The Steins Collect

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant Garde is the title of an exhibit running through September 6 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Steins of the title refer to  Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife, Sarah. It's an apt title because the Steins certainly did collect—Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Gris, and more, but mostly Picasso and Matisse.

It was actually Gertrude Stein's brother Michael and his wife Sarah who championed and patronized Matisse. His Woman with a Hat, the icon for this exhibit, doesn't seem outrageous to today's museum-goer. The bold colors, the use of non natural, including green, for parts of the face of Madame Matisse (the model) recalls Toulouse-Lautrec and his paintings at the Moulin Rouge. So it may be somewhat of a surprise to us that Matisse's painting might cause an outrage. Luckily, Michael and Sarah weren't outraged. The exhibit includes several small, unfamiliar Matisse paintings and sketches that probably wouldn't be considered masterpieces in their own right, but because they are by Matisse, they are valued. It also includes masterpieces like Girl with Green Eyes, and intimate paintings like the two portraits of Michael and Sarah. These two were the only double portraits Matisse ever painted.

Gertrude's favorite was Picasso. She and her brother Leo even had a falling out over her continued support of the painter—and maybe because of some sibling rivalry as well. Picasso is well-represented in this exhibit, from his painting of Gertrude to his Jeune Garçon au Cheval to his African Mask-influenced Head of a Woman and paintings from his Blue Period to Cubism.

The paintings—and sculpture—would be worth seeing in their own right. In this setting they tell a story of the beginnings of what we now know as modern art. But, just as compelling is the story of the creative Gertrude and her fascinating siblings—and sibling-in-law. It's worth seeing, and if you can't make it to San Francisco or its next stops, Paris or New York, go online and check it out. The exhibit is appropriate for all ages (except for the youngest or easily bored) children. What child doesn't relate to Picasso?

There were three generations in our party when we visited the exhibit. The youngest, age 10, had a sketch book and colored pencils with her. About a quarter of the way through she sat in a corner and started drawing. I thought she'd be inspired by all the colors of Matisse. Instead she moved when the adults in the party did but continued to sketch in the manner of Picasso, garnering comments from the guards and patrons alike, all encouraging her to "keep sketching" or "you go girl."

The exhibit is larger than one might imagine and takes more time to see it all. It's worth remembering that most of these paintings were exhibited on the walls in a private home. Here they are spread out in a brightly lit museum, most of them at eye level. Over time in Paris, the paintings hung from floor to ceiling. Especially in the early days, the rooms were dimly lit. Alice B. Toklas describes the poet Apollinaire—because he was the tallest—climbing a ladder and holding a lantern up in front of a painting so the visitors could see. It must have been quite a place to be—Paris at the birth of modern art. And in some way, this exhibit tells us, we'll always have Paris.

The SF MOMA exhibit is in SF until September 6. Click on the link below to the SF MOMA main page where you can find more information on events and exhibits related to this show. Scroll the page to find links to  Four Saints in Three Acts an opera by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson. The opera will be presented at Yerba Buena Center from August 18 through August 21. Also check out the Contemporary Jewish Museum for Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories.


SF MOMA, JCM, & Yerba Buena are all in the same neighborhood. They can be reached by BART (get off at Montgomery). If you drive, there is parking in a garage near the museum. (Turn right in the alley at the corner just past the museum.) You can also park at the 5th and Mission/Yerba Buena garage. If you think you have parking karma and you find a street parking space, be careful and check all signs. Many of the streets have TowAway zones during peak hours.

The Steins Collect

Seeing Gertrude Stein at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

Fort Collins, Gardnerville, & Genoa

Finally, after almost three months of not being able to get there, I made it to SF MOMA's Gertrude Stein exhibit. Not that the eleven weeks have been devoid of art, food, wandering, et al. I managed to make it to Fort Collins Lincoln Center opening at the formerly Mini, now Magnolia theater. PB&Jam children's theater inaugurated the new space with its production of Jungle Book. And, in a class act gesture, Lincoln Center management asked all the child actors to autograph a first-production-in-the-new-space certificate that would be kept for posterity. Way to support those budding thespians.

Right across the street is Lucile's Creole Cafe. This popular place serves up a dash of New Orleans, even Beignets. Along with the Beignets, we had Eggs Ponchartrain—trout & sauce bearnaise—and Cajun Breakfast—red beans, poached eggs, and hollandaise. Delicious.

Also managed to get to Gardnerville, NV for the annual July 4th Pops Concert in Heritage Park, and then over to Genoa for a late afternoon outdoor concert. The Genoa concert is a big event in the Douglas County-Carson Valley area and attracts musicians from all over—including some from the morning concert in Gardnerville. It attracts hundreds of listeners, too, who come for the music, a silent auction, picnicking in the country, and for the thunderous roar of shots fired from a Civil War cannon to end the 1812 Overture.

