Matisse's American Patrons

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 (brother and sister-in-law of Gertrude and Leo), 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 (see color). 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 (about $100). 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.

Her friends, unable to make her stop this pathetic exchange of treasure for indulgence, settled for finding local buyers who would pay high prices. The chief crusader, Mrs. Walter Haas, wife of the chairman of Levi Strauss & Co., bought Woman with a Hat for $20,000. Sarah, with growing compulsion, let the paintings go. When she died in 1953, so disturbed that she could not even stand the sight of her few remaining paintings, almost the entire collection had been scattered through the U.S.

In the years since, Mrs. Haas and a friend have bought portraits that Matisse did of Sarah and Michael and donated them to the San Francisco museum. When she heard that the Matisse show was coming to town, she persuaded the museum to track down as many Stein paintings as it could for a special exhibition that might persuade the city to buy the collection back. It was a gallant, if unrealistic hope --and a tribute to Sarah, who had. as Matisse said shortly before she died, "so often sustained me."

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