Paris Journal: Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso...the Stein Family

The Steins, Leo, Gertrude, Sarah and Michael were patrons not investors and in that regard, like their counterparts the lesser known Cone sisters from Baltimore, played an enormous role in the lives of the artists whose careers they cultivated. Cezanne was not a household name when Leo Stein purchased his first Cezanne from Vollard, Cezanne’s famed dealer (whose portrait hangs in the Cezanne and Paris show at the Musee du Luxembourg). Everyone always points to the tremendous connection between Picasso and Gertrude Stein epitomized in Picasso’s iconic portrait of Stein from l906 now hanging in the Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso…the Steins Family at the Grand Palais, but from a cultural point of view it’s significant that an eccentric family of Americans, assimilated Jews of means, fostered the development of the early twentieth century modernism which became the calling card of French culture. The bust of Stein by Jacques Lipchitz from l920 and the portrait by Picabia from l937, which also appear in the show, exemplify Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence as it applies to the plastic arts. The little audio widget given at the Stein show also pointed out the debt the Picasso painting has to Ingres’ Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832) on exhibit in the Morgan Library in New York—which is another way of underlining the fact that this monumentally extensive show devoted to the Stein collection is really also a focal point for numerous historical and esthetic connections past and present. Gertrude had studied with William James at Radcliffe. Leo, who was himself the author of a book called The A-B-C of Aesthetics, had also been part of the circle that included Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry. Fry had offered the notion  of  “pure form,” as a way of understanding Cezanne’s revolutionary esthetic. Whether you go backwards in time towards Renoir who Leo would champion after Alice B. Toklas came to live with Gertrude at the Rue de Fleurus or forward to Gertrude turning her attention to Juan Gris and Picabia, two artists represented by another renowned dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, all roads seem to lead to the Stein family and the central role they played in the history of art, esthetics and thought.

The Cone Sisters of Baltimore

When we think of art collecting today, the names Gogosian and Saatchi come to mind. Huge international galleries function almost like stock markets, catering to wealthy individuals who buy art for its investment as well as esthetic value. Collecting Matisse and Picasso: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore, an exhibition at The Jewish Museum, provides a different perspective on the art of collecting. Dr. Claribel Cone and her sister Etta collected before there was a market. They bought Matisse when critics savaged his work and those of his contemporaries in the Salon D’Autonme (1908), dubbing them les Fauves, or wild beasts. By 1913, when Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne were presented to New York society in the famed Armory Show, Claribel and Etta had already been collecting for a decade. Gertrude and Leo Stein befriended the Cones, further helping the sisters, who were beneficiaries of the fortune that their brothers Moses and Ceasar made in the cotton trade, to feed their passion for art. There are many wealthy people, but relatively few amass a trove of art that rivals the Cone sisters’ collection, which would eventually comprise 3,000 works, now housed in the Baltimore Museum of Art. Their accomplishment underscores the importance of the pure form of collecting that comes out of a love of beauty, as well as the crucial role that patronage plays in the survival of artists, particularly in seminal periods like that which led up to so-called Modernism. The Cones, like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, took an almost maternal role towards artists like Matisse and Picasso. There is a wonderful Picasso drawing in the show, which was included in a letter to Etta, in which the artist portrays himself as a portly gent with his hat in his hand. In a BBC documentary narrated by Michael Palin, which is part of the current exhibition, a commentator remarks that when you looked out of the Marlborough apartments—the building the Cones occupied in Baltimore—you saw the past, but on their walls you saw the future, insured by the sisters’ loving attention.   

Radical Invention

The Matisse Show at MOMA is subtitled “Radical Invention” and deals with the period after the painter’s return from Morocco to Paris in 1913 and before his leaving Paris for Nice in 1917. But one of the most significant paintings in the show, Still Life After Jan Davidsz de Heem’s "La Desserte," is based, as the title suggests, on a previous painting, which dates from 1640 and was rediscovered in 1893. Matisse had studied with Moreau, who encouraged him to copy the old masters. The proto-Cubist piece exhibits the confidence and originality that would be epitomized in Bathers by the River (l909-17), The Moroccans (1916) and The Piano Lesson (1916), where a shadow on the painter’s son’s face is represented by a triangle of darkness, shows the artist’s debt to the past. Two floors up, MOMA pays homage to the very movement the museum played such an important role in encouraging, in a show that seems to hearken back to Claudi Levi Strauss’s famous dichotomy between bricoleurs and ingénieurs (or inventors), highlighting the notion that the New York school really was the home of a radical break with Europe and the past. New Yorker art critic Harold Rosenberg pressed this point with his famous distinction between Coonskins and Redcoats, as he referred to American modernists and their European counterparts. But can one imagine Franz Kline without Velasquez? Pollock, Rothko, Newman, and de Kooning all have their separate rooms or walls. William Rubin refers to Arshile Gorky as “The Godfather” of the movement, and de Kooning is quoted as saying “flesh is the reason why paint was invented” on a wall plaque next to his angry rather than enigmatic Mona Lisa, Woman 1 (1950-2). The abstractionist photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind are represented, as are the lesser known Grace Hartigan (Shinnecock Canal) and Joan Mitchell (Ladybug), along with Nevelson, Frankenthaler, Gottlieb (with his famous exploding red balls), Clyfford Still and Sam Francis. But let’s take two early Pollocks, The Flame (1934-8) and the Mask (1941), which have the mythic quality of a Picasso or even a Georgia O’Keefe. There’s something comfortable about a long-term relationship with its routines and its rituals, and in this case the subject is the artist’s relationship with his work. By the time Pollock paints Gothic (1944), the image is already being lost, and by 1946, in Shimmering Substance, the drip style has come into being. Large canvases like One: November 31, 1950 and the famed Autumn Rhythm, which hangs in the permanent collection of the Met, are the embodiment of the classic action painting depicted in Hans Namuth’s famous film of the artist at work. What is dramatic, however, is not the break with the past, but the constant nostalgia that even pulls at an artist as revolutionary as Pollock. In Echo: November 15, 1951, Pollock is already returning to the image. Images are the way that memory is conveyed. The picture of Pollock on the cover of Life, like the picture of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, may have augured the artistic version of the idea put forth forty years later in Francis Fukayama’s The End of History and the Last Man, i.e., that the past is coming to an end. But the revolutionary innuendo is misleading. If there is one thing that the current show at MOMA demonstrates, it’s the fact that art is fundamentally more conservative than science, carrying as it does the burden of history. Abstract Expressionism was ultimately not as revolutionary an event as nuclear fusion. The past is evidenced in every brushstroke of the works on display in MOMA’s comprehensive homage.