With Matisse, Taking Notes

Imagine having Henri Matisse, a titan of modern art, as a teacher in Paris. Sarah Stein did.

Sarah, sister-in-law of celebrated Oakland native and poet Gertrude Stein, and Gertrude's brothers Leo and Michael, together in Paris collected the work of Pablo Picasso and Matisse - the 20th century's greatest painters - before and after the year in which Leo and Sarah studied there with Matisse. Fortunately, Sarah took notes.

[Photo from Estate of Daniel M. Stein. Matisse at center. As printed in SF Chronicle April 25, 2011]

Transcribed portions of Stein's 1908 studio notebook - recording Matisse's artistic advice firsthand - appeared in Alfred Barr's 1950 book "Matisse: His Art and His Public." But the original was presumed lost until San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Janet Bishop located it in the Portola Valley home of the late Daniel Stein, grandson of Sarah and her husband, Michael. Bishop and her colleagues had already invested months of research in the exhibition "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde," which opens at SFMOMA on May 21.

"We were very interested in locating the Stein heirs," said Bishop, "and we knew that Dan and (his wife) Betty had been consulted by the organizers of 'Four Americans in Paris,' " the thrilling 1970 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, on which "The Steins Collect" builds.

"Sarah and Michael Stein moved to Palo Alto in 1935, the same year that SFMOMA was founded ..." Bishop said, "And they brought with them. . .

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/24/DDT11J1Q5I.DTL#ixzz1KYSmVUlu