museums in the San Francisco Bay area, the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) are working in tandem to debut the first major exhibition to fully investigate this fascinating visual legacy and life of Gertrude Stein. At the Jewish Museum, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories is an art-filled biographical exploration of Stein¹s multiple identities as a literary pioneer, transatlantic modernist, Jewish-American expatriate, American celebrity, art collector, and muse to artists of several generations. The exhibition also features Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), Stein’s life-long partner, and explores the aesthetics of dress, home décor, entertainment, and food that the two women created together. 

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories is built upon exciting new scholarship, by lead guest curator Professor Wanda M. Corn of Stanford University and associate curator Professor Tirza Latimer of the California College of Arts. The exhibit is jointly organized with the Smithsonian¹s National Portrait Gallery. 

While simultaneously, at SFMOMA, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, reunites the unparalleled modern art collections of author Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael Stein, and Michael’s wife, Sarah Stein. Jointly organized by the museum, together with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, this major touring exhibition gathers approximately 200 iconic paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and illustrated books not only by Matisse and Picasso, who are each represented by dozens of works, but also by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Henri Manguin, Francis Picabia, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Félix Vallotton, among others. The Steins Collects premiered at SFMOMA in May, 2011, running until September 6, 2011, before traveling to Paris later this year and then New York in 2012. 

 

Supplemented by a rich array of archival materials—including photographs, family albums, film clips, correspondence, and ephemera—the exhibition provides a new perspective on the artistic foresight of this innovative family, tracing their enduring impact on art-making and collecting practices and their inestimable role in creating a new international standard of taste for modern art. 

Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in 1874 and raised in Oakland, California in an upper middle-class Jewish family, Stein left America for France in 1903 at the age of 27. Like James McNeill Whistler and Henry James, her American predecessors, Stein became an expatriate, living in France until her death in 1946. For almost all of that time, from 1908 onwards, Stein lived openly with Toklas. 

Stein was a cultural networker, bringing creative people and friends such as Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway, but also key members of a cosmopolitan homosexual elite, together at legendary salons held in her homes. Her originality as a thinker, along with her interdisciplinary approach to projects in dance, music and theater, continue to inspire artists today. As an inventor of modernist literature, she wrote novels, poems, journal essays, literary and art theory, opera libretti, plays, memoirs and word portraits. 

 

As American expatriates living in France, the four Steins were pivotal in shaping the city’s vibrant cultural life. Leo Stein (1872–1947) and younger sister Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) were the first to leave the family home in Oakland, traveling to Paris along with millions of tourists to visit the 1900 World’s Fair and then relocating to the city in 1902 and 1903, respectively. Sarah Stein (1870–1953) and Michael Stein (1865–1938) soon followed from San Francisco with their eight-year-old son, Allan, arriving in early 1904. The family established their apartments on 27 rue de Fleurus (Leo and Gertrude) and rue Madame (Sarah and Michael) and quickly integrated into the intellectual circles of the Parisian avant-garde. Gertrude and Leo lived modestly off family investments and had to team up to afford their early purchases. “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures. It’s that simple. . . . No one who is not very rich can do both,” was Gertrude’s legendary quote from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. 

Much of Gertrude Stein’s fame derives from a private modern art gallery she assembled, from 1904 to 1913, with her brother Leo Stein, while in Paris. Leo’s acquaintances and study of modern art would eventually result in the famous Stein art collections. Bernard Berenson hosted Gertrude and Leo in his English country house in 1902, and suggested they visit Paul Cézanne and Ambroise Vollard’s art gallery. In 1904, the joint family trust account had accumulated a balance of 8,000 francs, Gertrude and Leo spent this at Vollard’s Gallery, buying Gauguin’s Sunflowers and Three Tahitians, Cézanne’s Bathers, and two Renoirs. 

 

Widely-published critics did much to increase Stein’s notoriety in the U.S. Regularly-appearing newspaper articles frequently exposed Gertrude’s name to the public. Of the growing Stein family art collection in Paris, one critic commented: “in proportion to its size and quality … [it is] just about the most potent of any that I have ever heard of in history. He also made the observation that Gertrude “collected geniuses rather than masterpieces. She recognized them a long way off. The collection soon had a worldwide reputation. 

