Collectors make lasting impression with High's ‘Toulouse-Lautrec' show

Anxious to pounce on a potential once-in-a-lifetime art acquisition in London, Atlanta collector Howard Stein booked his reservation so close to departure day that he couldn't fly side-by-side with his adviser and close friend, High Museum of Art curator David Brenneman. An eternally ebullient retired northwest Georgia carpet mill owner who never met a stranger, Stein asked the hip-looking fellow who eased into the seat next to him if he'd mind switching with his buddy several rows back in first class.

The blond bloke smiled and said sure. When Brenneman realized who he was trading places with, he couldn't wait to tell Stein.

"Howard, do you know who that was?" the curator whispered. "Sting!"

"Oh yeah, The Sting," Stein replied gamely.

"At that point, I knew he had no idea who it was," Brenneman recalls with a wide smile one recent afternoon while observing the installation of a major High Museum exhibition that includes Stein's mega-score from that trip to Christie's -- an extremely rare, pristine 12-print "Elles" portfolio by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.

Pardon Stein, now 86, if he doesn't quite have his pop culture demigods down. He's been plowing his own fields of gold in the rarefied world of art auctions and high-stakes deals, thank you very much.

Without an art background, he and Irene, his wife of 62 years, assembled one of top Toulouse-Lautrec collections in the world. They didn't stop there. After becoming buddies with Brenneman, now the High's director of collections and exhibitions and European art curator, they built a stellar collection of works by peers of the great 19th century French graphic artist as well as a cache of select European sculpture from the 18th to the turn of the 20th century.

A wide selection of the art they have collected since the early 1970s -- 63 works on paper and 25 sculptures -- is on view in the just-opened High exhibit, "Toulouse-Lautrec & Friends."

"I'm like a two-gunslinger. If I like something," Stein explains, pausing to make a bullet's whooshing sound, "I shoot it right away."

For years, the Steins targeted the best finds purely to enhance their collection. But since a 1998 High exhibit of their Toulouse-Lautrec holdings, they've regularly donated works to the museum, pulled out their checkbook so that curators could purchase pieces they coveted and, lately, bought works specifically for the institution.

Last April, the couple made its biggest offering, a gift of 47 works, mainly works on paper by Toulouse-Lautrec and others in his circle or of his era, but also including a selection of fine sculpture. Brenneman, who met the Steins in 1995 when, newly arrived at the High, he was assigned to work on the 1998 exhibit from their collection, called last year's gift "transformative" for the Atlanta museum's national standing as a repository of European art.

Sculpture has become such a growing interest for the Steins that the High has filled the plaza level of the Anne Cox Chambers Wing with bronzes and marbles for "Toulouse-Lautrec & Friends." The prints, posters and drawings command the upper level.

The show is a testament to the Steins' connoisseurship but also to the fruitful partnership the collectors and curator forged.

"It was like having our own personal docent," Stein says. "David has a great personality, he's always positive, he never talks negative and I like people like that because I'm of the same ilk."

Howard, who finds endless new ways to compliment his wife's beauty and charm, does most of the talking for the couple, with Irene artfully filling in names and details in his tales of conquests so that he barely has to pause. He awards huge props to Brenneman for helping refine and expand their collecting eye, as well as for making introductions at museums, auction houses, galleries and art fairs during more than a half-dozen trips to New York and Paris.

But the curator says his old friend gives him too much credit.

"They have a very good eye, very good intuitive design sense," Brenneman says. "When I met them, it was like, ‘You've got this great Lautrec collection, now what?' I wanted them to do what they wanted to do, but I wanted to suggest that there was a whole world of other art out there. And that we could go see it. They could respond to it and if they liked it, you know ..."

They did and they did quite often, though they didn't embrace every discovery the curator led them to.

For such passionate collectors, the Brooklyn-born Steins got into art quite by chance. In the early 1970s, they started dropping into a neighborhood gallery during lunchtime strolls from the Long Island office where they ran their carpet mill. Their first purchase was a poster of the actress Sarah Bernhardt by Alphonse Mucha. That was followed by color posters by other well-known French artists of the late 19th century, including Jules Cheret and Fernand Louis Gottlob.

They didn't know it, but they were building up to one of the priciest French artists of the post-Impressionism period, Toulouse-Lautrec. They acquired their first print by the master a few years later and then went deep, focusing exclusively on his work for nearly two decades.

"It speaks to us," explains Howard, a self-taught carpet designer whose Howard Carpet Mills became known for its sophisticated color styling and textures, especially its early innovations with Berber. (The Steins sold the Chatsworth mill to Shaw Industries in 1989.) It wasn't just the vibrancy of Toulouse-Lautrec's colors that drew him, but the artist's depictions of night life in the dance clubs, bars and cafes of the can-can-loving Montmartre district.

