From the Steins to the Barnes

If you read the short version of this picture’s life, it usually says the Steins owned it and then it went to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. That skips a country and a bankruptcy. The full provenance (the documented chain of who owned a work, hand to hand) runs through Copenhagen. When the Stein siblings divided their collection in 1914, Leo kept Le bonheur de vivre; over the next few years it was handled through the Paris dealers, and in 1919 it was bought by a Danish grain merchant named Christian Tetzen-Lund, one of the great early collectors of Matisse and Picasso, who took it home to Copenhagen. For three years the most important Fauve painting in the world hung in Denmark.

Then a bank failed. In 1922 the Danish Landmandsbanken, the country’s largest bank, collapsed, and Tetzen-Lund, caught in the wreckage, had to break up his collection. He wrote to a wealthy American chemist who was buying modern pictures by the trainload: Albert C. Barnes of Philadelphia, who had made a fortune on an antiseptic and was assembling one of the greatest private collections of modern art anywhere. Barnes bought it through the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume for roughly 45,000 francs (about $3,700 at the time), and the purchase was recorded in January 1923. So the honest sentence is not “the Steins sold it to Barnes.” It is: a Copenhagen collector sat between them, and a bank collapse, not a sale at the Salon, is what carried the picture to America.

Where it landed is its own small irony. The Barnes Foundation, in suburban Merion, Pennsylvania (it moved into central Philadelphia in 2012), was a famously closed and idiosyncratic place, and that was written into law. Barnes’s founding 1922 trust (the indenture that governs the Foundation) forbade it from ever lending its pictures or even rehanging them, fixing every work in its assigned spot in perpetuity as a teaching ensemble; for decades it also barred color reproductions of the works in its care. That meant one of the pillars of modern painting was effectively bolted to a single wall and almost impossible to see in print. The critic Hilton Kramer called Le bonheur de vivre“the least familiar of modern masterpieces.” The no-loan rule was loosened only by a 2023 court ruling; for most of the twentieth century, a picture that had once been the loudest scandal in Paris sat where almost no one could see it, by the order of one collector’s will.

And yet its influence ran everywhere. Remember the little ring of dancers far back in the meadow. Matisse pulled that single motif out of the crowded canvas, blew it up, and made it the whole subject of The Dance (1909–10), one of the most famous images he ever painted. Le bonheur de vivre was the seedbed of his next forty years, the source he kept mining all the way to the late paper cut-outs.

It also fed the rivalry that would define the next decade of painting. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is widely read as his answer to the sensation Matisse had made. (That reading is interpretation, not documented intent, so take it as the way the rivalry is usually told, not as Picasso’s stated plan; the Demoiselleswork read covers the picture itself.) The split ran right through the Stein household, where Gertrude came down on Picasso’s side and Leo on Matisse’s. Together, the two men and their two canvases are usually counted as the twin poles early modern painting in the West was built between.

One last, oddly moving fact. The color you see today is already not quite the color of 1906. Some of Matisse’s heavy cadmium-yellow passages are slowly degrading, the bright pigment turning chalky and brown as its chemistry breaks down, a decay that conservators have studied closely. (It is the same quiet tragedy that has dulled the sunlit grass of Seurat’s Grande Jatte.) The great hymn to the joy of life is, very gently, fading, which only makes the loud, impossible color we can still see feel more worth looking at.