Questions and Answers

“When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars…”

Now you’re saying “He really has had too much of Alice’s special treat !” But no, really,  Summer 2011 in San Francisco is the Summer of Steins – I’ll bet my fringed suede vest and bell-bottomed jeans with the floral-fabric inserts at the bottom that it’s a fact!

The exhibition Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories will be at The Contemporary Jewish Museum from  May 12 – September 6, while The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde will be at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from May 21 – September 6.

First, here is what each of the museums has to say about their exhibitions and then I’ll add my groovy thoughts:

“The Contemporary Jewish Museum debuts the first major museum exhibition to fully investigate this fascinating visual legacy and life of Gertrude Stein. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories is an art-filled biographical exploration of Stein’s identities as a literary pioneer, transatlantic modernist, Jewish-American expatriate, American celebrity, art collector, and muse to artists of several generations. The exhibition also features Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s life-long partner, and explores the aesthetics of dress, home décor, entertainment, and food that the two women created together.

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories is built upon exciting new scholarship by lead guest curator Professor Wanda M. Corn of Stanford University and associate curator Professor Tirza True Latimer of the California College of Arts and is jointly organized with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Stein was a cultural networker, bringing creative people and friends such as Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway, but also key members of a cosmopolitan gay and lesbian elite, together at legendary salons held in her homes. Her originality as a thinker, along with her interdisciplinary approach to projects in dance, music and theater, continue to inspire artists today. As an inventor of modernist literature, she wrote novels, poems, journal essays, literary and art theory, opera libretti, plays, memoirs and word portraits.

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories features more than 100 artifacts and art works by artists from across Europe and the United States. It includes paintings, sculpture, photography, drawings, and artist’s gifts to Stein as well as items from her custom-designed wardrobe, manuscripts, books, periodicals, letters, journals, and personal belongings.

The galleries will also include media presentations to render a more complete picture of this complex icon of the twentieth-century. One loop will present a montage of photographs from throughout her life; another shows footage from her operas and ballet; and one examines Stein’s life during the war. An interactive, custom-made iPad app allows visitors the opportunity to explore images, press and other material from Stein’s lecture tour across America in 1934-35. On another iPad app, visitors can listen to Stein reading from her work while following along with the text.

This wealth of archival and artistic material illuminates Stein through five distinct stories that offer multiple ways of looking at or “seeing” Stein. Notably, these five stories do not repeat what is well known — Stein’s years as a salonière and collector of Picasso and Matisse in the years before World War I — but instead focus on Stein from 1915-46 when she became recognized as a major writer, collected the works of the neoromantics, and formed a new international circle of young friends that she called her ‘second family.’

The exhibition will be presented at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. after its premiere at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and will be on view there from October 14, 2011 through January 22, 2012.”

 

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“The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde reunites the unparalleled modern art collections of author Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael Stein, and Michael’s wife, Sarah Stein. Jointly organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, this major touring exhibition gathers approximately 200 iconic paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and illustrated books not only by Matisse and Picasso, who are each represented by dozens of works, but also by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Henri Manguin, Francis Picabia, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Félix Vallotton, among others. The Steins Collect will premiere at SFMOMA, before traveling to Paris and then New York.

Supplemented by a rich array of archival materials—including photographs, family albums, film clips, correspondence, and ephemera—the exhibition provides a new perspective on the artistic foresight of this innovative family, tracing their enduring impact on art-making and collecting practices and their inestimable role in creating a new international standard of taste for modern art.

The exhibition is cocurated by Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA; Cécile Debray, curator of historical collections at the Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Rebecca Rabinow, associate curator and administrator, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with new research and original essays from a range of French and American experts in the field.

 

The Steins Collect draws from prominent public and private collections worldwide and spans the family’s entire collecting history. Among some 40 works by Picasso and approximately 60 by Matisse are such masterpieces as Matisse’s Blue Nude (Baltimore Museum of Art), Woman with a Hat (SFMOMA), Self-Portrait (Statens Museum, Copenhagen), and Tea (LACMA); and Picasso’s Lady with a Fan(National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), Boy Leading a Horse (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Nude with Joined Hands (Museum of Modern Art, New York), and portrait of Gertrude Stein (Metropolitan Museum of Art), among many others.

Following its SFMOMA debut, The Steins Collect will travel to the Grand Palais, Paris (October 3, 2011, through January 16, 2012) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (February 21 through June 3, 2012).”

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I first heard about the possibility of these exhibitions about ten years ago, so it is very exciting to finally see them happen.

What is also exciting is the programming planned in conjunction with them. From lectures to films, from an opera production to one-person theatrical performances, from children’s classes to university credit courses there is more there here than GertrudeandAlice could ever have imagined !

To see what is happening in conjunction with Seeing Gertrude Stein, go to:

http://www.thecjm.org/index.php?option=com_ccevents&scope=exbt&task=detail&oid=9

And for events relating to The Steins Collect see:

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/410

and

www.sfmoma.org/pages/exhibitions/details/stein_neighborhood

Some items from my collection will be included in both exhibitions and in the Fall, in conjunction with the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, I am also co-curating another exhibition with Dyana Curreri-Ermatiger at  Stanford University’s Bing Stanford Art Gallery in Washington, D.C.  That exhibition will feature works by artists who have incorporated Stein’s texts into their pieces, as well as highlight the design elements of some of her first editions. The working title for our exhibition is I: Influence, Inspiration, Insight, Innovation –Contemporary Artists Look at Gertrude Stein’s Early Published Works. More on this later.

So, as Gertrude Stein may have lamented on that fateful day in 1926 when Alice picked up the shears, what better way to enter the Summer of Steins with peace and love and flowers and

“Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen

Give me down to there, hair, shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there, momma, everywhere, daddy, daddy

Hair, flow it, show it
Long as God can grow, my hair”

PS

We have a number of rose bushes in our yard.  Only one of them is doing extremely well this year, better than ever. It is a bush I’ve named my Gertrude Stein rose since it is yellow, her favorite color of roses.  The Gertrude Stein rose bush must have known this was going to be a special season – the SoS!

 

 

 

 

 

Tagged Alice B. Toklas, Cécile Debray, Dyana Curreri-Ermatiger, Gary Tinterow, Gertrude Stein, Janet Bishop, Rebecca Rabinow, Seeing Gertrude Stein:Five Stories, The Steins Collect, Tirza True Latimer, Wanda M. Corn