The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (14 page)

In 1916, Matisse wrote to Hans Purrmann after seeing Derain, who had joined the army, “How irrelevant the mentality of the rear must appear to those who return from the front.” And, as if in retreat from both the fighting and the soldiers he was not allowed to join, Matisse headed south to Nice.

The move would prove to be one of his career's most significant. In the Mediterranean city, Matisse found the light he needed to sustain him as an artist, though he almost did not stay. He prepared to leave Nice one morning in 1916, after days of continual rain, but the sun came out, he unpacked, and remained for thirty-five years.

Matisse took up residence in the Hotel Beau-Rivage overlooking the sea on the Promenade des Anglais. His routine was unvarying. He rose early, ate breakfast, practiced his violin in a “remote bathroom so as not to disturb the other guests,” then painted from nine to noon. The violin, he said, limbered his fingers for painting, but he also worried that if he ever went blind, he could no longer support his family through painting. Playing music on the street was thus his
back-up plan, though it proved unnecessary.

His gallery, Bernheim-Jeune, more than doubled its asking price for Matisse's work, which had gained the attention of international collectors, including the Americans John Quinn and Albert C. Barnes.

Almost in inverse ratio to her husband's good fortune, Madame Matisse's had declined. In the year 1917, a melancholy one for her, she began to suffer psychosomatic illnesses. Depressed and rarely venturing out, she became, in effect, the opposite of her husband.

But it was not surprising. The woman who had sustained her husband through extreme poverty felt excluded from his success. He rarely used her as a model any more. Instead, he spent his studio time with exotic young women posed in sensuous settings. Matisse believed his paintings had curative medicinal powers. He once advised a friend to sit among his painted works until he felt better. But Madame Matisse, it is certain, would not recover her spirits in a room filled with the lounging nudes who so occupied her husband.

In the spring of 1919, after the armistice was signed, Bernheim-Jeune staged a one-man show for Matisse. In 1920, three books on Matisse were published, and in 1921 he took an apartment in Nice in the Place Charles Felix. Until 1938, he divided his time between Nice and Paris.

Now that the Cone sisters were back in Europe, the grand gentleman of French painting resumed his friendship with them virtually where he had left it ten years before.

Some are coming to know very well that they are living a very dull way of living. These go shopping. They go shopping and it always was a thing they were rightly doing. Now everything is changing. Certainly everything is changing. They go shopping and they are being in a different way of living. Everything is changing.

—Gertrude Stein,
Flirting at the Bon Marché

C
onsumerism on a mass scale was born in America before World War One. Encouraged by newly advertising companies to “buy more,” everyone from paycheck-to-paycheck workers to the idle rich became, with an almost religious fervor, preoccupied with “things.” Women, in particular, accepted the advertiser's urgings to shop and buy—if only as a way to keep America's industrial wheels turning.

Claribel and Etta already had the tendency to acquire, and now that neither of them had any other occupation, it became their driving force. For Claribel, shopping compensated for the lack of things she had suffered in Germany. For Etta, it was a way to buy back pieces of that magical time she had spent in Paris in 1905 and 1906.

From their inheritance—money and dividends from the Cone company stock—the sisters took in an impressive
annual income. After calculating how much of that sizeable total could be spent during their summers abroad, they set out to buy. They bought silk stockings by the dozen, shirt waists, hats, handbags, jewelry, antiques, exotic fabrics, ornate boxes, books, rugs, and, most significantly, art.

In 1922, the Cones began building in earnest the art collection that Etta had unconsciously begun twenty-five years before, with the purchase of five Theodore Robinson impressionist paintings. The sisters had not purchased any paintings since 1906, when Etta, under Leo's influence, went on a buying spree, picking up Matisses and Picassos for a song.

But on July 11, 1922, the lengthy drought ended. The sisters paid a visit to the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery and purchased five Matisse paintings, paying as much as 8,500 francs, or about $500, for one of the works—considerably more than the 100 francs Etta had paid for a Matisse watercolor in 1906.

There is no way of knowing for certain which sister purchased which painting—the bills from the gallery are all addressed to Dr. Claribel Cone. We do know that Etta was the sister with the greater command of things artistic. She had also made all the Cone painting purchases up until 1922. And she had been the one to take a chance on unknown artists just after the turn of the century.

But the dominant Claribel, usurping Etta's claim to the territory, came to be recognized as “the collector” of the pair. The two were most often referred to as “Dr. Claribel and her sister, Miss Etta Cone,” as if the younger were a shadowy companion who followed her powerful sister into the habit of collecting. But Etta, despite years of independence, did not protest. She assumed once again her submissive role when dealing with Claribel's strong spirit. She “became like a voiceless bird” next to the commanding doctor.

In the past, the Cones had frequently mingled socially
with the artists whose work they bought. Etta made her purchases directly from them, which was, for her, a significant part of the charm of collecting. But now that Matisse had risen in the world to a position of fame, fortune, and representation, the Cone sisters, for the most part, were forced to make their Matisse painting purchases from the two brothers who owned the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery.

The Cones must have been even more of an enigma in 1922 Paris than they had been in 1906. The Jazz Age now gripped the city. Women's liberation had finally come to fashion—the French designer Paul Poiret banished the corset. The cosmetic industry was in full swing, selling powders and creams and colors to heighten the cheeks and eyes of women. And women were taking their long hair out of top knots and buns and cutting it off—the bob was all the rage.

Hemlines went up, necklines dipped down, women bound their breasts to make their profiles long and slim, and the female faces deemed most appealing were small with tiny lips. The new woman of the 1920s—the one considered the most fashionable—was the very opposite of the Cone sisters.

