In The Collector’s Salon

For many people, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-garde may feel like the answer to a prayer they weren’t aware they’d said. Unlike the collection of their friend and contemporary Albert Barnes, the Steins’ was constantly changing, the result of complex group finances and interactions, and was never allowed to ossify in the manner Barnes insisted his should. To visit the Steins is to have a dream–a sense reinforced in an early room of the exhibition, where ghostly images of their first homes in Paris are projected on multiple walls, with eerie results.

One thing many viewers will observe right away is how small most of the work is. The exhibition notes make very clear that although the Steins had money, it wasn’t enough to allow them to invest in work by well-known artists. Even the very smallest Cezannes were costly to them. Through a lifetime of collecting, they rarely purchased anything very large, even from younger artists, and while their collection would eventually come in its way to define the ‘get it before it breaks out art-world of the twentieth century’, it had its origins firmly in the nineteenth: there were Japanese prints and Renoir nudes. A tiny Manet, seen here in the second room, was the largest they could afford.

In a sense, then, Matisse and Picasso, at that time mostly unknown, along with Raoul du Gardier and Henri Manguin–now more obscure than ever–were a substitute, as the Steins must themselves have been to ambitious artists in search of ready money. It was a good match, nevertheless: the Steins, subject to a Jamesian revelation of Paris, embraced not just the art but the life-style that went with it, the brothers refusing to wear closed shoes and Gertrude living openly with her lover, Alice. Artists and patrons became friends.

The work itself is a joy, and placed in its context by Leo’s early love of Renoir, the boldness of high Modernist experimentation can once again be experienced in its breath-taking audacity. Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905) is a scream of colour, announcing a style that pushes Cezanne to breaking point, but still refuses to abandon volume; a series of blue-period Picassos lead up to the African-inspired studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon via his large Boy Leading a Horse (1906) and the commanding portrait of Gertrude (of which he famously said that although it didn’t look like her, ìit willî – and indeed it does).

The Steins were dedicated enough to their friends that they helped fund and religiously attended the Academie Matisse. A self-portrait by Leo shows him struggling, unsuccessfully, to incorporate his teacher’s strong green shadows. (It appears from the work on display that of all the Steins, it was Sarah who had the most natural painterly ability.)

Given their interest in colourist work, it is surprising no Stein was more interested in Bonnard, whose Siesta of 1900 is surely the most erotically sensual painting on display – but perhaps it was for that very reason. The Steins apparently were united in a love of the bold, but sexuality does not figure strongly, even after they ended their cohabitation and potentially divisive issues of orientation become moot.

A change begins after the Great War, and by the end of WWII it has solidified irreversibly: Gertrude, now a famous (and famously challenging) author and in a sense more invested in experimentation because of it, came to seek out the new for its own sake. Meanwhile, the artists she had previously favoured were both too expensive and, as the last room of the exhibition suggests, no longer producing great work. Picasso’s colourful late-stage cubism is a parody of his own daring explorations. Even Matisse’s enjoyable Tea of 1919 shows the tendencies that would later become the facile self-satisfaction of such 1940’s work as The Peasant Blouse (not in this exhibition), although his portraits of Michael and Sarah remain haunting, and his 1919 Bay of Nice is enticing for its depth of perspective and exaggeratedly high horizon line.

Francis Picabia, Gertrude Stein, 1937 or later. Oil on canvas 29 1⁄2 x 24 in. Private collection, courtesy Concept Art Gallery, Pittsburgh. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

More saddening perhaps is Gertrude’s search for poor substitutes. The exhibition ends with no fewer than three portraits of Gertrude and one homage (her favourite subject was apparently no secret). Each is worse than the next. Picabia offers a cartoonish version of pre-cubism Picasso, including a ham-fisted variation on Boy Leading a Horse and a prentice-work portrait. Meanwhile Andre Masson’s The Meal (1922) is pseudo-cubism, drained of both urgency and colour, a work in which riot has become rote.

It is a sad end to the show to see the novelist and once proud champion of great art so reduced. There is something like relief to find that the lump of black metal waiting in the hall beyond is Balzac, his back to you, monumental even in this appropriately scaled-down version of Rodin’s powerful portrait.