The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde and Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

Woody Allen's recent fantasy of Americans immersed in Modernist Paris, Midnight in Paris (2011), quite appropriately places Gertrude Stein at the epicenter of taste making for both literature and art. While the re-creation clearly demonstrates how intensely writers and painters interacted during the years of Hemingway's Movable Feast, the late 1920s, what this filmic narrative did not provide was how significantly those visionary Americans—specifically the Stein family and their friends the Cones, as Jewish Americans—acted in the role of muse through their enlightened patronage of emerging pioneers of Modernism, particularly Picasso and Matisse.At the salon center of that web of connections sat Gertrude Stein, but also her sensitive older brother, Leo, and her other sibling, Michael, were also avid collectors. Almost always overlooked in the story, two Baltimore sisters, Dr. Claribel and Etta Cone, the subject of Gertrude's poem “Two Women,” redoubled that formative influence in Paris of Jewish-American collectors, especially for the nascent career of Henri Matisse. Taken together, these friends and family transformed the history of twentieth-century art. While the fabled Armory Show in New York in 1913 and the influence of Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291 are more widely credited with introducing Americans to these new artistic developments, the roles of both the Steins and the Cones can now be clearly discerned a century later.A pair of recent major exhibition catalogs charts the formative roles of both the Steins and the Cones for modern art in Paris. By far the larger one, The Steins Collect, was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and it traveled to Paris and New York in 2012. A complementary discussion of Gertrude Stein with a more cultural and biographical emphasis was formulated in tandem with it as Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, by Tirza True Latimer and Wanda Corn. Consideration of the Cone sisters, Collecting Matisse and Modern Art, drawn from their bequest to the Baltimore Museum of Art, originated at the Jewish Museum in New York before a future stop at Vancouver Art Gallery. Its thin catalog should certainly be supplemented with the foundational publication on the Cones by Brenda Richardson (1985).1Part of the fascination of this group of Jewish Americans lies with their decision to relocate to Paris just after the turn of the century. They had financial independence from earlier family business successes, though Gertrude began by teaming up on purchases with Leo, declaring (according to Hemingway), “you can either buy clothes or buy pictures. It's that simple.” The Cone sisters derived their resources (“they were rich,” announced Gertrude Stein in her word portrait) from a family textile business with mills based in North Carolina. While they often visited Europe, particularly to see Gertrude and Leo Stein, the Cone sisters never did permanently relocate there and maintained adjoining apartments back in Baltimore. Michael Stein and his wife, Sarah, soon arrived in Paris, where Sarah helped Matisse establish an art school, but they also returned in 1935 to the family's American origins in the San Francisco Bay Area, fostering in the process an early appreciation of modern art in America's West. Indeed, the San Francisco exhibition celebrates that connection and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's own roots.Matisse remained the artist whom all these patrons supported. It is telling for these interconnections to note that Leo Stein loaned Matisse's challenging Blue Nude (1907) to the Armory Show, only to sell it in 1926 to Claribel Cone (the picture, in the Steins Collect, cat. 139, now resides permanently in the Baltimore Museum of Art). Both exhibitions arrange their objects in the order they were collected, so useful distinctions between individual tastes can be discerned. Leo came to his love of Matisse from that artist's own models—Cézanne, Renoir, and Manet—but he discovered the radically inventive Matisse at his very origin, especially at the controversial Salon d'Automne of 1905, where the artist and his associates were labeled Fauves, or “wild beasts” by hostile critics. Leo and Gertrude once owned Matisse's masterpiece (now in the Barnes Collection, Philadelphia), Bonheur de vivre (1905–6; cat. 117), as well as his most challenging figure, Woman with a Hat (1905, cat. 113; now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Leo, however, abandoned Matisse after 1908, Picasso after 1912. The Cone sisters remained the most perennial purchasers of Matisse, also favoring his bronze sculptures and culminating with his late painting Large Reclining Nude (1935; plate 37), recorded in historic photographs during its process of creation.Gertrude, by contrast, inclined far more to Picasso, who famously made her portrait (1905–6; cat. 238) in a legendary number of sittings by her account (probably exaggerated further with every telling). Picasso is also credited with a quip in response to her complaint that she did not resemble her portrait: “She will.” Gertrude, drawing away from the influence of Leo, also favored other artists who emerged out of Picasso's later Cubist experiments of the teens: Juan Gris, André Masson, Francis Picabia. She became the magnet at her celebrated Saturday evening salons (shared with Leo before World War I) for those artists and writers evoked by Woody Allen; these events are covered in “Picturing Gertrude” as well as “The Art of Friendship” among the Five Stories. An essay by Emily Braun in The Steins Collect, “Saturday Evenings at the Steins,” addresses this crucial