Last weekend, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s magnificent exhibition “The Steins Collect,” which puts on brilliant display the Impressionist and Modernist masterpieces of Gertrude Stein and her brothers Michael and Leo, I heard a visitor ask a question that has recently been on many minds around town.
“So was Gertrude Stein a Nazi?” the woman politely wondered.
That question came to particular prominence with the publication of Dartmouth professor and Stein scholar Barbara Will’s “Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fa , and the Vichy Dilemma,” about the American Jewish intellectual who loved France and the wartime head of the Bibliotheque Nationale who did not much like Jews. The odd friendship between them, Will contends, helped saved Stein’s life, not to mention the works now being shown at the Met. (Above: “Gertrude Stein” by Pablo Picasso / Metropolitan Museum of Art)
There was also the recent Op-Ed in the Daily News by Richard Chesnoff, which called on the Museum to include wall text explaining Stein’s own fascist proclivities. After the outcry was picked up by several New York politicians, the Met promised to do so. (Initially, the text had stated only that “the two women survived the war with their possessions intact” and that Fa was “thought to have protected them.”)
After the question was posed, the tour guide thoughtfully paused. Yes, Stein had some less-than-wholesome affiliations, he finally said, but the exhibition itself was apolitical, and since all of the art present had been collected before the start of World War II, the question was not entirely germane.
The tour moved on. But the question, in fact, remains, since to many people the primary reason the art survived in Occupied France was because Stein had been a willing propagandist for the Vichy regime, having even espoused an affinity (ironically, some say; seriously, others allege) for Hitler. She later wrote some propaganda for the pro-Nazi collaborationist Vichy government, which is believed to have helped her cause.
An editorial in today’s Daily News argues that the new wall text does not go far enough in explaining Stein’s affiliation (disclosure: I am on the paper’s editorial board). It points to a passage in Will’s book, which is available in the Met’s gift store, that says: “Fa was . . . a crucial mediator and protector when the Nazis showed up at Stein’s apartment in Paris to seize her art collection.”
Indeed, the new wall is more enlightening than its predecessor, but appears to still temper Fa ‘s role, making no mention of the letter he wrote to the Nazi Service for the Protection of Fine Arts or the assurances he received in return that, in his words, “no one [will] touch the collections of Gertrude.”
Will herself seemed a little confused by the Met’s response to the matter, telling the New Yorker last week that “the curators dropped the ball by not recognizing and anticipating this response.” Moreover, she told the magazine, “if one asks how and why this art survived…then the issue of Gertrude Steins’s Vichy commitments becomes very important indeed.”
And as Will and others have noted elsewhere, Stein was only one of several American Modernists to espouse hateful views. There were Ezra Pound’s fascist-friendly broadcasts from Mussolini’s Italy, as well as T.S. Eliot’s undiluted anti-Semitism. As with Stein, the issue remains of how to treat the artistic output of such compromised but brilliant intellects.
Will says, “I think we do need to ask ourselves whether our writers and artists should be judged by higher ethical and moral standards.”
This, too, is a fair question.
