Missionaries by Michael Kimmelman | The New York Review of Books 5/21/12 8:48 PM Missionaries APRIL 26, 2012 Michael Kimmelman The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 21–September 6, 2011; The Grand Palais, Paris, October 3, 2011–January 16, 2012; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 28–June 3, 2012 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/ Yale University Press, 452 pp., $75.00; $50.00 (paper) Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fäy, and the Vichy Dilemma by Barbara Will Columbia University Press, 274 pp., $35.00 Ida: A Novel by Gertrude Stein, edited by Logan Esdale Yale University Press, 348 pp., $18.00 (paper) Gertrude Stein endures. More than a hundred books about her have been written during the past decade or so and lately she made an appearance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. She remains a figure of fascination for scholars of queer studies, a saint in the broader gay community, exalted as a pioneer of poetics and sexual liberation, and as the librettist of wry, cryptic texts set to Virgil Thomson’s crazy-quilt music in Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, both recently revived to warm reviews. That said, even today few people manage to get through her books and poems, The Autobiography of Alice B. Estate of Daniel M. Stein http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/apr/26/missionaries/?pagination=false Page 1 of 8 Missionaries by Michael Kimmelman | The New York Review of Books 5/21/12 8:48 PM Henri Matisse (center) and Hans Purrmann (right) Toklas aside. Unread as always, Stein’s novels and poems dining with Michael, Sarah, and Allan Stein at nonetheless appear regularly in fresh critical editions. The their apartment at 58 rue Madame, Paris, circa 1908. The paintings in the background, all by latest printing of Ida from Yale University Press includes Matisse, are The Young Sailor I (far left); Pink Onions and Male Nude (left column); Fruit Trees Stein’s “How Writing Is Written,” from her mid-1930s in Blossom, Woman in a Kimono, Nude Reclining Woman, and Nude before a Screen (center barnstorming tour of America, when she reached her column); Madame Matisse in the Olive Grove, a triumphant peak of celebrity and made the cover of Time, sketch for Le Bonheur de Vivre, and Madame Matisse (The Green Line) (right column). and also Thornton Wilder’s “Gertrude Stein Makes Sense,” his posthumous tribute to his friend, from 1947, still perhaps the most lucid, down-to-earth aid for the head-scratching undergraduate. And now comes “The Steins Collect” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, after ballyhooed stops in San Francisco, where Gertrude’s family first earned its modest fortune, and Paris, where the Steins made their marks as patrons and salonists. A glamorous, occasionally revelatory affair, sprawled across close to a dozen big rooms in the museum, the exhibition, as Rebecca Rabinow, the Met’s curator, has arranged it, lavishes attention on Gertrude’s remarkable brothers, Leo and Michael, and her equally remarkable sister-in-law, Sarah. Michael and Sarah, husband and wife, who created a salon of their own on the rue de Fleurus, became Matisse’s greatest devotees, collecting and inspiring groundbreaking work and sponsoring his short-lived art academy. Classroom nudes by occasionally gifted, now widely forgotten protégés like Hans Purrmann, along with a self-portrait imitating Matisse, by Leo, occupy one gallery of the show. The hamfistedness of Leo’s picture speaks volumes. He’s the tragic hero of the Met show, the brains behind the family’s original impulse to collect new art, a classic case of the self-taught aesthete, and one of those touching, impossible, insecure, blustery, half-cooked geniuses, vainly grappling with the mysteries and injustices of life, whose intelligence exceeded his talents and who labored for decades over a unified aesthetic theory that would bind the old and new art he loved so deeply. “Now we shall all go to Leo Stein,” Edward Steichen instructed Alfred Stieglitz in 1909. “His place is the real center.” And so Stieglitz went, to hear Leo hold forth on art. “He described Whistler as decidedly second-rate and Matisse, whom he had championed a few years before, also as second class—a better sculptor than painter,” recalled Stieglitz, who, impressed despite the misjudgment, then asked Leo to write for Camera Work. “But Mr. Stieglitz,” Leo replied, “you see I am trying to evolve http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/apr/26/missionaries/?pagination=false Page 2 of 8 Missionaries by Michael Kimmelman | The New York Review of Books 5/21/12 8:48 PM a philosophy of art, and I have not entirely succeeded in closing the circle.” He finally published Appreciation: Painting, Poetry, and Prose, a rambling, episodically enlightened meditation, not quite the magnum opus he had imagined, in 1947, just before he died. “Aesthetics had to be brought into relation with all other things in a way that made me feel that living was not altogether silly,” Leo would reflect. He had made some questionable decisions along the way. At one point he sold some of his Matisses and bought more Renoirs, which ended up in the Barnes Collection. Hostage to his own mercurial tastes and inconstant faith, art remained for him the ultimate consolation, and nemesis. Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund/© 2012 Succession H. And of course to his everlasting horror it was Gertrude, whose Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Henri Matisse: Boy with Butterfly Net, writing he considered a sham, who meanwhile stole the 1907 limelight. “Le Stein,” as she was called—“The Presence,” as pilgrims to 27 rue de Fleurus also referred to her, not altogether admiringly—more than half a century after her death. But these days, fame carries its costs. Among the recent publications about Gertrude, Unlikely Collaboration by Barbara Will, an English professor at Dartmouth who has written extensively about Stein’s writings, is the latest to dissect her long-known but too often overlooked affiliation with Bernard Fäy, the Vichy collaborator and Nazi agent. Will’s work, a fine-grained, unflinching, and nuanced history, details a relationship of mutual admiration, bound from the start by a reverence for Stein’s linguistic adventures. Others have looked into this. Janet Malcolm had much to say about Stein’s relations with Fäy during the Vichy period in her New Yorker essays of June 2, 2003, and November 13, 2006, which became her excellent book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. The friendship contributed to Stein’s Vichyite leanings and was helped, considering Fäy’s anti-Semitism, by what Will calls the “fluidity” of Stein’s Jewish affiliations. Assimilation buttressed her modernist bona fides, or so Stein believed. She came to see Christianity as the salvation of France. Jewishness became for her “a form of transgressive identification,” as Will puts it, a view acknowledged in private “in intimate moments with Toklas.” She sounds from this account like a classic self-hating Jew, whose ticket to acceptance was a perch in high culture. In another of Leo’s changing perceptions of modern http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/apr/26/missionaries/?pagination=false Page 3 of 8 Missionaries by Michael Kimmelman | The New York Review of Books 5/21/12 8:48 PM In another of Leo’s changing perceptions of modern trends, he turned against Picasso after the artist began the experiments that led to Cubism. Gertrude defended Picasso, continued to see him, collected his works, and sat for her famous portrait by him, which required some one hundred sessions. She recognized him as a star. But the Met exhibition also makes abundantly clear that it was Leo, not Gertrude, who had the eye. The show ends with a big room of works Gertrude acquired on her own, after Leo abandoned her to her ego and to Alice. Notwithstanding that Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, and other artists they had championed became too expensive for her to buy, it’s revealing that Gertrude couldn’t do much The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Gertrude Stein, better than Francis Rose and Francisco Riba-Rovira, both 1946 (47.106)/© 2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York of whom painted her portrait. Pablo Picasso: Gertrude Stein, 1905-1906 “Hitler should have received the Nobel Peace Prize,” she meanwhile told The New York Times Magazine in 1934, and, alas, she apparently meant it. “He is removing all elements of contest and of struggle from Germany,” she explained. “By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.” It occurred to me, in those early rooms at the Met, looking at the genuinely radical pictures that Leo and Gertrude bought around 1906, when their home was just becoming a crucible for progressive art, that this was the same moment, as Will notes in her book, when Gertrude developed what Alice Toklas later recalled as a “mad enthusiasm” for the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger. Weininger, a Jewish convert to Protestantism who committed suicide (“the only decent Jew,” said Hitler’s mentor, Dietrich Eckart), wrote Sex and Character, a racist taxonomy of humanity. It had an influence over Stein’s groundbreaking novel, The Making of Americans. For Weininger, humanity broke down into categories like the Woman/Jew and Man/Genius.