phenomenon of networking and aesthetic rivalry.Surely Gertrude Stein was one of the first great figures who can properly be termed a public celebrity, exemplified by a triumphal return tour to America in 1934 (covered in another of the Five Stories). But her own literary aura (including her self-serving autobiographical accounts), her prominent salons, and the fame of her Picasso portrait have overshadowed the strong part played early by Leo, especially in those formative first salons, not to mention the dominance of Matisse in the art collecting by all of these venturesome Americans abroad. The walls of these exhibitions quickly correct that impression, as the bold outlines and vivid colors of the Matisse paintings dominate those of Gertrude's own protégé, Picasso. However, Leo departed definitively for America in 1914, at which point he and Gertrude divided their collection, polarizing both their tastes and their followers. To balance the current standard account, a second section in The Steins Collect focuses on Leo Stein, featuring two essays: one on Leo before 1914 (by Gary Tinterow) and another, “Leo without Gertrude” (by Martha Lucy), about his aesthetic afterlife in New York and America.Although in The Steins Collect only Braun's essay really addresses the question of the Jewish background of these figures, some conclusions can be drawn for this readership. First of all, Braun (with Emily Bilski) has already presented the importance of such salons, especially by Jewish women, as part of the refined, shared culture by Jewish art lovers during the past two centuries, an element of their assimilationist ventures within dominant society.2 Gertrude Stein herself observed that her salon “put a Jewish hostess at the apex of Parisian society.”3 Sarah Stein also exemplifies this tendency, even to the point of taking visible prominence while remaining financially supported by her husband, Michael, in the background. Additionally, other figures, mentioned in Levitov's Jewish Museum essay, became extensions of Gertrude's influence and social model back in America, sometimes in direct contact with Leo Stein: Mabel Dodge Luhan, especially; but also Agnes Meyer, Katherine Dreier, and the Stettheimer sisters, one of whom, Florine, became an artist (plate 45) in her own right (and even designed stage sets and costumes later for the Virgil Thompson/Gertrude Stein opera, Four Saints in Three Acts).4Also part of the Stein circle and a gallery owner who championed Picasso's Cubism as well as other experimental artists, especially Gris, whom Gertrude collected during the teens, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler as both a German and a Jew found ready acceptance. He even continued his contact with Gertrude until the 1940s (229–33). Gertrude's consort, Alice B. Toklas, was also Jewish. Such identities were noticed more by their critics. Braun quotes a catty Mary Cassatt about this parvenu elite: “They are not Jews for nothing” (p. 63). Bernard Berenson, a self-denying Jewish aesthete of Renaissance art and culture, wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston that the Steins formed “a tribe of queer, conceited, unworldly, bookish, rude, touchy, brutal, hypersensitive people,” led by Gertrude, “a sort of Semitic primeval female straight from the desert” (quoted by Tinterow, p. 83).In general the Steins' salon population often consisted of newcomers or outsiders to Paris—those for whom French, as it was for the Americans but also for both Picasso and Kahnweiler, remained a distinctly second language. Quite a few aspiring American artists visited, including Jewish artists Max Weber (who formed the New Society of American Artists in Paris with Alfred Maurer and Arthur B. Carles in 1908), Abraham Walkowitz, and Elie Nadelman. Socially diverse crowds, including homosexuals, Jews, foreigners, and bohemians of various stripes, populated these gatherings, sometimes to the consternation of more prominent socialites. Ultimately, Gertrude's own lesbian sexual identity and physical ambiguity set the pace for social as well as aesthetic radicalism and received commentary both fawning and strident.As their exhibition shows, as collectors the Cone sisters also relished decorative pattern aligned with Matisse, including exotic textiles, jewelry, fabrics, and other objects from Africa and Asia, some of them acquired on an early around-the-world trip in 1906. Their close friendship with the artist sustained a lifetime allegiance to Matisse and his bold forms yet legible, even conventional subjects, including female nudes. The Cones also chose to purchase earlier, nineteenth-century Parisian art, which had shaped Matisse, rather than subsequent modern art. By the time after Leo's departure, when Gertrude Stein could no longer afford Picassos or the works of the other leading contemporary painters in Paris, and when Matisse was very successful and well settled, the Cones still retained their close connection to Matisse and supported his work as both friends and patrons (he made a visit in 1930).Thus as both the artists and their Jewish American patrons aged, both the white heat of creativity and the close support that had sustained their mutual lives in early twentieth-century Paris waned. Claribel Cone died in 1929, Etta in 1949; Gertrude and Leo Stein in 1946 and 1947, respectively, before Matisse, already enfeebled, succumbed in 1954. Their era had long since passed. But the crucial importance of Jewish patronage for the support of modern art and music, already noted in German-speaking countries (and duly attacked there by bigoted cultural jingos),5 found its counterpart in avant-garde Paris—now, however, under the leadership of foreign visitors: American Jews!

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