Now a historical site, Genoa started out as a trading post on the Overland Emigrant Trail, then became a Mormon settlement. One of the settlers in what was then Utah Territory was assigned to help define the border between California and Nevada—what is now South Lake Tahoe is just over the mountain. He also changed the name from Mormon Station to Genoa. Legend has it, that he named it for Genoa, Italy, the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. But, as more than one person reminded me, remember to pronounce Genoa as juh NO ah, not like the pronunciation for the Italian city.

Well, there it is, a take on the Stein exhibit will have to wait—tomorrow, maybe.

Unappetizing Food Plate

With a slew of graphic artists who no doubt could use the work, it seems the USDA could have come up with a more appetizing Food Plate.

Oh, in case you haven't heard, that's the icon that is now replacing the Food Pyramid. The Pyramid itself had undergone several changes in the past few years. It's difficult to keep up with all the new food fads and recommendations. I feel a bit sorry for those who had to come up with a new, comprehensive design. Even more sorry for those who had to decide how to represent what foods should be in the graphic and still satisfy all the stakeholders.

Still, what does the Food Plate say and how does it say it? On the positive: First, it is balanced. Second, a preschooler would be attracted to the bright colors. But, come on folks, where's the real information?

Isn't this icon a bit dumbed down? Is it because we are trying not to offend any particular food eaters, farmers, or manufacturers? Or do we just not know what to recommend?

Take a look at it. Here's the link to the USDA Choose My Plate Web site. USDA's MyPlate - Home page

More about the Plate, and food recommendations, later. Off now, to review a recent food movie release. Will pick up the Stein/Toklas thread next week, and finally get to the Magna Carta tomorrow. Been preoccupied tidying post burglary, so the Blog has been languishing on the back seat. On the road now—I hope.

Alice B.'s Cook Book

Hearing about the upcoming Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde exhibition at San Francisco MOMA, the scheduled August performances of Stein's and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints inThree Acts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the just opened: Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, at the Jewish Contemporary Museum, inspired me to unearth my copy of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. 

Gertrude Stein’s lifelong companion outlived Stein by just over 20 years. Stein died in Paris in 1946. That’s when, legend has it, she uttered her famous last words. She asked, as she was wheeled into surgery, “What is the answer?” Hearing no response, she continued, “In that case, what is the question?” 

A friend and I have a disagreement, but I say, for last words, that beats Oscar Wilde’s “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do,” or any of the other variations of that quote. But I digress.

Toklas is not known for famous last words but she had plenty to say in her 1954 Cook Book.  

One story goes that her publisher approached Toklas and asked her to write a cookbook. They were, according to some accounts, interested in hearing stories of Toklas and Stein and the life they led as much as—maybe even more than—the food. So, if Toklas wouldn’t mind, would she please drop a name or two about all the famous guests and interesting events.

And Toklas delivered.

As much a memoir as a gathering of recipes, her book was an immediate hit. Tradition has it that Toklas was almost at deadline and did not have enough recipes, So she asked friends. One friend, artist Brion Gysin—perhaps intending it as a joke— gave her a recipe of what he called haschich fudge. 

I searched my book, Index and page by page, figuring that it might be interesting to whip up a batch to taste test before heading over to the exhibitions. But—and you can see this coming—there was no there there.

That’s when I found that my copy of the Cook Book, is an American first edition. The London publishers left the fudge in, but before the American edition was published, the New York editors noticed the ingredient “canibus” [sic] and pulled the recipe.

It’s still possible to find the fudge, or what it is more popularly called “Alice B. Toklas Brownies,” on the Web. I’m not providing any links. You can Google it—for research purposes of course. 

Toklas’s recipes are written in a narrative style, not in the style of recipes we are familiar with today; they are a bit hard to follow. But the ingredients are certainly interesting.

Being a big fan of George Sand, I turned to what Toklas called Aurore’s Omelette. (Aurore was Sand’s name: Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, later la Baroness Dudevant.)

Surely I could whip up an omelette. But not so fast. Aurore’s recipe called for eight eggs, sugar, and heavy cream, folded over a cup of candied fruit and marron glacé and candied cherries and covered with a sauce of cream, made with two more eggs and three more yolks and salt and two cups of milk and two tablespoons of butter and three powdered macaroons and that sprinkled with a half a cup of diced angelica and six more powdered macaroons and three more tablespoons of melted butter, all placed in a "preheated 550° oven only long enough to brown lightly.”

I'll stick to “The real right way for french fried potatoes” and the relatively simple Boeuf Bourguignon (I). But first I’ll fill up with the stories in the Cook Book and the pictures at the exhibition.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Home | Contemporary Jewish Museum

http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2010/08/brion_gysin_bigger_than_life.html

There there.

