The Steins Collect

Protesting the loitering law

San Francisco. Gorgeous day of punishing winds, trying to meet my sister coming in from Oakland, we lose our separate ways and reunite on the windy plain of the Civic Center. In the gusty city congregations of scruffy people decamp on the manicured greens, shouting protests at the new loitering law. We make our way down to the Mission district, passing a veritable Grand Ole Opry of characters: women in their slips, an enormously obese white man congratulating a tattered black couple, ravaged drug addicts emerging from SRO's. Mimi said she'd never seen anything so seedy but the Tenderloin is worse. Still everyone seems comfortable with their world, no violent outbreaks.

SF MOMA

We slide back into our habitual universe, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and its bright portals, elongated mural figures on two butterfly winds through the black marble stair winds, the dark body of the insect. Tasteful and gently avant garde. We stroll through the collection: Picasso, Braque, many lumpy Matisse bronzes, his nudes and his bulbous serf. There is his savage painting of the Blue Nude which provoked Picasso to create Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. Rothko and a room of delicate Klees. We had our de rigueur lunch in the cafe, my bowl of tiny squashes in a savory tomato stew. Then we saw the special exhibition, The Steins Collect, that narrates Leo and Gertrude and Michael's paths through Paris. Their comfortable apartments were on streets from my home town of Paris, on rue de Fleurus, rue Madame, rue de la Tour. They helped the whole world to see Picasso and Matisse through clear eyes. Gertrude, handsome but increasingly butch and formidable, and mustachioed Alice B. Toklas perch in their homey quarters. The famous Gertrude by Picasso that sheared away her handsome Jewishness (prematurely) leaving her like a Michelangelo sibyl. The Steins were Oaklanders transplanted in Paris and I palpably feel the direct pathway through space and time between my own haunts. The elaborate lyricism of Matisse, the increasing ugliness factor of Picasso. Michael's Corbusier house like a grotesque space-age vision. The most striking photographs are of their homes, looking so comfortable and worn, where we remember them all as free and brave.