Mrs. Walter Haas, founder of the Michael and Sarah Stein collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art, recalls her friendship with the couple, (brother and sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein), after they fled Europe in 1938 and took up residence in Palo Alto, CA. The Stein family, while living in Paris during the 1920s and 30s were some of the most prominent collectors of modern painting and art, building a superlative collection of works by Matisse, Picasso, and other prominent avant-garde painters and sculptors. Interviewed in her Atherton home by Rena Down and Charles Amirkhanian, Mrs. Haas talks about the collection, recalls her friendship with Sarah Stein, her meetings with Henri Matisse and Alice B. Toklas, and discusses Matisse’s landmark work, “La Femme a Chapeau”, which hung on a nearby wall but a few feet from the KPFA microphone. |
