Scarsdale Adult School Explores Stein Family Legacy

The is offering a guided tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “The Steins Collect” Exhibition on Saturday, March 10, 2012, from 9:45 a.m. until noon at a cost of $75.

Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, art historian and teacher at SHS along with Pamela Kroll, English teacher at SHS, will lead the group through this extraordinary gallery of Parisian avant-garde artwork. The collection reunites approximately 200 works that the Stein family had amassed in the first decades of the twentieth century.

To enhance the experience, bookend the tour with Pamela Kroll’s two-session Thursday evening course entitled “Gertrude Stein’s Salon: Two Perspectives.” The class examines Stein’s legendary Parisian atelier through an examination of “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” and Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast.”

The class will also discuss the relationship between Gertrude Stein and some of the painters she hosted, including Picasso. The evening class meets from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at on two consecutive Thursdays, beginning March 8, 2012, at a cost of $60.

To register, visit www.ScarsdaleAdultSchool.org. Call (914) 723-2325 with any questions.

Here's what the Met has to say about "The Steins Collect":

Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife Sarah were important patrons of modern art in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century. This exhibition unites some two hundred works of art to demonstrate the significant impact the Steins' patronage had on the artists of their day and the way in which the family disseminated a new standard of taste for modern art. The Steins' Saturday evening salons introduced a generation of visitors to recent developments in art, particularly the work of their close friends Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, long before it was on view in museums.

Beginning with the art that Leo Stein collected when he arrived in Paris in 1903—including paintings and prints by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Manet, and Auguste Renoir—the exhibition traces the evolution of the Steins' taste and examines the close relationships formed between individual members of the family and their artist friends. While focusing on works by Matisse and Picasso, the exhibition also includes paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Manguin, André Masson, Elie Nadelman, Francis Picabia, and others.