Souren Melikian wages war on Picasso’s “cartoon” paintings by analyzing the Met’s holdings and hammering away at the idea that the leading Picasso collectors shunned the paintings that get under Melikian’s skin:
So great was Leo and Gertrude Stein’s admiration for the painter that they amassed the largest group of Picassos anywhere until they split up their joint collection in the winter of 1913-14. But Gertrude Stein, a connoisseur of Picasso’s art if ever there was one, never owned any of the one-day cartoon-style pictures in which the artist later indulged.
Neither did another of the most perceptive collectors of Picasso’s work, Florene Schoenborn, whose donations and 1995 bequest brought to the Met several of the most powerful masterpieces by the Paris school painter. Yet, the diversity of the pictures that she acquired with her first husband, Samuel Marx, rules out any suggestion of conformism.
Of Picasso and Provenance (New York Times)
