“The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” will show through Sept. 6 at SFMOMA, 1511 Third St., San Francisco. Tickets are free for members and kids 12 and under accompanied by an adult, $7 to $25 nonmembers. Information: 357-4000 or go to sfmoma.org.
By Woody Weingarten
For Marin devotees of Pablo Picasso, his art on display across the Golden Gate is worth the trip.
Indubitably.
A short journey to “The Steins Collect,” a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibit, can also mean a major bonus — an intimate view of Gertrude Stein, her family and her soirées on the Left Bank of Paris.
Expatriates from the Bay Area in the early 20th century, the Stein siblings immediately started purchasing art, first acquiring Matisses and Picassos and eventually amassing more than 300 works.
Gertrude — considered by some a literary colossus, by others a no-talent runaway ego, and by yet others an icon in the nascent lesbian movement — was quoted by Ernest Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast” as saying, “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures … No one who is not very rich can do both.”
She and brother Leo, an art critic, weren’t wealthy (though they did live off family investments). So they dabbled in art.
And when Picasso’s paintings became too pricey, they shifted to less established artists such as Andre Masson, according to notes at the 200-piece SFMOMA exhibit.
Gertrude and Leo lived in one ill-lighted French apartment, older brother Michael and his wife, Sarah, in another. The exhibit reflecting their bohemian lifestyle, “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” tracks their acquisitions — much like the Picasso display at the de Young Museum — more or less chronologically.
In 17 rooms at SFMOMA, one of them dedicated to the Michael and Sarah’s patronage of modern architecture, viewers can find 40 works by Picasso, 60 by Henri Matisse.
If that’s not enough, there are pieces by Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Juan Gris and other household names.
Some were regathered from private collections for the show, others from museums.
In addition to paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and illustrated books are many Stein family snapshots (some posed formally, some casual), albums and correspondence — as well as huge photo blowups.
Family mementos add insight, including Michael and Sarah’s marriage certificate, in Hebrew.
Among the most renowned pieces displayed is the 1905-06 oil “Gertrude Stein,” owned by New York’s MOMA. When told the portrait didn’t look like her, Picasso supposedly predicted, “It will.”
“The Steins Collect” also features less-striking portraits of Gertrude: a 1937 oil by Francis Picabia, a 1929 ink rendition of “Gertrude Stein in Bilignin” by Eugene Berman and a 1934-35 oil on plaster by Pierre Tal-Coat.
But no one should miss Jo Davidson’s bronze sculpture of her in the hallway outside the exhibit.
Other Picasso works that compel attention are “Boy Leading a Horse” and “Lady With a Fan,” his bronze sculpture titled “Head of a Picador With a Broken Nose,” a 1906 portrait of Leo Stein and a self-portrait finished that same year.
His blue and rose periods are represented, as are works showing his predilection for African motifs, one dramatic example being a study for “The Dryad (Nude in a Forest)”.
Matisse is hardly ignored.
Witness “Woman With a Hat” (a portrait of his wife, Amélie), “Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra,” “The Girl With Green Eyes” and a 1906 self-portrait.
Because the Steins befriended Matisse and Picasso, both artists painted members of the family. Sarah and Michael’s son, for example, are the subjects of two extraordinary pieces, Matisse’s “Boy With a Butterfly Net” and Picasso’s “Portrait of Allan Stein,” which depicts him at age 10.
Also noteworthy are “Portrait of Michael Stein” and “Portrait of Sarah Stein.” Matisse altered the latter, enhancing Sarah’s features and neckline to make her more iconic than human.
She reportedly said she liked the portrait of her husband better.
Shortly before those two paintings were completed, Leo and Gertrude’s relationship disintegrated — partially because he was jealous of her literary success, partially because he detested Picasso’s evolving style.
He moved out.
She kept the cubist pioneer’s creations (except for two Picasso ink sketches of Leo) and he hung onto the Renoirs.
They split the Matisses and Cezannes.
Luckily for art lovers, the best of the best are represented here.
If there’s any hole in the exhibit, it’s that it dances lightly around Gertrude’s approval of Spanish dictator Gen. Francisco Franco and a German fellow named Adolf Hitler — and skirts questions of how she, Jewish by birth, kept her art collection intact under a Nazi-powered Vichy government.
The display doesn’t slight her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, though, or the Stein family’s ties to the Bay Area (Gertrude and Leo grew up in Oakland, and Michael and Sarah, who’d lived in San Francisco before moving to France, relocated in Palo Alto).
Finally, this review might be remiss if it didn’t tweak Gertrude’s most-quoted phrase. Be assured, then, that “a spectacle is a spectacle is a spectacle.”
Indubitably.
“The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” will show through Sept. 6 at SFMOMA, 1511 Third St., San Francisco. Tickets are free for members and kids 12 and under accompanied by an adult, $7 to $25 nonmembers. Information: 357-4000 or go to sfmoma.org.
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