Gertrude Stein Was Significant to the Development of the 20th Century Art Because Quizlet
With its acid colors and slapdash brush strokes, the painting all the same jolts the eye. The face, blotched in mauve and yellow, is highlighted with thick lines of lime green; the groundwork is a rough patchwork of pastel tints. And the hat! With its high blue brim and round protuberances of pink, lavender and green, the hat is a phosphorescent landscape by itself, improbably perched on the caput of a haughty woman whose downturned oral fissure and bored eyes seem to be expressing disdain at your astonishment.
If the picture startles fifty-fifty after a century has passed, imagine the reaction when Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat was first exhibited in 1905. 1 outraged critic ridiculed the room at the Grand Palais in Paris, where it reigned alongside the violently hued canvases of similar-minded painters, as the lair of fauves, or wild animals. The insult, somewhen losing its sting, stuck to the grouping, which also included André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. The Fauves were the near controversial artists in Paris, and of all their paintings, Woman with a Chapeau was the near notorious.
And so when the picture was later on hung in the Parisian apartment of Leo and Gertrude Stein, a brother and sister from California, it fabricated their home a destination. "The artists wanted to keep seeing that picture, and the Steins opened information technology upward to anyone who wanted to see it," says Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which organized "The Steins Collect," an exhibition of many pieces the Steins held. The exhibition goes on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Urban center from Feb 28 to June 3. (An unrelated exhibition, "Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories," about her life and work, remains at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery until January 22.)
When Leo Stein first saw Adult female with a Hat, he thought it "the nastiest smear of paint" he had ever encountered. But for five weeks, he and Gertrude went to the Grand Palais repeatedly to look at it, so succumbed, paying Matisse 500 francs, the equivalent then of about $100. The purchase helped establish them equally serious collectors of avant-garde fine art, and it did still more than for Matisse, who had yet to discover generous patrons and desperately needed the money. Over the next few years, he would come to rely for financial and moral support on Gertrude and Leo, and fifty-fifty more on their brother Michael and his wife, Sarah. And information technology was at the Steins' that Matisse first came face to confront with Pablo Picasso. The two would embark on ane of the most fruitful rivalries in fine art history.
For a few years the California Steins formed, improbably enough, the near important incubator for the Parisian avant-garde. Leo led the way. The fourth of five surviving children built-in to a German Jewish family that had relocated from Baltimore to Pittsburgh and somewhen to the San Francisco Bay expanse, he was a precocious intellectual and, in childhood, the inseparable companion of his younger sis, Gertrude. When Leo enrolled at Harvard in 1892, she followed him, taking courses at the Harvard Annex, which after became Radcliffe. When he went to the Globe Exposition in Paris in the summer of 1900, she accompanied him. Leo, and then 28, liked Europe so much that he stayed, residing showtime in Florence and and then moving to Paris in 1903. Gertrude, 2 years younger, visited him in Paris that fall and did non expect back.
By then Leo had already abandoned his ideas of taking up law, history, philosophy and biology. In Florence he had befriended the eminent art historian Bernard Berenson and resolved to become an fine art historian, but he scrapped that appetite, too. As James R. Mellow observed in the 1974 book Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, Leo led "a life of perennial self-analysis in the pursuit of self-esteem." Dining in Paris with the cellist Pablo Casals in 1903, Leo decided he would be an artist. He returned to his hotel that night, lit a bonfire in the fireplace, stripped off his clothes and sketched himself nude by the flickering lite. Thank you to his uncle, the sculptor Ephraim Keyser, who had merely rented a place of his own in Paris, Leo establish 27 rue de Fleurus, a two-story residence with an adjoining studio, on the Left Bank near the Luxembourg Gardens. Gertrude soon joined him at that place.
The source of the Steins' income was dorsum in California, where their eldest sibling, Michael, had shrewdly managed the business he inherited upon the death of their father in 1891: San Francisco rental properties and streetcar lines. (The two eye children, Simon and Bertha, mayhap lacking the Stein genius, fail to figure much in the family chronicles.) Reports of life in Paris tantalized Michael. In Jan 1904, he resigned his mail service as sectionalisation superintendent of the Market Street Railway in San Francisco then that, with Sarah and their viii-yr-old son, Allan, he could join his two younger siblings on the Left Banking concern. Michael and Sarah took a year'due south lease on an apartment a few blocks from Gertrude and Leo. But when the lease was upwardly, they could not bring themselves to return to California. Instead, they rented another apartment close by, on the 3rd flooring of a quondam Protestant church on the rue Madame. They would stay in French republic for 30 years.
