The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde ed. by Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow, and: Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore by Karen Levitov (review)

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).¹

Part 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...