The Girl with Green Eyes

 

La fille aux yeux verts (The Girl with Green Eyes) Henri Matisse, French,  (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France, 1869 - 1954, Nice, France) 1908 oil on canvas

One painting that was not represented at the 1992 Henri Matisse retrospective exhibit was La fille aux yeux verts (The Girl with Green Eyes), which was bequeathed to the San Francisco Museum of Modern art in 1950 by Harriet Lane Levy. Levy, a UC Berkeley graduate, who traveled to Paris with her childhood friend and neighbor Alice B. Toklas. There they became part of a circle of friends that included Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Toklas’ future lover Gertrude Stein.

I just spent the morning trying to unearth the newspaper article that I read a long time ago about The Girl with the Green Eyes. Since I could not find any reference to it, I will have to do it from memory. Levy’s donation was of course an extremely generous donation, but it has an unusual string attached. The painting is not allowed to be exhibited outside of San Francisco. I don't believe Levy understood the ramifications of this restriction.

I don’t know how commonplace it was for museums to loan works of art to each other back in 1950, but today it is a museum’s life blood. A curator can round out an exhibit by borrowing a pieces of art from another museums and then in turn loan out artifacts from its own collection. There is even a Museum Loan Network that maintains a directory of 20,000 loanable artifacts owned by 400 institutions. I can only imagine how many works of art the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York loaned out, or promised to loan out, in order to gather together 400 pieces of Henri Matisse’s art. It was certainly a huge collaborative effort between many institutions and individuals.

One does not want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’m guessing that the curators at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have intermittently been frustrated that they can not leverage this important work by loaning it out. 

I don’t know if Levy put the same restriction on the other works of art in the bequest, like this Fauvism painting by André Derain:

 

Paysage du Midi (Landscape of the Midi) André Derain, French (Chatou, France, 1880 - 1954, Garches, France) 1906 Painting oil on canvas on board

I never go to the San Francisco MoMA without paying The Girl with the Green Eyes a visit. Both paintings are on display at the Museum of Modern Art on the second floor.

Matisse at MoMA

The Egyptian Curtain (oil on canvas, 1948), The Phillips Collection, Washington

Back in late 1992 I went on a business trip to Washington DC. I decided to pay for an extra hop to New York City because there was a major Matisse retrospective showing at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Since my sister- and brother-in-law live in Westport, Connecticut, I had no hotel costs.

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

I got up early on Saturday morning to catch the 7 a.m. train into New York. When I arrived at the museum, there was already a huge line wrapped around the block. I chose to stand in the “short” line where you pledge to become a member. I stood in line for over three hours, maybe it was four, in a huge snow storm only to learn that they were not going to let any more people in that day. I had worked my way up to about 20th in line.

I developed meaningful relationships with the people standing in queue with me. The two men standing ahead of me were travel agents from Berkeley, California. They bought two very expensive tickets from a scalper on Friday but they turned out to be fake tickets! The elegantly dressed lady on the other side of me was from Greenwich, Connecticut. There was a bedraggled, very sad-looking homeless man with dull eyes who shuffled up and down the line asking for spare change. A few people gave some token change, but then one of the Berkeley men had an inspired moment. He gave the homeless man a five-dollar bill and said: “You see that coffee cart down the block? Buy me a cup of coffee (this is before the Starbucks latte days) and I’ll give you another five when you return.”

Then of course I said: “Here’s another five, but make sure mine has cream and sugar.” The next thing you know, he had more orders than he could carry in one trip. Note: suddenly everyone had spare change :-(

When this man returned with our coffees he had a lilt in his voice and a sparkle in his eyes. “Now who had the cream and sugar?” People truly want to be productive.

My sister-in-law still talks about the fact that I decided to take the 6 a.m. train the following morning. “You’re not really going out in that weather again are you?”

“But it’s Matisse! And it’s the biggest show ever!” I never considered not going. The Berkeley travel agents told me they were going to go a third day. Getting up that extra hour earlier made all the difference in the world. It was super-duper cold during the first hour but I got in within an hour or so from the museum’s opening. The show was worth every minute of standing in line. As for the homeless man, he paraded up and down the line all morning taking coffee orders and I didn’t see those dull eyes again.

The exhibit was spectacular. There were 400 works of Henri Matisses's works, displayed on three floors of MOMA, beginning with his early works as an art student, through his “fauvism” period,

Open Window at Collioure , 55 x 46 cm. , Private Collection, 1905

continuing on to the cross-pollination of ideas with Pablo Picasso, his time in the South of France, and finally to his larger-than-life Jazz collages nearing the end of his life.

La Gerbe, 294 x 350 cm., 1953

I didn't know much about Matisse when I walked into the exhibit, but I felt privileged for the glimpse into his wondrous and rich mind. I would do these two days all over again if I had another opportunity.

Copies of the book published for this exhibit are still available on the used market.

alibris.com

I know you are all breathing a sigh of relief that I didn't just see it, because it would take me fifteen posts to finally finish talking about it.