All four of the Paris-based Steins (including Sarah, a Stein by marriage) were natural collectors. Leo pioneered the path, frequenting the galleries and the conservative Paris Salon. He was dissatisfied. He felt he was more on rails when he visited the first Fall Salon in Oct 1903—it was a reaction to the Paris Salon's traditionalism—returning many times with Gertrude. He later recounted that he "looked once more and again at every unmarried pic, but as a botanist might at the flora of an unknown land." Still, he was confused by the abundance of fine art. Consulting Berenson for advice, he ready off to investigate the paintings of Paul Cézanne at Ambroise Vollard's gallery.
The place looked like a junk shop. Although Vollard was resistant to selling pictures to buyers he didn't know, Leo coaxed an early Cézanne landscape out of him. When brother Michael informed Gertrude and Leo that an unexpected windfall of $one,600, or 8,000 francs, was due to them, they knew what to practise. They would buy art at Vollard'south. Established first-charge per unit artists like Daumier, Delacroix and Manet were so expensive that the budding collectors could but afford small pictures by them. Simply they were able to buy six modest paintings: two each past Cézanne, Renoir and Gauguin. A few months later, Leo and Gertrude returned to Vollard'southward and purchased Madame Cézanne with a Fan, for 8,000 francs. In 2 months, they had spent some $three,200 (equivalent to about $80,000 today): Never once more would they lavish so much so fast on art. Vollard would oftentimes say approvingly that the Steins were his just clients who collected paintings "not because they were rich, but despite the fact that they weren't."
Leo comprehended Cézanne's importance very early, and spoke eloquently almost it. "Leo Stein began to talk," the photographer Alfred Stieglitz after recalled. "I quickly realized I had never heard more beautiful English language nor anything clearer." Corresponding with a friend late in 1905, Leo wrote that Cézanne had "succeeded in rendering mass with a vital intensity that is unparalleled in the whole history of painting." Any Cézanne'southward subject thing, Leo continued, "there is always this remorseless intensity, this countless unending gripping of the form, the unceasing endeavour to forcefulness it to reveal its accented self-existing quality of mass....Every sheet is a battleground and victory an unattainable ideal."
But Cézanne was too expensive to collect, then the Steins sought out emerging artists. In 1905, Leo stumbled upon Picasso'due south piece of work, which was being exhibited at group shows, including one staged in a piece of furniture shop. He bought a big gouache (opaque watercolor) by the then obscure 24-twelvemonth-old artist, The Acrobat Family unit, later on attributed to his Rose Period. Next he purchased a Picasso oil, Girl with a Basket of Flowers, even though Gertrude institute it repellent. When he told her at dinner he had bought the pic, she threw down her silverware. "Now you've spoiled my appetite," she declared. Her opinion changed. Years subsequently, she would turn down what Leo characterized as "an absurd sum" from a would-exist buyer of Daughter with a Basket of Flowers.
At the same time, Leo and Gertrude were warming to Matisse's harder-to-digest compositions. When the two bought Adult female with a Hat at the 1905 Fall Salon in the Grand Palais, they became the only collectors who had caused works by both Picasso and Matisse. Between 1905 and 1907, said Alfred Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Mod Fine art in New York City, "[Leo] was mayhap the most discerning connoisseur and collector of 20th-century painting in the earth."
Picasso recognized that the Steins could exist useful, and he began to cultivate them. He produced flattering gouache portraits of Leo, with an expression that was hostage and profoundly thoughtful, and of a sensitive immature Allan. With his companion, Fernande Olivier, he dined at the rue de Fleurus flat. Gertrude afterward wrote that when she reached for a roll on the table, Picasso beat her to it, exclaiming, "This piece of bread is mine." She flare-up out laughing, and Picasso, sheepishly acknowledging that the gesture betrayed his poverty, smiled back. It sealed their friendship. But Fernande said that Picasso had been so impressed past Gertrude'south massive head and body he wanted to pigment her even earlier he knew her.
Like Cézanne's Madame Cézanne with a Fan and Matisse's Woman with a Hat, his Portrait of Gertrude Stein represented the bailiwick seated in a chair and looking downwardly at the viewer. Picasso was jousting directly with his rivals. Gertrude was delighted past the consequence, writing some years later that "for me, information technology is I, and it is the merely reproduction of me which is always I, for me." When people told Picasso that Gertrude didn't resemble her portrait, he would reply, "She will."