By early 1906, Leo and Gertrude Stein’s studio had many paintings by Henri Manguin, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Honoré Daumier, Henri Matisse, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Their collection was representative of two famous art exhibitions that took place during their residence together in Paris, and to which they contributed, either by lending their art, or by patronizing the featured artists. The Steins’ elder brother, Michael, and sister-in-law Sarah (Sally) acquired a large number of Henri Matisse paintings; Gertrude’s friends from Baltimore, Claribel and Etta Cone, collected similarly, eventually donating their art collection, virtually intact, to the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

While numerous artists visited the Stein salon, many of these artists were not represented among the paintings on the walls at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Where Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso’s works dominated Leo and Gertrude’s collection, Sarah Stein’s collection emphasized Matisse. 

 

Contemporaries of Leo and Gertrude, Matisse and Picasso became part of their social circle, and were a part of the early Saturday evenings at their home. Gertrude attributed the beginnings of the Saturday evening salons to Matisse, as; “[m]ore and more frequently, people began visiting to see the Matisse paintings—and the Cezannes. Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began.” This arrangement was codifies, so that Gertrude could attend to her writing in peace. Michael and Sarah decided to open their apartment on the same night of the week and so began the prestigious Saturday evening salons where the brightest artists, writers, musicians, and collectors of the day convened to discuss the latest developments. Anyone with a proper referral was welcome to strain their eyes to see the works by candlelight, as neither apartment was wired with electricity yet. 

Among Picasso’s acquaintances who frequented the Saturday evenings were: Fernande Olivier (Picasso’s mistress), Georges Braque, André Derain, Henri Rousseau, Joseph Stella (artists), Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire (poets), and Marie Laurencin (poet, Apollinaire’s mistress and an artist in her own right), to name a few. 

Comments surrounding Pablo Picasso’s, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906 (on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), also serve the indelible Gertrude Stein reputation. When someone commented that Stein didn’t look like her portrait, Picasso replied, “She will!” 

The art collection increased and the walls at Rue de Fleurus were rearranged continuously to make way for new acquisitions. In “the first half of 1905” the Steins acquired Cézanne’s Portrait of Mme Cézanne and Delacroix’s Perseus and Andromeda. Shortly after the opening of the Paris Autumn Salon, in 1905, the Steins acquired Matisse’s Woman with a Hat and Picasso’s Young Girl with Basket of Flowers. 

 

While the Stein family collection continued to grow over the next several years, Gertrude’s increasingly intense relationship with a women she met on the day of her arrival in Paris in 1907, together with the impending war between France and Germany resulted in a division of the art collection and brother Leo’s move to Italy in April 1914. Regarding the division of the Steins’ art collection, Leo wrote in a letter to his sister: 

“The Cézanne apples have a unique importance to me that nothing can replace. The Picasso landscape is not important in any such sense. We are, as it seems to me on the whole, both so well off now that we needn’t repine. The Cézanne’s had to be divided. I am willing to leave you the Picasso oeuvre, as you left me the Renoir, and you can have everything except that. I want to keep the few drawings that I have. This leaves no string for me, it is financially equable either way for estimates are only rough & ready methods, & I’m afraid you’ll have to look upon the loss of the apples as an act of God. I have been anxious above all things that each should have in reason all that he wanted, and just as I was glad that Renoir was sufficiently indifferent to you so that you were ready to give them up, so I am glad that Pablo is sufficiently indifferent to me that I am willing to let you have all you want of it.”  

After Stein’s and Leo’s households separated in 1914, she continued to collect examples of Picasso’s art which had turned to Cubism. At her death, Gertrude’s remaining collection emphasized the artwork of Picasso and Juan Gris, having sold most of her other pictures. 

 

As an integral part of the Stein life-story, the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s, Seeing Gertrude Stein, more than 100 artifacts and art works by artists from across Europe and the United States are on display. Included are paintings, sculpture, photography, drawings, and artist¹s gifts to Stein, as well as items from Stein¹s and Toklas¹s custom-designed wardrobe, manuscripts, books, periodicals, letters, journals, and personal belongings. Galleries also include digital and video loops on monitors to render a fuller picture of Stein¹s history. One loop, for example, has the voice of Stein reading from her work. 

