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From left: Picasso’s Head in Three-Quarter View, 1907; Matisse’s Self-Portrait, 1906, and Femme au Chapeau,1905.
May 21: "The Steins Collect"
May 2011
In Paris during the winter of 1905, a 24-year-old Pablo Picasso, not yet
world famous, asked to paint Gertrude Stein’s portrait. The artist and
the writer had just met, but over the course of some 90 sittings at
Picasso’s studio Stein became his muse, fiercest supporter, and,
eventually, most influential patron. Before she was anointed the grande
dame of modernist literature, Stein—along with her brothers Leo and
Michael, and Michael’s wife, Sarah—was an art collector: Her famed salon
at 27 rue de Fleurus was crammed with the canvases of Picasso, Matisse,
Renoir, and Cézanne, among others, well before the art establishment
recognized their genius. From May 21 to September 6, the landmark Stein
collection will be reconstituted for the first time in more than 40
years, at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. “The Steins weren’t
buying and holding,” says Janet Bishop, cocurator of “The Steins
Collect,” which showcases more than 200 iconic works that will travel to
Paris’s Grand Palais and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “They were
sharing their pleasures.” Their Saturday-night salon was one of the only
places, in fact, where the public could gaze, and often gawk, at the
early experiments of cubists like Picasso and Braque—making the Stein
atelier arguably the world’s first modern art museum.
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