Woman with a Hat (1905) by Henri Matisse © Art Library / Alamy
Their friends were the Steins – Gertrude, Leo, Michael and Sarah – and the painting they were earnestly contemplating was Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, a portrait of his wife, Amélie, who worked as a milliner to feed him and their children. Gertrude thought it ‘perfectly natural’, did not understand why it infuriated people and wanted to buy it. Leo said: ‘It was what I was unknowingly waiting for… a thing brilliant and powerful but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.’ And Sarah Stein wanted to buy it because it looked like her mother.
Matisse quickly acquired a reputation as King of the Fauves. The exhibition’s organizers asked him to withdraw the painting, but the artist Georges Desvallières, founder of the salon d’automne, was a friend and ally of Matisse. His support won through and the painting remained in the show.
Matisse wanted 500 francs for it. Gertrude and Leo offered 450. Madame Matisse told her husband to hold out for the extra 50 francs, which would mean winter clothes for their daughter. He did, and Gertrude and Leo telegrammed their acceptance. Matisse had no money and the patronage of the Steins came at a crucial time.
The walls of 27 rue de Fleurus began to crowd with his work. Within a short space, Gertrude and Leo bought Joy of Life, Blue Nude, a cast of his sculpture The Serf, Portrait of Margot, Landscape at Collioure. But Sarah Stein was his most loyal admirer. Her apartment became a shrine to Matisse. She bought a self-portrait, Blue Still Life, Pink Onions, The Young Sailor. ‘She knows more about my painting than I do,’ Matisse said of her. She went on buying his work long after Gertrude and Leo stopped.
saturday evening salons
Soon after buying Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, Gertrude and Leo bought their first Picasso: The Acrobat’s Family with a Monkey. They got it from Clovis Sagot, who had a gallery, which had previously been a pharmacy, at 46 rue Laffitte, close to Ambroise Vollard’s. Picasso was only twenty-four and Sagot was the first dealer to show his work. He described Sagot as very difficult and a shark because of the deals he struck and the way he sold paintings for so much more than he paid artists for them.
After quarrelling over it, Gertrude and Leo bought another Picasso, of a nude girl holding a basket of red flowers. Then, within months, they bought Two Women Sitting at a Bar, The Absinthe Drinker, Woman with a Fan, Woman with Bangs and Boy Leading a Horse. Their whole apartment became crowded to the ceilings with works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Renoir – modernist paintings that now define an era. They did not insure the collection and for the most part did not frame them. Gertrude thought frames constrained pictures.
Curtailment to their collecting came when there was nowhere left to hang any more pictures. Gertrude said their Saturday evening salons began because so many people wanted to see these paintings at all hours of the day. ‘Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance.’ She and Leo formalized the visiting to Saturday evenings. All kinds of people turned up: young painters, writers, collectors, dealers, tourists. They looked at the pictures while Leo held forth about them, and these visitors mingled with Monsieur and Madame Matisse, Picasso and his partner Fernande Olivier, Marie Laurencin and her lover, Guillaume Apollinaire.
Ambroise Vollard called the Steins ‘the most hospitable people in the world’.
People who came there out of snobbery soon felt a sort of discomfort at being allowed so much liberty in another man’s house. Only those who really cared for painting continued to visit.
Unwittingly, Gertrude and Leo created a private museum of modern art. There was no systematic intention to their collecting beyond love of each work. What they looked for in each picture they bought was integrity of expression and a new way of seeing and saying.
William James visited: ‘Another world of which I know nothing,’ he said. Gertrude’s American lesbian friends Ethel Mars and Maud Squire, both artists, were regulars at the salons. Their partnership was lifelong. They met at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, then went to Paris together in 1903. Both wore extravagant make-up and coloured their hair – Ethel’s was orange. Maud Squire showed her work at the autumn salon. Gertrude wrote a poem about and for them, ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’.
Gertrude and Leo attracted as much interest as the pictures on their walls. Gertrude, in brown corduroy, sat in the studio in a high-backed Renaissance chair next to the large iron stove. Leo, in Japanese silk, sat with his feet high up on a bookcase because of his troublesome digestion and ‘expounded and explained. People came and so I explained because it was my nature to explain,’ he said. He talked of Renoir’s feeling for colour ‘as the stuff of art’, Degas’ intellect and control, Cézanne’s treatment of mass. While he held forth, Gertrude studied people’s characters so as to fit them into a ‘characterological system’ for The Making of Americans.
I made enormous charts, and I tried to carry these charts out. You start in and you take everyone that you know, and then when you see anybody who has a certain expression or turn of the face that reminds you of some one, you find out where he agrees or disagrees with the character, until you build up the whole scheme.
Gertrude and Picasso
On their first visit to Picasso’s studio, Gertrude and Leo spent 800 francs buying his paintings and Leo commissioned several drawings of himself, but it was Gertrude who became Picasso’s intimate friend and championed him as a genius equal only to herself.
They became very close, and in the winter of 1906 he asked to paint her portrait. Thereafter, most afternoons