"The fact that it told the story about the history of the people of Paris during La Belle Epoque was very fascinating to us," Howard says."There's a story behind every piece. It'd take me five minutes over every one to tell you why and where each was done."

As the mill prospered, international business travel only stoked the collecting obsession of Howard and Irene, a former teacher who served as the mill's treasurer. "She was the money bags," Howard likes to joke. "I was the carpetbagger."

In 1976, they moved to Atlanta to cut out his weekly commuting and to be near to their children, Bruce Stein, a urologist, and Cindy Goldberg, who's married to a urologist.

The Steins soon joined the museum, where their involvement and support have grown by the year. They were benefactors of the capital campaign for 1983 Richard Meier-designed building and Howard is a lifetime member of the museum's board of trustees.

The warm reception for the 1998 exhibit "Toulouse-Lautrec: Posters and Prints form the Collection of Irene and Howard Stein," including the "Elles" set that Brenneman accompanied him to London to examine, only deepened their commitment to the High. That led them in 2001 to donate the pristine 12-print portfolio, which had cost more than $1 million.

"After our show was over, I said to Irene, ‘What are we going to do with the set, to put it under a bed and hide it?'" Howard recounts. "‘Let's give it to the museum.'"

Had their son and daughter ever suggested the Steins slow down on such generous gestures?

"Our children fortunately have never questioned it and it's not a topic," Howard says. "If I knew they liked the medium as much as Irene and I do, we would think twice."

But the kids don't have the art collecting jones like Mom and Dad.

Even after last year's 47-work gift to the High and general downsizing since they moved from Sandy Springs to a Buckhead high-rise, the Steins are not done collecting.

"It goes on and on," Howard explains, without an ounce of kvetch. "I always use this analogy: It's like the child who collects stamps and on the page there's 20 boxes and he has half of those boxes [filled]. He wants the other 10. That's what collecting is."

Thus, the High had to tuck an addendum into the back of the just off-the-presses 144-page hardback catalog that accompanies "Toulouse-Lautrec & Friends," an eight-page booklet titled "French Sculpture, New Acquisitions: The Irene and Howard Stein Collection."

"I had no reason to buy these three pieces. We already had a show," Howard acknowledges about a marble sculpture by Charles Cordier and two bronzes by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. "But that's not the conclusion. I want to see the museum be one of best museums in [the art and era] we represent."

Brenneman says as he got closer with the Steins on buying trips and they "had some interesting conversations" about where the collection would end up.

"Of course, I was hopeful," the curator admits. "I don't know that they had ever thought about it as a collection that would stay intact. A lot of people in my experience don't think when they start buying art what the end game is."

Brenneman says it's part of his job to steer collectors toward the High if he thinks it's going to enhance the museum's holdings. "But at the same time," he adds, "being mindful that people are different and have different ideas."

The Steins, fortunately for the High and Atlanta, were on-board with the idea of sharing their passion.

"We're going to have a legacy. It's very important," Howard says. "But building the museum takes on an equal importance. We've been very active in terms of wanting to see it grow. And it has grown and it's made us very pleased."

Even though they no longer own a vast majority of the pieces on view in "Toulouse-Lautrec & Friends," Howard talks about even the most recent acquisitions with the same pride he discusses his six grandkids.

"This Cordier piece, the workmanship is fantastic," Howard proclaims of the regal 53-inch sculpture "A Young Woman of Trastevere," which will be a focal point of the works in the Anne Cox Chambers Wing lobby. "It's going to make an impression from the piazza -- people are going to look [through the glass windows] and want to come in and see it!"

On view

“Toulouse-Lautrec & Friends”

Through May 1. $18; $15 students and seniors; $11 children 6-17; free for children 5 and younger and members. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; until 8 p.m. Thursdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.

Exhibition highlights

"The Clowness at the Moulin Rouge" (1897): One of the most highly sought of Toulouse-Lautrec's prints, because only 20 impressions were created (a standard edition then was 100). "Clowness" focuses on Cha-u-Kao, a Moulin Rouge performer and frequent model model for the artist. "It's the beauty of the drawing and the watercolor-like delicacy of the color that make this one of Toulouse-Lautrecs's great masterpieces," curator David Brenneman writes in the exhibit catalog.

"Miss Loie Fuller" (1893): This American dancer was a Folies Bergere sensation for her dance of veils with gossamer fabric that she could turn into waves and clouds above her head under colored spotlights. She captured the imagination of many artists, including Toulouse-Lautrec, whose color lithograph presents her as a "haunting specter of nearly abstract form" according to the catalog. The artist used powdered gold on the print purchased by the Steins to create the dancer's luminescent form. Each print in the edition of 50 is inked differently, "in effect making each a unique work of art," Brenneman writes.