Next week, San Francisco MOMA opens an exhibition of modern art once in the collection of Gertrude Stein and her brothers. 

For those who don’t know about Gertrude Stein’s collecting of modern paintings: Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec ..., and the salon she held at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, befriending and hosting the cultural, literary, and artistic avant-garde, and American expatriates—she is credited for coining the term the “Lost Generation”— Stein is probably most well-remembered by her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, through Toklas’s Cookbook with her famous—or infamous—fudge recipe, and through Stein’s own aphorisms including her best known “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Stein is well known in Oakland for another aphorism, one that has been interpreted as a put-down of her childhood city—and of American cities in general. After years of living in Paris, Stein and her life companion, Toklas, were in the U.S. on a speaking tour. When she visited Oakland, her childhood house was no longer there, her neighborhood was not there, everything had changed. No wonder she wrote—in her own inimitable style— "... there is no there there."

Many of us can relate, as we move around in our lives and find Stein was right. No there there.

For a long time, before we all got smarter, before we could check things on the internet, those not in the know, especially those—and I was once one of them—who live across the Bay to the West, said that it means there’s nothing in Oakland.

The statement used to play havoc with Oakland’s sense of inferiority. But now we just play with Stein’s statement. We like to think we know what she meant.

A handful of years ago, Berkeley, the college town to the north of Oakland, decided to commission some works of public art at various sites where the border of Berkeley meets the borders of the cities surrounding it: El Cerrito, Albany, Emeryville. At the junction of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and Adeline Street, just about one-tenth of a mile from the Oakland border, a sculpture in letters eight feet high spells out two words: HERE and THERE.

The artists, Steve Gillman and Katherine Keefer, meant it playfully. They said it refers to the literary heritage of the area. To the best of my memory, no one in Oakland objected. Yet, just before the sculpture was about to be installed, a controversy arose in Berkeley. Some of the city council members and at least one member of  the arts commission feared the sculpture was meant to signify the superiority of Berkeley over its neighbor. One council person even proposed adding more words and changing the message to: Here, There, and Everywhere. Nice. But not Stein, and without local historic and geographic significance. 

        But that's public art for you, always controversial, even when it isn't. 

Magna Carta at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

On Saturday, at a wonderful Mother of the Year ceremony at the Oakland Rose Garden honoring the Editor Emeritus of the MacArthur Metro, a friend told me that the Magna Carta is in San Francisco at the Legion of Honor. Yes. That Magna Carta, the one we all remember from 1215 at Runnymede.

I intended to get right over to the Legion on Sunday and have some pictures along with a good story to relaunch this long-delayed Blog. But, arriving home Saturday afternoon, we found the doors open, the house burglarized, computers taken. All those good things that put a major crimp in one's plans.

So, I can't give you my take on the document or the exhibit. It is one of the Magna Carta copies that is considered to be an original. It's hand-lettered on parchment. Imagine doing that. Why, it's sometimes difficult enough for folks in our era to make a decent photocopy.

But those are some of the physical details. The real value of the document is what it stands for, and its inspiration for the U.S. founding documents, especially the Bill of Rights. Especially the right of due process. You know, the right we all enjoy not to be thrown in a dungeon without access to a lawyer, without being told the charges against us, without the right of habeas corpus, without a speedy trial. Whoops. Going too far. Forgot what century I was in for a moment.

And, o.k. I am being a bit sarcastic. But, I'm dead serious about wanting to see this document and to bask in its presence for a bit.

Meanwhile back to changing locks and passwords.


The Legion of Honor is open Tuesday through Sunday.

The Magna Carta | Legion of Honor

A Note on Egypt

To say we've been watching history unfold over the past several days is putting it mildly. Revolution in Egypt has been capturing the eyes of the world. It's been dramatic looking at the overhead camera's view of the city of Cairo and seeing all the people willing to put their lives on the line for liberty.

I was surprised to be struck to see the view of the Nile River flowing through this modern city. The Nile for me has always been a blue line running down Africa on a map. Oh, it's not that I didn't know it was there but seeing this ancient natural feature in the middle of such a modern scene made me realize how profound the happenings below.

Watching the thousands of people in the square and hearing them call for Mubarak to step down, call for democracy, call for freedom has been moving and inspirational. It's been scary, too. Oh, not personally scary for those of us watching from thousands of miles away, but we have been holding our breath and hoping that the demonstrators will be safe, that there won't be a bloodbath. And so far, so good. When the announcement came today that Mubarak stepped down, the cheer from the crowd was loud enough to be heard around the world.

All is not settled yet, of course and it remains to be seen how the military will respond, how quickly elections can be held, who will step into power. We are still watching and still not quite ready to breathe.