Paris Portraits: Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein, and Their Circle BY Harriet Lane Levy (Heyday Books, 2011) From the Publisher: “Paris Portraits is a short masterpiece. This sparkling manuscript, long hidden in the archives of the University of California’s Bancroft Library, brings to life a vibrant and mythic time and place. Through Harriet’s eyes, we circulate among the artists and patrons in the salons of Gertrude and Sarah Stein, overhear conversations between the up-and-coming Matisse and his students, and see Gertrude Stein’s reaction when she learns of Picasso putting his hand on Toklas’s knee. We’re present when, while reading the poetry of Tagore, Harriet looks up and for the first time, sees — really sees and understands with the heart — what Matisse is doing. Paris Portraits enables us to visit, however briefly, a world that has left its mark on our imaginations — and will inspire those generations of writers, poets, and artists to come.”

In 1907 a forty-year-old San Franciscan named Harriet Lane Levy moved to Paris with her friend Alice B. Toklas. The two had been encouraged to do so by a former neighbor and childhood friend, Sarah Samuels, who had married the younger brother of the influential art patrons, Gertrude and Leo Stein. Harriet was to spend the next several years in the City of Light, wafting in and out of the Steins’ salons and Montmartre, learning about modern art and literature, and becoming acquainted with the artists and writers the Steins promoted. Paris Portraits is Levy’s clearly written account of those years and relationships. She writes of the pre-World War I years, before Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris; her candid stories center around the artists of the early twentieth century and pre-date the anecdotes about the Steins that are familiar to those who have read Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast. So reading Paris Portraits is like opening a rarely used drawer in an old dresser and discovering a lovely string of beads you had not known was there. It is an intriguing surprise. …reading Paris Portraits is like opening a rarely used drawer in an old dresser and discovering a lovely string of beads you had not known was there. At the core of this small and slim book of 104 pages are the personalities and artistic preferences of the Steins. In the chapter entitled “The Two Camps,” Levy writes of the powerful influence the Steins had over the Parisian art world — and over her. She sums up her feelings about the family in the same chapter: “…in spite of my affection for them, I hated them because I never had the courage to tell them to go to hell, as I so often wanted to do.” “Leo discovered Matisse,” she went on to write, and grew to appreciate Picasso, while Gertrude “loved Picasso,” whose “spirit was akin to her own.” But for Sarah Stein, Matisse became and remained “the one great artist.” The Steins prominently displayed the two men’s paintings in their homes and encouraged their friends and other visitors to buy them. These visitors, Levy writes, came from all over the world to view the paintings, then returned to their homes “bearing a message, a message of a new idea, a new vision that was opening to the world.” Levy confesses that she would have liked to purchase a Picasso, but was too afraid of angering her old friend Sarah to do so. She also relates an occasion where Alice Toklas arrives late to an appointment at Gertrude’s apartment and is treated so cruelly by Gertrude that Levy vows never to buy a single one of the Picasso paintings the tyrannical Gertrude so passionately promoted. She eventually invests in an oil painting by Matisse, “The Girl with the Green Eyes,” which hangs in the San Francisco Museum of Art at her bequest. Levy freely admits to struggling to understand the work of both artists, as well as the writings of Gertrude Stein. “I saw nothing to praise in all these paintings on the walls,” she writes. “I looked at them over and over again, waiting for the day when they would explain themselves to me.”

But one day, as she sits in Gertrude Stein’s apartment reading some of Stein’s word portraits, she has an epiphany. She describes the writing as “vivisectional, as if emotions were revealing themselves in their original state of being.” She relates experiencing another similarly intense emotion while later viewing some of Matisse’s vivid work. That feeling she called “a sense of life in the living.”

In addition to enlightening anecdotes about the painters Picasso, Matisse, and Rousseau (“the darling of the Montmartre group of painters”), Levy records her impressions of some of the less-renowned personalities then living in Paris: the temperamental Swedish-American sculptor, Peter David Edstrom; the greedy Russian art collector, Stronkine; the soft-spoken French poet, André Salmon; and the energetic American journalist who sought out and translated French plays into English, Mildred Aldrich. These first-hand accounts are valuable because they round out what we know about the circle of writers and artists working in Paris at the time, shining a spotlight on some of the less famous men and women who were part of the Steins’ world.

With Paris Portraits, Levy gives us her sense of life in the living during the early years of the twentieth century and the avant-garde movement in Paris, as well as the difficult and competing personalities of Gertrude and Sarah Stein.

Levy also recounts the development of the relationship between Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, as well as the influence Christian Science has on many of the members of this erudite circle. When Sarah Stein grows interested in the Christian Science movement, she channels the ardor she previously reserved for Matisse’s work into the healing practice and abandons her preoccupation with art. The sculptor Edstrom actually marries Cora Downer, the practitioner who introduced Christian Science to Europe. And in the chapter, “Fiesole: Sarah Heals Me,” Levy relates how she herself, after eight years of unspecified mobility problems, regains her ability to walk “without distress” when Gertrude orders Sarah to heal her. Levy offers no rational explanation for the healing, but confides that she did not believe that God was responsible. “Everyone who has known me intimately has remarked on my capacity for ingratitude,” she writes. She seems to simply accept her improvement as a matter of course, rather than as any sort of divine intervention.

With Paris Portraits, Levy gives us her sense of life in the living during the early years of the twentieth century and the avant-garde movement in Paris, as well as the difficult and competing personalities of Gertrude and Sarah Stein. A foreword by Deborah Kirshman, the former Fine Arts Editor and Assistant Director of the University of California Press, illumines Levy’s verbal portraits, as do the several historic photographs in the book. Kirshman notes the significance of the substantial influence a group of intellectual Jews from San Francisco had on the avant-garde movement in Paris.

A shortcoming of the book is that at times it seems to relate mere gossip. Levy’s writing moves from anecdote to anecdote, without making many overarching conclusions. Neither Levy nor Kirshman reports when the journal was written, and, therefore, how much hindsight was involved in Levy’s observations.

At the outset of World War I, Harriet Levy moved back to the safety of California. She was to visit Paris one more time fifteen years later, eager to show Gertrude the manuscript of a story she had written. But Gertrude, she relates, was too busy talking about her personal affairs and self-avowed greatness to listen—and there Paris Portraits ends. According to a brief biographical note in the back of the book, Levy returned to San Francisco once more and “led a life of eccentricity and independence” until her death in 1950.