Like Naifeh and Smith’s book, “The Steins Collect” retells an old story, but the saga of these well-to-do Jewish siblings from Northern California who became the pivotal Parisian collectors of Matisse and Picasso enchants once again. You can regard it as an avant-garde catechism: Leo’s first adventures as a collector; Gertrude’s growing interest in the visual arts; the arrival in Paris of Michael and Sarah; Gertrude sitting for a portrait by Picasso in 1905–’06; Sarah’s great friendship with Matisse, which leads to the founding of Matisse’s short-lived school; Alice B. Toklas’s appearance; the break between Gertrude and Leo and Leo’s eventual rejection of much of modern art; Michael and Sarah commissioning Le Corbusier to build for them one of his great early houses. By comparison with the story of the van Gogh brothers— Theo died less than a year after Vincent, reduced to madness by the ravages of syphilis—the Steins were supremely fortunate. We may wonder if Leo, Michael, and Sarah ever again felt the exhilaration of that first decade in Paris, and in recent years dark questions have been raised as to exactly how Gertrude and Alice managed to survive World War II in France and return to their Parisian apartment and find the paintings intact. But say what you will, there is about Gertrude Stein, dying in Paris in 1946 with her magnificent Picassos all around her, something of the aura of beatification, the prophetess vindicated, the vindication light and comic, much like the treatment of the lives of the saints in Four Saints in Three Acts, the opera she created with Virgil Thomson (which was presented at BAM in Mark Morris’s buoyant production just as “The Steins Collect” opened at the Metropolitan).

No one can doubt that the particular character of the Steins’ collections was shaped to a significant degree by financial necessity. Leo had begun by collecting works by somewhat established artists, but on his limited budget his purchases were of necessity minor. In 1904 he and Gertrude joined their resources to buy a major painting by Cézanne, Madame Cézanne with a Fan, and soon enough they saw that by buying works by the nearly unknown and pretty much unsalable Picasso and Matisse, they were getting a lot more bang for their buck. Rebecca Rabinow of the Metropolitan—who organized the exhibition with Janet Bishop and Cécile Debray—reports in the catalogue that “Leo and Gertrude considered their paintings to be investments, which explains why, during these years, they always pooled their funds.” Someone close to the family is said to have commented of their Daumier that “someday [it would] be worth its weight in gold.” As for their purchases of Picasso and Matisse, the window of opportunity turned out to be narrow; within a few years the Steins had been priced out of the market. And in later years all of them sold many paintings in order to support themselves. In the meantime, they had the social benefit of having the paintings hanging on their walls. The growing fame of their collections turned what would have been just another group of well-off Americans with bohemian inclinations into magnetic figures, the people everybody wanted to know.

WHILE THERE ARE surely advantages to a time such as ours, when we view private life as relatively detached from the larger movements of culture and society, Gertrude Stein could probably not have imagined becoming fully herself without in some way reshaping the world around her. “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories”—the exhibition organized by Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer that originated in San Francisco and was at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington last fall—is meant to demonstrate how this worked. I approached the show with a certain hesitation, having found the catalogue a little heavy on identity politics. But as presented at the National Portrait Gallery, this gathering of photographs, paintings, drawings, books, manuscripts, radio and film clips, and even some of Stein’s clothing does at least suggest how the avant-garde imagination could blur the lines between private experience and public avowal. The landmarks of the modern imagination that we associate with Gertrude Stein—beginning with Picasso’s 1905–’06 portrait of her and what many regard as Stein’s greatest work of fiction, The Making of Americans—are freestanding artistic creations that double as landmarks of a new consciousness. Stein may not be a writer to be considered in the company of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Colette, but she is one of the originals, her voice entirely her own. As for her apartment, her pictures, her brown velvet suits: these were the outward signs of an inward transformation, as essential for Gertrude Stein as the yellow house in Arles and the Provençal straw hat were for van Gogh.

Stein produced several studies of twentieth-century art that are as essential as they are idiosyncratic. Picasso, published in 1938, contains some of the most eloquent pages ever written about the modern refusal to assume that perceptual experience is necessarily the most telling or truthful experience. And Stein’s lecture on “Pictures,” presented during her travels across the United States in 1934–1935, is among the most striking texts ever dedicated to the formalist ideal. “Anything painted in oil anywhere on a flat surface holds my attention and I can always look at it,” she explains. “I like sign paintings and I do regret that they no longer paint the signs on the walls with oil paints.” She even likes things that are painted badly. “And now,” she wonders, “why does the representation of things that being painted do not look at all like the things look to me from which they are painted why does such a representation give me the pleasure and hold my attention.” Stein is developing an argument for the emotional appeal of pure painting. And although she argues with a force and originality that mocks the old accusation that Gertrude learned everything she knew from Leo, he is certainly thinking along parallel lines in his book Appreciation, published long after their falling out. Here he launches a critique of Herbert Read’s ideas about pure abstraction. Leo has no patience with efforts to find in Plato’s discussion of pure form in the Philebus an argument for the value of absolute beauty in the arts. Purity does not interest Leo. Commenting on Read’s interest in Plato’s argument that pure white is truer and more beautiful than gray, Leo observes that “anyone who wanted this pure white would ask a chemist to make it and not an artist.”