Information technology was probably the fall of 1906 when Picasso and Matisse met at the Steins. Gertrude said they exchanged paintings, each choosing the other's weakest effort. They would see each other at the Sabbatum evening salons initiated by Gertrude and Leo on the rue de Fleurus and the Michael Steins on the rue Madame. These organized viewings came about because Gertrude, who used the studio for her writing, resented unscheduled interruptions. In Gertrude'due south flat, the pictures were tiered 3 or 4 high, to a higher place heavy wooden Renaissance-era furniture from Florence. The illumination was gaslight; electric lighting didn't replace it until a year or and so before the outbreak of Globe War I. Yet, the curious flocked to the Steins. Picasso called them "virginal," explaining: "They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans." He took many of his creative person friends there, including Braque and Derain, and the poet Apollinaire. By 1908, Sarah reported, the crowds were and then pressing that it was impossible to concur a chat without beingness overheard.
In 1907 Leo and Gertrude acquired Matisse's Blueish Nude: Retentiveness of Biskra, which depicts a reclining woman with her left arm kleptomaniacal above her head, in a garden setting of bold crosshatchings. The picture, and other Matisses the Steins picked up, hit a competitive nerve in Picasso; in his ambitious Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (an artistic breakthrough, which went unsold for some years) and the related Nude with Drapery, he mimicked the woman'southward gesture in Blue Nude, and he extended the crosshatchings, which Matisse had confined to the background, to cover the figures. The masklike face of Gertrude in Picasso's earlier portrait proved to be a transition to the faces in these pictures, which derived from assuming, geometric African masks. Co-ordinate to Matisse, Picasso became smitten with African sculpture after Matisse, on his way to the Steins, picked up a small-scale African head in an antiques shop and, upon arriving, showed it to Picasso, who was "astonished" past it.
Music was 1 of the concluding Matisses that Gertrude and Leo bought, in 1907. Beginning in 1906, however, Michael and Sarah collected Matisse's work primarily. But a world-class catastrophe—the convulsion in San Francisco on April 18, 1906—slowed them down. They returned home with three paintings and a drawing by Matisse—his showtime works seen in the United States. Happily, the Steins discovered piffling damage to their holdings and returned to Paris in mid-November to resume collecting, trading 3 paintings by other artists for six Matisses. Michael and Sarah were his most fervent buyers until the Moscow industrialist Sergei Shchukin saw their drove on a visit to Paris in December 1907. Within a year, he was Matisse's main patron.
Gertrude's love of art informed her piece of work as a writer. In a 1934 lecture, she remarked that a Cézanne painting "e'er was what it looked like the very essence of an oil painting because everything was always at that place, really there." She built up her own sentences by using words in the deliberate, repetitive, blocky way in which Cézanne employed small planes of colour to return mass on a two-dimensional canvas.
The 1909 publication of Three Lives, a collection of stories, marked Gertrude'southward starting time literary success. The following year, Alice B. Toklas, who, like Gertrude, came from a middle-class Jewish family in San Francisco, moved into the rue de Fleurus apartment and became Gertrude'south lifelong companion. Leo, perhaps chafing at his sister'southward literary success, later on wrote that Toklas' inflow eased his imminent rupture with Gertrude, "equally it enabled the matter to happen without whatever explosion."
Gertrude's artistic choices grew bolder. Every bit Picasso staked out increasingly adventurous territory, many of his patrons grumbled and refused to follow. Leo, for one, derided Demoiselles as a "horrible mess." But Gertrude applauded the landscapes that Picasso painted in Horta de Ebro, Spain, in the summer of 1909, which marked a crucial phase in his transition from Cézanne'southward Post-Impressionism into the new territory of Cubism. Over the next few years, his Analytical Cubist notwithstanding lifes, which fragmented the picture into visual shards, alienated people still more. Picasso deeply appreciated Gertrude's purchase of some of these difficult paintings. The showtime work she bought without Leo was The Architect's Table, a somber-colored, oval Analytical Cubist painting of 1912 that contains, amid the images of things 1 might find on such a table, a few messages: one, the boldly lettered "Ma Jolie," or "My Pretty One," refers covertly to Picasso's new dear, Eva Gouel, for whom he would presently leave Fernande Olivier; and another, less prominent, is Gertrude'southward calling card, which she had left one 24-hour interval at his studio. Subsequently that year she bought 2 more Cubist still lifes.
At the aforementioned time, Gertrude was losing interest in Matisse. Picasso, she said, "was the merely one in painting who saw the twentieth century with his eyes and saw its reality and consequently his struggle was terrifying." She felt a detail kinship with him because she was engaged in the same struggle in literature. They were geniuses together. A split up with Leo, who loathed Gertrude's writing, was unavoidable. It came in 1913, he wrote to a friend, considering "it was of course a serious affair for her that I can't abide her stuff and recollect it abominable....To this has been added my utter refusal to accept the later phases of Picasso with whose trend Gertrude has so closely centrolineal herself." But Leo, besides, was disenchanted with Matisse. The living painter he most admired was Renoir, whom he considered unsurpassed as a colorist.
