Souvenirs From Paris
Comments OffBy DAVID LITTLEJOHN
San Francisco
This city climaxed a four-month celebration of five onetime Bay Area residents who settled in Paris—brothers Michael and Leo Stein; their sister, Gertrude; Michael’s wife, Sarah; and Gertrude’s life partner, Alice B. Toklas—with four performances earlier this month of “Four Saints in Three Acts.” Gertrude Stein wrote the nonsensical if occasionally droll libretto in 1929; Virgil Thomson penned the score, and got it produced in 1934. In the 1950s, Thomson cut “Four Saints” down to 45 minutes, and for the recent production in the Yerba Buena Center theater, director Brian Staufenbiel added “a more structured narrative” and dressed everyone but the leads in white. Nicole Paiement, the conductor and artistic director of Ensemble Parallèle, did a good job of conducting her 23-piece orchestra.
Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
Contemporary Jewish Museum
Through Sept. 6, then travels to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
The Steins Collect
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Through Sept. 6, then travels to the Grand Palais in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
This version is set, more or less, in St. Teresa’s death-bedroom, with various saints gathered around her lacy, tented rolling bed; in an operating room (same bed, same room), in which St. Ignatius-as-surgeon, dressed in a scarlet suit, saws apart a dummy St. Teresa as the “real” one watches from above. The other saints toss the severed limbs about; Dr. Ignatius stitches them back together. Two characters (policemen?) in black start arresting people, which leads to a courtroom scene. All this has nothing to do with the original—but then the original didn’t have much to do with anything, either. Time is still found for a famous tango interlude and St. Ignatius’s line “Pigeons in the grass, alas,” which is repeated (with variations) by the other saints a dozen or two times. In fact, many words and lines are repeated over and over again. Thomson’s thin, unchallenging score manages to play some amusing games with Stein’s repeated words: Eclectic and melodious, it is never aggressively modern. The program was filled out by an inconsequential new work by Luciano Chessa, using lines Thomson had cut from “Four Saints.”
To learn more about the woman who came up with this mad libretto (and a great deal of similar quirky prose), one should spend a couple of hours at Daniel Libeskind’s Contemporary Jewish Museum. Here curators Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer have put together “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories.” It is doubtful anyone will ever really understand Stein, but in this extensive exhibition the curators have provided us with all the clues we could ask for: recordings of her reading and talking; film clips of her theater pieces; clothing, jewelry, furniture and wallpaper; more paintings and sculptures of her; many more photographs. “Gertrude Stein became one of the most painted, sculpted and photographed women of the twentieth century,” we are told. The judicious catalog—defensive, but not worshipful (it cannily avoids talking about her writing)—may be the most candid, thoughtful and extensive biography she will ever get.
Just around the corner from the Jewish Museum, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the centerpiece of this summer’s Steinfest, “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” curated by Janet Bishop and others.
For several years, almost the only places in Paris where one could go to see collections of works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were Gertrude and Leo’s (and later Alice’s) weekly Saturday-evening salons on rue de Fleurus, and Sarah and Michael’s the same evening on the rue Madame. Eventually, “everybody” came—writers, musicians, cafe society and the gay demimonde, foreign searchers after the new, and the artists the Steins collected.
The main attraction of the SFMOMA show are the 76 Matisses and 47 Picassos the Steins once owned (the works and numbers will differ slightly when the show travels to Paris and New York). In addition to an impressive number of masterpieces, the exhibition includes the minor works one should expect of a family of emigré Californians of comfortable but not unlimited means—as well as family snapshots, letters, documents, furniture, house plans and home movies. There are 204 works of art here, filling most of the museum’s fourth floor.
The experience of standing before Picasso’s small, dark-eyed “Self Portrait”; his hulking, immortalized image of Gertrude Stein (which she gave to the Met to help ensure her immortality); his ethereal “Boy Leading a Horse” (on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, and one of the greatest modern paintings); and Matisse’s dazzling “Woman With a Hat” (from SFMOMA’s permanent collection)—all in a row, all painted and purchased in 1905-06—makes passing through galleries of lesser works worthwhile.
SFMOMA/Succession H. Matisse/ARS
‘The Girl With Green Eyes’ (1908) by Henri Matisse
In Room I, an erotic Bonnard and a Renoir nude are joined by a small Manet and four Cézannes (two of them lithographs). Room III includes the great row of four mentioned above. Room IV has a corner of fine melancholy rose- and blue-period Picassos, as well as a long wall of 11 Matisses in all the wrong colors and his knobbly bronze “Serf.” In Room VI, feast on Matisse’s “The Girl With Green Eyes” of 1908, bought that year by Michael Stein for a friend who eventually gave it to SFMOMA. Next come Matisse’s jarring “Blue Nude” painting (now part of the Cone Collection in the Baltimore Museum of Art) and the bronze “Reclining Nude” that mimics her pose. There follows a compelling suite of five of Picasso’s sharp, orange watercolor sketches for a woman’s almond-shaped, huge-eyed head—plus a larger version in oil—which was to turn up later that year atop one of his Demoiselles d’Avignon.
There are more of Picasso’s early Cubist adventures in the next two rooms. Gertrude was willing to embrace these new works, while Leo was not—which (along with Alice’s growing role in the household) led to the siblings’, and the collection’s, split in 1914. Further along are Matisse’s handsome, stylized portraits of his good friends Michael and Sarah, donated to SFMOMA in 1955. Michael and Sarah returned to the Bay Area in 1935. Before they died—short of cash—they were able to sell many of their Matisses to good friends, who then gave the works to the San Francisco museum, where they form the core of its early-modern collection today.
Back in 1904, Leo and Gertrude, just settled in Paris, learned that they had a legacy of $8,000—perhaps $200,000 today. Almost immediately, Leo, the family art expert, went out and bought a Gauguin, a Cézanne and two Renoirs. In 1905 he bought their greatest Cézanne—”The Artist’s Wife With a Fan” (1878-88), now in the Buehrle Foundation in Zurich (which, alas, does not lend its works)—and a Delacroix, as well as their first important works by Matisse and Picasso, virtually wet from the canvas. In rapid succession came Bonnard, Daumier, Manguin, a fine Toulouse-Lautrec, Valladon, more and more and more Picassos and Matisses.
How did this family—along with very few other people—recognize the importance of so many defiantly rule-breaking paintings by artists still derided or ignored by the Salons, museums and major galleries and collectors? Who among us today could make such a brilliant gamble on the future of art with just $200,000 to spend? Such is the mystery of changing tastes and the enduring fascination of the Steins.
Mr. Littlejohn writes for the Journal on West Coast events.