This wealth of archival and artistic material on exhibit illuminates Stein through five distinct stories that offer multiple ways of seeing Stein. Most notably, these five stories do not repeat what is best known, that is, Stein’s years as a salonière and collector of Picasso and Matisse in the years before World War I. instead, this portion focuses on Stein from 1915-46, when she became recognized as a major writer, collected the works of the Neo-Romantics, and formed a new international circle of young friends that she called her ‘second family. 

Story One, Picturing Gertrude 

Images of Stein changed considerably over the decades, from her Gibson Girl New Woman look during her student days, to her reinvention as a Bohemian priestess in Paris at the turn of the century, to her matronly look after World War I, with her masculine dress in waistcoats after she cut her hair, with Toklas’ encouragement, in 1926. She became one of the most painted, sculpted and photographed women of the twentieth-century. This first ‘story’ presents portraits of Stein from her childhood to maturity and includes works by Felix Vallotton, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Carl Van Vechten, Jacques Lipchitz, Jo Davidson and others. 

 

Story Two, Domestic Stein 

An exploration of the life Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas created around distinctive styles of dress, home décor, and entertaining. This is the first exhibition to give Toklas a major place in Stein¹s life, demonstrating that there was no Gertrude without Alice and no Alice without Gertrude. 

Story Three, Art of Friendship 

The wide circle of visual artists Stein and Toklas befriended included not just famous figures, such as Matisse and Picasso, but also, after World War I, a less well-known international set of younger male artists, writers, and composers—most of them gay—who adopted Stein as a figurehead, mentor, mother, patron, and role model. While achieving her own fame, Stein had the talent and instincts to champion others such as Carl Van Vechten, Pavel Tchelitchew, Francis Picabia, Cecil Beaton, and Francis Rose, all of whom made major contributions to American and European culture. 

(During the 1920s, with the walls of her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus covered by avant-garde paintings, Stein attracted many of the great writers of the time, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson. It was during that time she has been credited with inventing the term ‘Lost Generation’ for some of these expatriate American writers.  She was Ernest Hemingway’s mentor, and upon the birth of his son he asked her to be the godmother of his child. During the 1930s, Stein and Toklas became famous with the 1933 mass market publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She and Alice had an extended lecture tour in the United States during this decade). 

 

Story Four, Celebrity Stein 

The fourth ‘story’ focuses on one of the most important aspects of Stein¹s career—her six-month cross-country trip in the U.S.—followed by her life and activities during the two World Wars. Stein, who had never returned to the States after setting up housekeeping in Paris in 1903-04, arrived in New York from France, in 1934, with the reputation as an eccentric, avant-garde writer and left as a beloved media celebrity. She finished that year more famous in the States than she had ever been in France. During World War I, she and Toklas were active patriots, distributing Red Cross supplies throughout France; in World War II, their decision to stay in Nazi-occupied France is more controversial, inextricably linked to her large ego and her ability to suppress her Jewish identity (Gertrude and Alice—both Jewish—escaped persecution probably because of their friendship to Bernard Faÿ who was a collaborator with the Vichy regime and had connections to the Gestapo. When Faÿ was sentenced to hard labor for life after the war, Gertrude and Alice campaigned for his release. Several years later, Toklas would contribute money to Faÿ’s escape from prison). 

Story Five, Legacies 

The fifth ‘story’ probes the deep influence Stein has had on American artists after her death and includes works by Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Red Grooms, Glenn Ligon, Deborah Kass and many other important contemporary artists. 

