When I first visited “The Steins Collect” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in late April, I had wondered about the omission of Gertrude Stein’s collaboration with France’s pro-Nazi Vichy government. The exhibition, which travelled from San Francisco to Paris to New York, where it closed last Sunday, June 3rd, was just as much an account of the lives of Gertrude and Leo Stein, their art-collecting family and expat milieu, as it was a survey of their collected art work. Consequently, it seemed odd to leave out mention of Gertrude Stein’s closeness with Bernard Faÿ, a prominent Vichy figure. (Stein came to admire the Vichy head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, so openly that she translated a set of his anti-Semitic speeches into English). As Janet Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker, it was Faÿ who protected not only Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, during the war but also the art work that Stein collected. In fact, arguably the greatest intrigue in the history of the paintings is that they were nearly confiscated from the home of this Jewish-American lesbian couple—but finally saved. The influential Faÿ intervened, granting happy reprieve to the Picassos and Matisses.
Facing criticism from Alan Dershowitz, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, and New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, among others, the Met had agreed to add a few sentences to the text on the wall that would address Stein’s collaborationist activities, and said it would direct patrons to Barbara Will’s “Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma.” I wrote a post for Culture Desk commending the museum’s decision to tell a fuller story about Stein’s troubling wartime activity.
And so, visiting the exhibition again on Friday, May 25th, three and a half weeks after the Met announced its decision to amend the wall text—and not long before the show’s close—I was surprised to perceive no change in the section addressing Stein’s life during the war. I twice walked through the rooms of the show, reading each mounted plaque with care. But the text appeared unchanged, still lacking mention of Stein’s Pétainist activity, or even Pétainist allegiances:
I asked a woman at the information desk if she knew anything about an adjustment to the text, and she offered a story before I even finished my question. They’d looked into the question of Stein’s controversial activity, she told me, and they’d found no basis for the charge of anti-Semitism (though this was not exactly the question under consideration). She mentioned an interview the New York Times conducted with Stein in 1934 that is cited by Stein antagonists and apologists alike to defend their respective stances on her wartime years. Paraphrasing, the woman told me that Stein had said that the Nazis could get the Democrats and the left and the Jews out of Germany, and then Hitler should be given the Nobel Peace Prize for it.
“That,” she told me, “that’s an ironic statement. Stein was a narcissistic woman. She wasn’t a very nice woman, but no, not anti-Semitic. So we didn’t change anything.”
“You didn’t change any of the Stein exhibit text?”
“No,” she repeated, “We didn’t change anything.”
While doing research for my earlier post, I had come across Stein’s quote from the article the woman had mentioned—an impressive dispatch by the journalist Lansing Warren from Stein’s studio in Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement, published on May 6, 1934:
Yes, clearly there is irony here, a characteristic Stein provocation (although Stein seemed less ironic when she praised Pétain’s emphasis on “peace” in “daily living;” she exclaimed that he had “achieved a miracle” in signing an armistice with Hitler, and enabled the French “to make France again.” She admired Franco, hated F.D.R., and in 1937 told a journalist that Hitler “is not the dangerous one. You see, he is the German romanticist.”). But this is not the whole story on Stein’s pro-Nazi expression, as the exhibition’s curators must know.
I called the Met the following day to speak with Harold Holzer, the museum spokesman. Clearly frustrated with the controversy surrounding the exhibition, he insisted that they did change the text, and stressed to me how unusual it was for the museum to alter a label unless it was factually incorrect. I told him how similar the revised texts seemed to me, and Holzer sent me the before and after versions. The original reads as follows:
As the exhibition drew to a close, then, the museum no longer told us that Gertrude’s apartment is “sunny.” Instead of “One year later [in 1939], France and Britain declared war on Germany,” we have “In the summer of 1940, Germany invaded France and seized control of Paris.” We have added specificity about their life in the countryside: a “rented house at Bilignin.” Faÿ is now a “Nazi collaborator” instead of an “influential Vichy collaborator” (strictly, less accurate), and it is certain that he protected them (no more he “is thought to have” done so). Then, instead of “Remarkably the two women survived the war with their possessions intact,” there is “Gertrude did not purchase any art during the war.” And finally—and most tellingly—the ending has changed. No longer do we read, “When Gertrude died in 1946, it was revealed that she had bequeathed her portrait by Picasso to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, forever linking their legacies.” Instead: “The German military was on the verge of confiscating her collection when Allied troops arrived in Paris in August 1944. Literature about Gertrude’s life in Occupied France is available in the Museum shop.” The fact that Gertrude did not purchase art has been removed, as has the linkage between Stein and the Met, and replaced with a liberation-day anecdote and a direction to further reading.
Yes, the text had literally been changed: new text had been printed and a new plaque mounted. But the substance of the change is another matter. The Anti-Defamation League had “welcomed the decision by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to amend its exhibit on Gertrude Stein’s art collection to include mention of Stein’s Nazi sympathies.” No such emendation was made.
I asked Janet Malcolm what she thought about the ordeal. She, too, expressed puzzlement over the Met’s insistence on skirting the issue. “The museum’s revised text is very inadequate,” she told me.
Barbara Will, whose book the Met directs patrons to only by selling it in the gift shop, was startled that the changes were “so minimal.”
“There is a huge will to believe in Stein’s heroism and progressivism,” she elaborated in an e-mail. “Of course the complexity of Stein’s situation in Vichy needs to be acknowledged, but what remains baffling is why so many people refuse to call her out on her collaborative activities, as well as her real commitment to the Vichy regime.”
Like every great cultural institution, the Met has an obligation to tell the truth, as best as it can. Here it was just a matter of keeping its word. Why did it refuse to inform the public about Gertrude Stein’s wartime record, even after it agreed that it ought to address her collaboration with France’s pro-Nazi government? Is there an art lender, dealer, or collector threatened, a dissenting descendant, or an institutional reputation on the line? Did the Met want to downplay the fact that someone to whom it had devoted such a major exhibition had such ugly collaborationist sympathies? What, or whom, are they trying to protect?
Carl Mydans/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
