The traveling exhibition of gouache cutouts done by Henri Matisse in his
last years has been admired lately in Manhattan and Chicago, but at San
Francisco's Museum of Art last week the show had a unique and poignant
meaning. One room contained a separate exhibit of more than 75 items,
ranging from oils to tiles, that were also mostly by Matisse. Though
now owned by many collectors, these treasures were once a part of one
of the earliest and most significant collections of 20th century art.
They belonged to San Francisco's Michael and Sarah Stein , the well-to-do and cultivated
Americans-in-Paris who, beginning in 1905, became the invaluable
patrons of the daring young Matisse.Michael was the breadwinner of the Stein family, a shy, bearded
Harvard-man who took over his father's business of operating San
Francisco's famed cable cars. He and his wife Sarah lived mostly in and
around Paris: they not only commissioned Le Corbusier to build them a
villa, but they also got interested in Matisse and Picasso at a time
when few Frenchmen would touch them.Gertrude Stein always maintained that she was the first to recognize
Matisse's great gift. Leo said that it was he. But according to Matisse
himself, “Mme. Michael Stein was the really intelligently sensitive
member of the family.”A Passion Begun. Sarah Stein's relationship with Matisse began when she,
Leo and Michael, accompanied by their son's piano teacher, dropped in
on the famous “wild beast” exhibition that had outraged the Paris
critics. As the piano teacher, now Mrs. Therese Jalenko of San
Francisco, remembers the day, the four visitors heard derisive laughter
the minute they entered the gallery, found a cluster of sneering
viewers around Matisse's Woman with a Hat . Sarah grew to
love the painting, happened to be in the gallery a few days later when
Matisse made his one and only visit. Sarah soon found herself in deep
conversation with the painter, who told her that the painting was
actually a portrait of his wife, and that she had worn a black dress
when posing. “Matisse created that symphony of color,” Sarah told
friends later.Largely because of Sarah's enthusiasm, Leo bought the painting for 500
francs . But Michael and Sarah were soon building up a
collection of their own, in 1917 bought Woman with a Hat after Leo
turned against Matisse. By the time Michael and Sarah moved back to
California in 1935, they had about 50 oils, 20 bronzes, and a stack of
drawings, most of them by Matisse.A Passion Rejected. Their rambling house in Palo Alto quickly began to
attract streams of visitors, many of them students and professors from
Stanford University. When Michael died of cancer in 1938, Sarah
promised that she would leave the bulk of her collection to Stanford.
But as time passed, friends began to notice some disturbing changes in
Sarah. The beautiful Matisses that had been her life's consuming
passion began to seem of no importance to her. It turned out that she
was selling off the collection piece by piece at ridiculously low sums
to pay for her grandson's ventures into raising horses.
