The road to Copenhagen

Here is the picture’s life as an object (its provenance, the documented chain of who owned it from the painter’s hand to where it hangs now) and the first step is the one most often confused. The Green Stripe was not the painting the Steins bought off the Salon wall for 500 francs; that was Woman with a Hat, and the buyers were Leo and Gertrude Stein. The Green Stripe went to a different pair of Steins entirely (Michael and Sarah Stein, Michael being Leo and Gertrude’s eldest brother) and it came to them not off a Salon wall but through a Paris gallery, Galerie Druet, in the spring of 1906. The Michael Steins were among the most important American patrons of the new painting, and the portrait hung in their Paris flat. Two Stein households, two Matisse portraits of the same wife, two separate purchases, keep them apart and the rest of the story stays clear.

From the Steins the picture made an unsettled journey across war-time Europe, and this is the least-documented stretch of its life, so we will keep it to what is reasonably held. With the outbreak of the First World War it ended up stored in Germany; sale negotiations in 1917–18 led to a temporary seizure by a German dealer before it found its way back to Paris around 1919. Then it went north. Around 1920 the Danish grain merchant and collector Christian Tetzen-Lund (one of the serious buyers of French modern painting in Copenhagen) acquired it. He sold off most of his collection over the 1920s, but he kept this small portrait. He held it until his death in 1936.

And here we must correct the story you will most often hear, because it is wrong in a specific and tidy way. The Green Stripe did not come to the Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark) as a gift or bequest. When Tetzen-Lund died in 1936, his collection went to auction, and SMK bought the painting at that estate sale. The money came from the Ingeniør J. Rump and Elisabeth Rump Fund (the Rump fund) which is why the painting’s inventory number carries the prefix KMSr(it is KMSr171), the “r” standing for the Rump collection.

The confusion is understandable, because there really was a great Danish collector named Johannes Rump, and his roughly one-hundred-work donation in 1928 is the spine of SMK’s whole collection of French modernism. So the museum’s French rooms are, broadly, the house that Rump built. But this picture is not part of Rump’s own gift, he never owned it. It entered the museum in 1936 as a fund-financed purchasefrom someone else’s estate, paid for with money from the foundation that bears Rump’s name. A purchase, not a bequest. The distinction is small and the picture hangs in the same rooms either way, but it is the kind of thing this pipeline exists to get right.

It is there still, on permanent view, one of SMK’s signature works of French modernism. The museum’s chief curator, Dorthe Aagesen, has put its quality plainly: “Every brush stroke is very deliberately placed, and the painting is a good example of how you can experiment with the portrait format.” Which is, in the end, the whole story of the green stripe, a deliberately placed band of color, in a small experiment on a portrait, that turned out to be one of the most legible breaks in the history of painting.