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This well-organized and complex two-museum exhibit raises as many questions as it answers: Was Stein a bohemian genius, willing to take great risks in her personal life, writings and art patronage? Or was she an egotist and avid self-promoter who manipulated the world with a visionary zeal aimed at meeting her personal needs and ambitions? Would Gertrude Stein become the heroine of generations of women and emerging artists as a pioneering force in early modern arts and letters and would she have remained so, if not vindicated by the course of history? Stein Collects deals realistically and in depth with these questions, leaving the issues of character and self-serving motivation largely to the viewer. There is no doubt that Stein was one of the most brilliant and searching minds of the 20th century. Moral ambiguity was not her strong suit. She sought no comfort in political and social orthodoxy. Strong-minded and a cultural taste-maker, Stein consistently went out on a limb for what she believed in—even to the end. 

Her writing in the last year of her life expresses a particular penchant for life lived at the edge of the conventional and the comfortable. After World War II, Stein was visited by many young American soldiers. Her preface written for a 1945 Paris exhibition for Spanish painter Francisco Riba-Rovira, at Roquepine Gallery, is one of her last texts on her vision of the painting art. In it, she expressed her opinions of long-time acquaintances, Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse and Juan Gris, as well as Riba-Rovira, a familiar artist of her salon at rue de Fleurus: 

 

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 Picasso concealed, 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 weakness and his strength. 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.” 

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor 

Editor’s note: Following its Contemporary Jewish Museum/SFMOMA debut, The Steins Collect will travel to the Grand Palais, Paris (October 3, 2011, through January 16, 2012) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (February 21 through June 3, 2012). The exhibition is co-curated by Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA; Cécile Debray, curator of historical collections at the Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Rebecca Rabinow, associate curator and administrator, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

A richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with new research and original essays from a range of French and American experts in the field. 

Visit the museum sites at: www.cjm.org and www.sfmoma.org 

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Caption detail: 

1. Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1905–06; oil on canvas; 39 3/8 x 32 in. (100 x 81.3 cm); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946; © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
2. George Platt Lynes, Gertrude Stein, Bilignin, 1931, toned gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection, Gift of Adelyn D. Breeskin BMA 1985.3, © Estate of George Platt Lynes.
3. Pablo Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, 1905–6; oil on canvas; 86 7/8 x 51 5/8 in. (220.7 x 131.1 cm); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the William S. Paley Collection, 1964; © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
4. The Steins in the courtyard at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, ca. 1905. From left: Leo Stein, Allan Stein, Gertrude Stein, Theresa Ehrman, Sarah Stein, Michael Stein. Theresa Ehrman papers and photographs, BANC MSS 2010/603, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Transfer; Judah L.Magnes Museum; 2010.
5. Henri Matisse, Michael Stein, 1916; oil on canvas; 26 1/2 x 19 7/8 in. (67.3 x 50.5 cm); SFMOMA, Sarah and Michael Stein Memorial Collection, gift of Nathan Cummings; © Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: Ben Blackwell.
6. Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905; oil on canvas; 31 3/4 x 23 1/2 in. (80.7 x 59.7 cm); SFMOMA, Bequest of Elise S. Haas; © Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: Ben Blackwell.
7. Pablo Picasso, Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery), 1907; oil on canvas; 24 1/4 x 18 3/4 in. (61.4 x 47.6 cm); Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Estate of John Hay Whitney, 1983; © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY
8. Henri Matisse, Sketch for Le Bonheur de vivre, 1905–6; oil on canvas; 16 x 21 1/2 in. (40.6 x 54.6 cm); SFMOMA, bequest of Elise S. Haas; © Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: Ben Blackwell       
9. Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, 1922, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Isabel Wilder, © 2010 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.10.
10. Carl Van Vechten, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Departing Newark Airport with Zuni Fetishes, November 7, 1934, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections, Boatwright Memorial Library, The University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, Carl Van Vechten-Mark Lutz Collection, Courtesy of the Carl Van Vechten Trust.
11. Bachrach Studio, Gertrude Stein, c. 1903, Photograph drymounted on board. Courtesy of the Therese Erhman Papers, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA.
12. Henri Matisse, Self-Portrait, 1906; oil on canvas; 21 5/8 in. x 18 1/8 in. 954.93 cm x 46.04 cm); Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark; © 2011 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
13. Henri Matisse, Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra, 1907; oil on canvas; 36 1/4 x 55 1/4 in. (92.1 x 140.3 cm.); The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland; © 2011 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: Mitro Hood