“The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,”on display at the SFMOMA from May 21 through Sept. 6, is one of the most ambitious shows the SFMOMA has ever put on, says the museum’s director Neal Benezra. With 200 paintings, including 75 by Henri Matisse and 45 by Pablo Picasso, the exhibit not only gives you an opportunity to see lots of amazing art, but to realize how important art collectors were.
Writer Gertrude Stein, as well as her two brothers, Leo and Michael, and Michael’s wife, Sarah, were among the first to realize the genius of Matisse and Picasso. In 1904, when the Steins discovered the two painters, Picasso was only 23, and Matisse, at 35 was “still struggling to gain a foothold,” according to Benezra.
They Steins hung these artists paintings , along with works by contemporaries such as Paul Cézanne in their apartment in Paris for people to come and see.
Janet Bishop, the curator of painting and sculpture for SFMOMA, said she was thrilled to see paintings in living color after seeing so many sepia colored photographs of the paintings hanging in Steins’ living rooms. The siblings had a very open door policy about letting people in, she says.
“If you wanted to see the most interesting art in Paris, you had to go see the Steins,” she said.
The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde is jointly organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The exhibition premieres in San Francisco from May 21 – Sept. 6, before traveling to Paris and New York.
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