When brother and sister parted means, the prickly question was the segmentation of spoils. Leo wrote to Gertrude that he would "insist with happy cheerfulness that yous brand every bit clean a sweep of the Picassos as I take of the Renoirs." Truthful to his give-and-take, when he departed in April 1914 for his villa on a hillside outside Florence, he left behind all his Picassos except for some cartoonlike sketches that the artist had made of him. He also relinquished nigh every Matisse. He took 16 Renoirs. Indeed, before departing he sold several pictures so that he could purchase Renoir's florid Cup of Chocolate, a painting from about 1912, depicting an overripe, underdressed young woman sitting at a table languidly stirring her cocoa. Suggesting how far he had strayed from the advanced, he deemed the painting "the quintessence of pictorial art." But he remained loyal to Cézanne, who had died less than a decade earlier. He insisted on keeping Cézanne's small merely beautiful painting of v apples, which held a "unique importance to me that nothing can supercede." It broke Gertrude'southward center to give it up. Picasso painted a watercolor of a single apple tree and gave it to her and Alice as a Christmas present.
The outbreak of hostilities between Gertrude and Leo coincided with aggression on a global scale. World War I had painful personal consequences for Sarah and Michael, who, at Matisse'due south request, had lent 19 of his paintings to an exhibition at Fritz Gurlitt'due south gallery in Berlin in July 1914. The paintings were impounded when war was declared a month later. Sarah referred to the loss as "the tragedy of her life." Matisse, who naturally felt terrible about the turn of events, painted portraits of Michael and Sarah, which they treasured. (It is not articulate if he sold or gave the paintings to them.) And they continued to buy Matisse paintings, although never in the book that they could beget earlier. When Gertrude needed coin to get with Alice to Spain during the war, she sold Woman with a Hat—the painting that more than or less started it all—to her brother and sis-in-law for $4,000. Sarah and Michael's friendship with Matisse endured. When they moved back to California in 1935, iii years before Michael'south death, Matisse wrote to Sarah: "Truthful friends are then rare that information technology is painful to run across them move away." The Matisse paintings they took with them to America would inspire a new generation of artists, notably Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Motherwell. The Matisses that Motherwell saw as a student on a visit to Sarah's home "went through me similar an pointer," Motherwell would say, "and from that moment, I knew exactly what I wanted to do."
With a few bumps along the way, Gertrude maintained her friendship with Picasso, and she connected to collect art until her expiry, at historic period 72, in 1946. However, the rise in Picasso's prices after World War I led her to younger artists: among them, Juan Gris, André Masson, Francis Picabia and Sir Francis Rose. (At her death, Stein endemic near 100 Rose paintings.) Except for Gris, whom she adored and who died young, Gertrude never claimed that her new infatuations played in the same league as her earlier discoveries. In 1932 she proclaimed that "painting at present afterward its great menstruation has come up dorsum to exist a pocket-sized art."
She sacrificed major works to pay living expenses. As Jewish Americans in World State of war 2, she and Alice retreated to the relative obscurity of a French farmhouse. They took but two paintings with them: Picasso's portrait of Gertrude and Cézanne's portrait of his wife. Once the Cézanne disappeared, Gertrude said in response to a visitor'due south query about it, "Nosotros are eating the Cézanne." Similarly, later Gertrude's death, Alice sold some of the pictures that had been hidden away in Paris during the state of war; she needed the money to subsidize the publication of some of Gertrude'due south more opaque writings. In Alice's last years, she became embroiled in an ugly dispute with Roubina Stein, the widow of Allan, Gertrude's nephew and the co-casher of her estate. Returning one summertime to Paris from a sojourn in Italy, Alice found that Roubina had stripped the apartment of its fine art. "The pictures are gone permanently," Alice reported to a friend. "My dim sight could not see them now. Happily a bright memory does."
Leo never lost the collecting bug. Merely to concord on to his villa in Settignano, where he lived with his wife, Nina, and to afford their winters in Paris, he, too, had to sell virtually of the paintings he owned, including all the Renoirs. Just in the 1920s and '30s, he began buying again. The object of his renewed interest was even stranger than Gertrude's: a forgettable Czech creative person, Othon Coubine, who painted in a backward-looking Impressionist mode.
Only once, not long after the finish of World War I, Gertrude idea she glimpsed Leo in Paris, as she and Alice collection by in their Ford. He took off his hat and she bowed in response, merely she didn't stop. In the more than than 30 years betwixt his begrudging deviation and her death, brother and sister never spoke once more.
Arthur Lubow wrote about Mainland china's terra cotta soldiers in the July 2009 outcome. He is working on a biography of Diane Arbus.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/an-eye-for-genius-the-collections-of-gertrude-and-leo-stein-6210565/
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