Gertrude Stein, Modern No More, at the Met’s Reopened Galleries

Picasso, “Gertrude Stein,” 1906, Bequest of Gertrude Stein
©1999 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Poor Gertrude Stein, above, must be rolling in her grave.
I’ll have much more to say soon about the Metropolitan Museum’s renovated and expanded galleries for 19th- and early 20th-century European paintings and sculpture, which reopened to the public today. It’s sure good to have all those hard-working, money-raising masterpieces back where they belong.
There have been some changes made, not all of them for the good. Today, I’ll start with the biggest shocker: Listed on the museum’s website as one of its modern art highlights, Picasso’s iconic Stein portrait is no longer in the the Met’s modern-art wing, but in the final gallery of the same section of the museum that shows Ingres, Corot and even (gulp) Boldini.
Rebecca Rabinow, the Met’s associate curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, justified moving early works of Matisse, Picasso and the Fauves away from their modern brethren (not to mention from later works by the same partly relocated artists) by observing that the previous “cutoffs,” separating the post-Impressionists from the moderns, “were artificial and done retroactively.”
But more likely, the main reason for reassigning landmark early modern works to the expanded 19th- to early 20th-century galleries, as the curator in charge of Rabinow’s department, Gary Tinterow suggested during yesterday’s press walk, was to give “more room in the modern wing to show more modern and contemporary art.”
This change means that Picasso’s oeuvre is now inconveniently split between the first-floor modern-art galleries and the second-floor European galleries, with some famous Blue Period paintings keeping Stein company, along with an even later portrait, the famous “Woman in White” of 1923. Matisse’s oeuvre suffers a similarly bifurcated fate.
Wasn’t it Gertrude who first informed us that “modern museum” is an oxymoron?