BlogBack: The Met’s Harold Holzer on Relocating Gertrude Stein

Harold Holzer, the Metropolitan Museum’s senior vice president for external affairs, responds to Gertrude Stein, Modern No More, at the Met’s Reopened Galleries:
Gertrude Stein herself left the portrait to the Met specifically so it would NOT be installed with more recent art. In fact, when Alice B. Toklas learned it had been lent to the Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition, she was quite angry and demanded it be returned to the Met. Gary Tinterow [the Met’s curator in charge of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art] pointed out that before it was hung here, it shared space in Stein’s studio with Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse. Back home where she belongs???