Like the mighty Mississippi River rolling ever onward, the news of SFMOMA's show of the Steins' collection has inundated the local media. However, unlike unruly Mississippi, the news of this show is bringing delight.
The show at SFMOMA is an eloquent tribute to the family as art collectors. Seldom have so few bought so much art with so little money. It's difficult to say which is more amazing - the low prices paid for now priceless paintings by Picasso and Matisse or the Steins' (particularly Sarah Stein's) amazing choices of art that was then new, provocative and avant-guard.
Covering the whole fourth floor of the museum, this major touring exhibition gathers approximately 200 iconic paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and illustrated books.
The work is presented in chronologically by when they were originally acquired by the family, highlighting major themes and benchmarks of both art history and the Steins' parallel journey. There are numerous masterpieces - Cezanne's Bathers, Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse, Matisse's Landscape study for le Bonheur de vivre and his Girl with the green eyes to mention a few. There are sketches. drawings, watercolors, even ceramics and prints from Leo Stein's collection of Japanese prints.
Different rooms display the early 20th century Parisian art scene and Leo's early interests in Cézanne, Renoir, and Manet to the infamous 1905 Salon d'Automne. Other rooms display Leo and Gertrude's joint acquisitions and the rue de Fleurus; Michael and Sarah Stein's particular devotion to Matisse and the rue Madame; Gertrude's collecting patterns, from her complex relationship with Picasso and their artistic influence on each other through her later promotion of Gris, André Masson, and Picabia in the 1920s and '30s; and Michael and Sarah's history-making art advocacy in the United States, from a 1906 trip home, when they brought the first Matisse paintings to be seen on American soil, to their 1935 return to Palo Alto, California.
The exhibition features a special gallery devoted to the Académie Matisse, as well as a gallery conceived by SFMOMA project assistant curator Carrie Pilto devoted to the Steins' patronage of modern architecture with their commission of the Villa Stein-de Monzie by Le Corbusier.
Each gallery displays a rich array of archival materials—including photographs, family albums, film clips, correspondence, and ephemera—the exhibition provides a new perspective on the artistic foresight of this innovative family, tracing their enduring impact on art-making and collecting practices and their inestimable role in creating a new international standard of taste for modern art.
SFMOMA's Live Art program will restage a production of Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), composer Virgil Thomson's experimental opera based on Gertrude Stein's original play.To accompany the exhibition, SFMOMA, in association with Yale University Press, will publish a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue (cloth, 464 pages, $75), featuring previously unpublished archival information and original essays.
The parallel exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum is a separate focus on Gertrude Stein and her influence on both Parisian and American cultural and literary worlds and her life-long relationship with Alice B. Toklas.
at SFMOMA from May 21 through September 6, 2011, before traveling to Paris and then New York.
SFMOMA: http://www.sfmoma.org/
Contemporary Jewish Museum: http://www.thecjm.org/
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