Seeing Stein(s) Collect

The year 2011 was marked in the San Francisco Bay Area by the belated homecoming of one of its prodigal daughters, the iconic writer and promulgator of the idea of modernism, Gertrude Stein. Two major exhibitions, The Steins Collect at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum, along with the publication of accompanying catalogues, the staging of an "opera installation" performance of Four Saints in Three Acts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and a host of related public lectures and events celebrated Gertrude and the Family Stein in grand style. The exhibitions brought together a stunning constellation of works and engrossed thousands of viewers in the complex mythos of the Stein family, French modern art, American expatriate bohemia in Paris, and the emergence of self-conscious modernism across the arts. The catalogues are similarly rich, sumptuously documenting the show and providing a wealth of critical perspectives on the material. Both catalogues, in fact, go well beyond the typical exhibition catalogue's generic role of memorializing the curatorial concept in a portable form and offering explanatory material at a slightly more expansive scale than the wall text that was provided to visitors in situ. In particular, Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer's catalogue for Seeing Gertrude Stein stands as a notable independent publication, supplementary to and critically more provocative than the exhibition display itself, which, despite its framing apparatus, will have remained for most viewers, I suspect, primarily a vividly illustrated biographical survey of Stein's forty-year career.

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde tracked the transformations of the Stein family's art collections as they successively came to Paris, met various artists and dealers, formed their friendships and aesthetic views, and experienced the vicissitudes of the art market and the broader history of the period. The primary device the exhibition relies on—extremely successfully in display—was the reconstruction from photographs, presented in enlargement alongside the paintings and reproduced in an extensive appendix in the catalogue, of the ever-changing configuration of works in the various residences of the Stein family members: the famous Rue de Fleurus house of Leo and Gertrude and, later, Gertrude and Alice; the Rue Madame residence of Michael and Sarah Stein; the Rue de la Tour house of Michael, Sarah, and their friend Gabrielle Colaço-Osorio; the Villa Stein-de Monzie of Michael, Sarah, and Gabrielle, designed by Corbusier; the Kingsley Avenue residence of Michael and Sarah, in Palo Alto, California; and the Rue Christine house of Gertrude and Alice. (The wartime country residences of Stein and Toklas were not included here, but were, however, well documented and discussed in the Contemporary Jewish Museum's Seeing Gertrude Stein.)

It was difficult not to be simply stunned at the sheer number of masterpieces of French modernist art that passed through the hands—and hung on the walls—of Leo, Gertrude, and Michael Stein, along with Michael's wife Sarah. As the show illustrated, their collections each had very complex histories of acquisition, display, and sale or donation; the works once in their possession eventually seeded a wide range of modern art collections world-wide. Many of the individual works are familiar from published histories of modern art or from exhibitions of individual masters such as Picasso, Matisse, or Cezanne. Yet the act of reassembling them for the exhibition in their "original" proximity provided an unsettling shock to that sense of familiarity, fostered by a benumbing series of reproductions. Though this...