Leo Daniel Stein was an American art collector and art critic. He became an influential promoter of 20th-century paintings.
Background
Leo was born on May 11, 1872 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, United States, son of Daniel Stein and Amelia Keyser Stein, both of German-Jewish extraction, who, at the time of their marriage in Baltimore in 1864, agreed to produce five children.
Along with his brother Solomon, Daniel Stein was then proprietor of a prosperous wholesale woolen business. The filial partnership became strained, however, and was dissolved shortly after Gertrude's birth. The rift sent Daniel to Vienna, where he moved his family in 1875. After three years in Vienna and another in Paris, the Steins returned to the United States, eventually settling in East Oakland, California.
Education
Leo's ambition was to become a historian, on the model of Gibbon, and he occupied himself memorizing enormous numbers of dates, dynasties, and royal lineages. Later, he studied history at the University of California and at Harvard, where he also became a pupil and devot of William James.
After two years at Harvard (1892 - 1894), however, Stein concluded that history dealt only with superficialities, and abandoned it as a professional objective. After a year at Harvard Law School and a trip around the world, he entered the Johns Hopkins University (1897) to study biology.
Soon disenchanted, his ambitions took another erratic swing, sending him to Europe to write a book on the Renaissance painter, Mantegna. It shortly became evident that his real interest in art was "esthetic and not historical, " and he next decided to live in Paris and become a painter.
Career
Stein purchased his first modern painting in London the previous year and was eager to expand his collection. Stein's introduction to Cezanne launched him as a serious collector. He bought one of Cezanne's landscapes, studied many others, and then discovered Matisse, whose Fauve-period La Femme au Chapeau scandalized Paris in 1905; Stein thought it "a nasty smear of paint" but "brilliant and powerful" and bought it immediately for his collection.
He bought his first Picasso in the same year, making the acquaintance of the artist as well, thereby becoming perhaps the first collector to appreciate both Matisse and Picasso. Stein also acquired canvases by Gauguin, Renoir, Manet, Daumier, Delacroix, Maurice Denis, and Toulouse-Lautrec, giving the Stein apartment the appearance and attraction of a radical museum.
People from everywhere came to visit, and Stein blossomed as a messianic guide to his collection, aggressively propagandizing both the new art and his opinions about it. Visitors were impressed, irritated, often both, but their numbers and credentials multiplied.
Amid the fame, however, the pair had begun to, in Leo's words, "disaggregate, " and by 1912, open warfare broke out. The causes were numerous: eclipsed for years by her brother, Gertrude began to assert herself as a personality and as an artist, and demanded recognition as such.
Her brother, on the other hand, could abide neither her "stuff, " as he called it, nor her thirst for la gloire. Picasso was another factor. With his discovery of cubism, he replaced Stein as his sister's mentor, and Stein was never able to forgive either offense.
Leaving the apartment in rue de Fleurus, Stein spent the war years in the United States, turning out a steady flow of articles for the New Republic.
In 1947 his book Appreciation: Painting, Poetry, and Prose was published in the United States. Its timing and critical success confirmed Leo's belief that he had finally been able to build something substantial upon his intelligence, but that it was late, "too damned late. "
He died of cancer and was buried in Settignano, Italy.
Achievements
Leo Daniel Stein became perhaps the first collector to appreciate both Matisse and Picasso, became legend on both sides of the Atlantic. He also contributed frequently to American publications, and was the author of books: The ABC's of Aesthetics, Appreciation: Painting, Poetry, and Prose.
Views
Cubism seemed to him the "intellectual product of the unintellectual, " and he found its underlying ideas "silly and boring. " Stein was never able, in fact, to digest the basic modernist principle through which both his sister and Picasso achieved distinction; the idea that rules were made to be broken was completely alien to his ordered, essentially classical, mentality. In Stein's estimation, Picasso was a great illustrator, "perhaps the greatest ever born, " who possessed a powerful imagination, but "intellect, never. "
Personality
Leo's personality, furthermore, had become more and more that of a neurotic, for although his intellect was remarkable, he was able neither to accept his limitations nor to capitalize upon his talents.
Quotes from others about the person
Bernard Berenson saw him as "the sort of man who was always inventing the umbrella, " while the critic Alfred Barr observed that "during the years 1905-1907, Stein was perhaps the world's most discriminating connoisseur of twentieth-century painting. "
Connections
In March 1921, he married Nina Auzias and settled in Settignano (near Florence), Italy, where he remained the rest of his life. Their two older children died.
