Paris.- The Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais is proud to present “Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso … The Stein Family” on view at the museum until January 16th 2012. This exhibition has been organized by the Rmn-Grand Palais, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. After Paris, the exhibition will travel to New York. The Steins, an American family, moved to Paris in the early 20th century: Gertrude, an avant-garde writer, set up house with her brother Leo, in the rue de Fleurus; her elder brother Michael took a flat with his wife Sarah in the rue Madame. They were the first people to buy Matisses and Picassos and they also received the entire avant-garde into their homes and thus built up one of the most astonishing collections of modern art. The exhibition looks at the history of this out-of-the-ordinary family. It shows how important its patronage was for the artists and how it helped establish a new standard of taste in modern art, through Leo’s view of the sources of modernity and his exchanges with the intellectuals of the time; Gertrude’s friendship with Picasso; Sarah’s relations with Matisse; and the projects that Gertrude developed with artists in the 20s and 30s.
It is a major exhibition bringing together an outstanding ensemble of works from the Steins’ various collections: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Henri Manguin, Pierre Bonnard, Vallotton, Marie Laurencin, Gris, Masson, Picabia…. The eight sections shed light on all the members of the family: Leo, Sarah and Michael, and Gertrude and their particular collecting preferences.
Sarah and Michael Stein became friends with Henri Matisse and were the first great defenders of his art. They put together an outstanding collection before the First World War. Sarah persuaded Matisse to open an Academy and joined many other foreign artists in his classes. She supported Matisse’s determination to explain his art through writing and teaching. In 1914, the Steins agreed to lend nineteen of their finest canvases to Berlin, for an exhibition in Fritz Gurlitt’s Gallery. The war blocked their works in Germany and they were never recovered. In 1928 they moved into a villa that Le Corbusier built for them at Garches and lived there until 1935 when the rising fascist threat prompted their return to the United States. Pablo Picasso offered to paint Gertrude Stein’s portrait in 1906 and they became close friends. That was when she began to write her monumental book, ‘The Making of Americans’, which was deeply influenced by Paul Cézanne’s painting (especially the “Portrait de Femme (Portrait of a Woman)” which she bought from Vollard) and her discussions with Picasso.
They were both keenly interested in realism and the object, and developed a relatively hermetic discourse – one was literary, based on repetition and the other was pictorial, based on the decomposition of volumes. Gertrude and Leo both supported Picasso during his experimental work on “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, buying an outstanding book of studies and the large painting, “Nu à la serviette (Nude with Towel)”, 1907. When brother and sister went their separate ways in 1913, Gertrude continued to buy Picasso’s Cubist paintings.
After the war, the artists that the Steins had supported became very famous and financially out of reach. Gertrude Stein, who was close to Kahnweiler, nevertheless continued to support the post Cubist production of artists like Juan Gris, George Braque, André Masson and others throughout the1920s. When Leo moved to Italy, and Michael and Sarah went back to San Francisco, Gertrude divided her time between Paris and her house at Bilignin (Ain). She defended a group of young painters, the neo-Humanists Francis Rose, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchew, as well as the later work of Francis Picabia, the “Transparents” and hyper realism. Before her death in 1946 she witnessed the emergence of informal abstraction with Atlan’s early works. Her engagement alongside her companion Alice Toklas with the American Red Cross during the war made Gertrude Stein a popular figure and her fame was amplified by the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933. The many portraits made of her (by Felix Vallotton, Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Jo Davidson, J acques Lipchitz, Dora Maar, Louis Marcoussis, Picabia, Rose, Tchelitchew, Elie Nadelman and many others) helped construct a myth that survives to the present day.
Constructed in just three years, the Grand Palais is a true architectural achievement. For over a century it has been inseparably associated with key artistic movements, major technological breakthroughs in aviation, the automotive industry, and radio broadcasting, and has hosted a wide range of events from show jumping to high fashion, as well as the most avant-garde and offbeat themes. The Galeries nationales du Grand Palais exhibit artists’ monographs, show great artistic movements and original projects, stage fine arts retrospectives encompassing the 20th century and the world’s creative arts and civilisations: these major cultural events offer the public a broad and generous view of art history. For 40 years, the Galeries nationales have been a historic venue for major exhibitions, of which nearly 250 have been staged in collaboration with the most important French and foreign museums, on some 5,300 m2 of exhibition space! Recent successes have included the Claude Monet and J M W Turner and his painters exhibitions drawing 913,064 and 455,322 visitors respectively. The RMN-GP oversees the programming and production of all the events staged in the Galeries nationales, publishes all the supporting catalogues and works of reference, provides visitor hospitality, and is responsible for the commercial operation of the facility. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.grandpalais.fr