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Hi, I’m Rebecca Rabinow, a curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When Leo Stein decided to become an artist and move to Paris at the end
of 1902, Leo rented a studio, which was on 27,
rue de Fleurus, just a few blocks from the Luxembourg Gardens. Gertrude
and her companion, Alice Toklas, remained there until the mid-nineteen-thirties.
The organizers of “The Steins Collect” have been working on this exhibition for
about eight years and we've gone to archives around the United States and
in Europe.
I think we found over four hundred photographs, snapshots at this time
steric
to document art as it entered into their home. And they sent these photographs to
friends and family.
Here, in this space, which is exactly the dimensions of the rue de Fleurus
studio, we can see when a work enters the collection and then moves across the
room and is replaced by something else.
They sky their paintings from the floor to the ceiling. It was a very
modest room, it had a stove; it had no electricity. Instead of having any wood
paneling, they simply painted wainscoting a terracotta-y red color to
about four feet high,
and above that it was just a dirty white gray.
Over the years, there were water leaks; the walls became stained.
The Steins felt that the modest, almost shabby, surroundings only emphasized the
greatness of the works on the walls.
Gertrude used the studio as her writing space, and Leo use the studio as his
painting space,
and they were disturbed by the number of visitors who came during the day.
So they decided
to have a Saturday Salon. Anyone with a reference in hand was allowed to come in
and look at the art on the wall.
Four hundred and sixty square feet is probably the size of an average studio
apartment in New York City, and imaginary glowing with the reds and blues and
yellows.
How overwhelming it must have been.
When one thinks about the visitors who came and these conversations about the
art and about literature and about music in the space, it must have been incredible place.