<p>Cate Gable</p>

    On our landing approach over San Francisco Bay, I peered out the window and thought, What a magnificent natural wonder this must have been past tense being the operative part of this thought.

    The San Francisco Bay was crucified for commerce.

 

The Ohlone Way

    The surfeit of wildlife long ago sacrificed for industry is described in The Ohlone Way by Malcolm Margolin: Tall shoulder-high stands of native bush-grass covered the vast meadowlands and the tree-dotted savannahs. Marshes that spread out for thousands of acres fringed the shores of the Bay. Thick oak-bay forests and redwood forests covered much of the hills.

    The low salty margins of the Bay held vast pickleweed and cordgrass swamps [and] provided what many biologists now consider to be the richest wildlife habitat in all of North America.

    Flocks of geese, ducks, and seabirds were so enormous that when alarmed by a rifle shot they were said to rise, in a dense cloud with the noise like that of a hurricane. Of course, the water environment held equal bounty: mussels, clams, oysters, abalone were not even talking fish yet all this without even stepping off the shore.

    Now the shoreline sports airports, ship and freighter handling docks, warehouses, marinas, condo complexes and developments, bridge abutments and even a golf course, most all created from fill. Where there is undeveloped shoreline, it has been shaped into salt ponds eerily reflecting the sun in neon shades of orange and green.

    We handy humans, so good at transmuting our environment, have simply exchanged natures bounty for intellectual density. Even now, there is nothing like the Bay area.

 

Stein Family

    I made this trip to take in the last days of The Steins Collect exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) just across the street. Ive been researching a Stein-Toklas project for a decade and couldnt pass up this once-in-a-lifetime chance to see Stein archival material all in one place.

    The MOMA show, organized by curator Janet Bishop, pulls together works once owned by the Steins: 60 by Matisse, 40 by Picasso and another 100 by artists including Gaugin, Bonnard, Cézanne, Gris, Picabia and Renoir.

    Its an international story as Daniel and Amelia Stein, parents of Gertrude, Leo, Michael, Simon and Bertha, were Oakland residents when there were still oak trees in the East Bay. Daniel took the ferry across the bay to work, and Milly tended the kids.

    Leo and Gertrude loved drawing class; Bertha took piano lessons; Simon studied violin; and Michael, the eldest, took over his fathers business after both parents died around the turn of the century. He consolidated their San Francisco cable car holdings into an enterprise that provided trust monies for all of the children.

    Leo moved to Paris and began collecting art, initially Japanese prints. Gertrude joined him in 1903 after bailing out of her pre-med final for William James at Radcliffe. (Her I dont feel much like taking an exam today earned her the highest grade in the class.)

    Leo and Gertrude began more serious collecting, purchasing the paintings of Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Cezanne, and Gaugin. Several years later, Alice Babette Toklas moved in with them to 27, rue de Fleurus (that is another story), and eventually Leo moved out. He discontinued his collecting of Picasso after the grand artist entered his cubism period. Gertrude kept on until, largely because of their efforts, his paintings were priced out of her range. Then she shifted to Picabia, Braque, Gris and others still unknown.

    Michael and Sarah Stein, during their years in Paris, became the primary patrons of Matisse after Leo and Gertrude opened their eyes with the purchase of Femme au Chapeau (Woman with a Hat) in 1905. When they returned to San Francisco just after the earthquake in 1906 to check on their holdings, they brought the first Matisses to America and started a flurry of outrage and attention.

    The Steins played a critical role in the development of 20th century art.

 

The Steins collect

    I spoke with Bishop, who said the idea of reuniting the Stein collection came about in 1991. We started by examining the photographs of the art on the walls in the various Stein residences just to figure out what paintings the Steins owned.

    Then I had a project assistant who spent two years blowing things up and scanning photos to try to match paintings to catalogues. Each project takes its own shape. We could have worked on this one much longer.

    One of the significant things was that the Steins introduced Matisse to Picasso, said Bishop, beginning one of the richest and most celebrated rivalries in modern art. When you see their paintings in one place, you understand more clearly the artistic conversations that took place on their canvasses.

    My biggest thrill was standing face to face with Picassos portrait of Stein, completed in 1906. Her face, which Picasso had left blank as he left on vacation because he said, I cannot see you anymore, he completed in a flurry upon his return. When Gertrude argued that it didnt look like her, he said, famously, It will.

 

No there there

    But most amazing of all was the start of my Stein odyssey at the Bancroft Library on the University of California Berkeley campus. I was allowed to hold in my hands and turn the pages of the tiny, credit card-sized daybooks of Gertrudes mother, Milly.

    Gertude, first called simply baby she was the youngest of the children grows up before my eyes. She gets new shoes, gets fitted for a proper dress, begins her drawing lessons, goes fishing with the boys, and is promoted in school to low fourth.

    At 10 she invites Sunday school friends (the children attended the First Congregational Jewish Synagogue, now Temple Sinai in Oakland), ten boys and girls to a party; followed by her mother finish[ing] two Aprons for Gertrude. All well.

    In 1935, when Gertrude returned to Oakland on her American tour with Alice, she tried to find her family home and made her infamous There is no there there comment; by which she meant not that there wasnt anything of value in Oakland but that everything had changed so much she couldnt recognize it.

    The outdoor life she had lived growing up around the bay in the late 1800s had disappeared, the oaks were gone, the fishing was over. Once the country mouse goes to the city, can she come home again?

    After growing up in the Yakima Valley, I settled 23 years in Berkeley. This morning I returned to my garden to pick beans and chard in the cool morning air looking out over our pristine bay so grateful to be home.