Art: Museum without Windows

“I have always enjoyed going to museums,” said Gertrude Stein once, “because the view from museum windows is usually very pleasant.” But on her rare visits to the U.S., Gertrude Stein had never made Manhattan’s massive Metropolitan Museum one of her haunts: it had no windows in its picture galleries. Furthermore, with all its millions it had never purchased a painting by her favorite artist, Picasso. The chromium-plated, slick Museum of Modern Art, with windows as wide as walls, was more to her taste: it had done more than all other U.S. museums to publicize Picasso.

Gertrude Stein’s will, filed last week (it was written by a lawyer in standard legalese) left Picasso’s classic 1906 portrait of Writer Stein to the public. But it did not go to the many-windowed Museum of Modern Art. It went to the Met. Crowed the Metropolitan’s scholarly Vice Director Horace Jayne: “Possibly Miss Stein bequeathed it to us because we’re an older institution.”

Her clifflike face and shrewd, appraising eyes in the portrait were bound to surprise those who remembered Gertrude Stein as the garrulous maiden aunt of modern letters. Picasso had gone all out to record physical solidity and force. Explained Stein in her book, Picasso, published in 1938: “. . . For him the reality of life is in the head, the face and the body, and this for him is so important, so persistent, so complete that it is not at all necessary to think of any other thing and the soul is another thing.”