True, at their age, they were no longer expected to follow fashion trends. But to those trends they made absolutely no concessions. Judging by their unchanged appearances, they were utterly unaware of the much-changed world.

Though the well-heeled Cone sisters were certainly welcome guests, they must have struck an odd chord on entering Bernheim-Jeune. The two sisters were almost the same height, with Claribel slightly the wider of the two. Standing side by side, they appeared to be an enormous, almost square block of black cloth. They were described as “colorful in a stodgy way; stout, staunch, individualistic. . . their swelling bodices buttoned up to the neck, their full skirts sweeping the floor and hiding buttoned shoes.”

To the two brothers who owned the gallery, the Cone sisters must have appeared in the doorway as apparitions from the previous century. But these particular ghosts were a gallery owner's dream. They wanted Matisses, and they wanted them in quantity. On July 24, Claribel marched back into the gallery and purchased a Matisse oil painting,
Le pot d'etain
(The Pewter Jug), for the vast sum of 20,000 francs.

The sisters did not entirely abandon the artists for the galleries. On July 14, Claribel posed for a portrait by Picasso. The key detail surrounding the sitting—whether Picasso suggested it or Claribel—is unclear. Also unclear is where the event took place. From July to the end of September, Picasso was staying at a villa at the Forêt de Fontainebleau, but he most likely met Claribel in town during a visit to his studio off the Champs Elysées.

Claribel, having not visited a Picasso studio since the Bâteau Lavoir, would have been much struck by the difference between his opulent new setting and his previous abode. In fact, the differences are evident even in Picasso's elegant pencil drawing of Claribel. It is clean, simple, and without any of the haunting shadows associated with poverty that dominated his portrait of Gertrude. Claribel sat on a comfortable wooden armchair with her feet on a pillow, looking like a contented lady of means (and a little like an older, female version of Oscar Wilde).

Picasso, still in the midst of his return to classicism, considered Claribel to be a perfect subject. The Claribel he drew, in ruffles and pendant, was every bit a queen—a figure large enough, in bulk and in spirit, to do justice to his style. Picasso wanted 1,000 francs for the drawing. Claribel hoisted up her skirt, found a pocket in her petticoat, counted out the notes,
and handed them to the artist. The woman who had been mistaken for European royalty certainly had an uninhibited American way of transacting business.

Sometime that summer, the two sisters also met up with Matisse, whose schedule put him in Nice in the winter and Paris in the summer. It must have been a joyous reunion, especially for Etta, who had not seen her favorite artist for a decade. Matisse and the two sisters had all expanded across the middle, and gone at least partly gray on top, but they were as exuberant and as full of life as they had been in 1912.

Matisse had much good news for them, including word that the French government had finally purchased one of his paintings. He had settled into a luxurious life of ease and creativity, one that had hardly seemed possible in 1905 when he considered abandoning painting because he was so poor. Now Matisse, and by reflection his paintings, began to “rejoice in the comforts of life that the French cultivate with such care.” His subjects—flowers, textiles, objects, and women—struck a special chord with the Cone sisters, unlike any they had with other artists.

Years later, during an exhibit of the Cone collection at New York's Knoedler Gallery, a critic for the
Herald Tribune
wrote: “If it is true, as has been claimed, that the pictures a man buys are, even within the limitations of his education and pocketbook, a most revealing index to his inner self, then the Cone sisters of Baltimore present one of the most fascinating paradoxes in the history of American art collecting. . . Behind the monumental, forbidding, blue stocking exteriors of the two must have beat warm, expansive, even hedonistic hearts.”

The critic was right. Despite their austere exteriors, Etta and Claribel Cone were sensualists. They had both suffered—Etta, ill health and loneliness, and Claribel, deprivation
and war. And at the end of it all, they set out together to surround themselves with things rich and deep and beautiful. Their demands were not great. They did not join the throbbing masses dancing until dawn, or the sexual revolution boisterously upending tradition in Paris.

They looked for the sensuous life in quiet ways. The Cones stayed in only the best places and ate only the finest food. They drank cocktails and sherry and wine in the Lutetia's glorious salon, and when they smoked cigarettes, one of the sisters marveled over the fanciful figures the smoke made in the air, while the other blew her smoke into rings. They delected over the details of life no matter how minute. In the weave of a piece of fabric, for example, they saw a rich history that others missed.

Matisse's paintings were exactly suited to the Cone sisters’ taste—they met their every criterion. His canvases were intricate, potent, abundant, ripe, and sexual. His works gave a vibrant voice to the sisters’ inner lives.

Matisse was under contract with Bernheim-Jeune to sell his paintings through the gallery, but the contract allowed him to sell his bronzes directly from his studio. The Cone sisters bought four bronzes from the years 1905 to 1908. These Matisse purchases indicate the course their collecting career would take. They could rarely buy one of anything—no matter how costly. In fact, at some point during the summer of 1922, the sisters purchased duplicates of each of Matisse's four bronze sculptures. They might have been considering how they would split the collection if they ever parted—or they simply might have felt compelled to buy and own more than one.

As planned, Etta left Paris with Miss Kaufman that summer for side trips through Europe. If she worried about leaving
Claribel behind in Paris, she needn't have. Claribel wrote to Etta, then in Brest, that she was having the time of her life shopping. The Empress was busy roaming galleries, antique shops, and department stores in search of objects that had come to be her most cherished companions. Her purse was open, and she was spending freely. Etta complained to Gertrude that she and her sister were “being drowned in things.”

Claribel later said, “As a matter of fact. . . I didn't even know that the things I had could be called a collection until people began to use the term in talking to me about them. Ever since I was a small girl and picked up all the shells I could find, reveling in their color and in their forms, I've been acquiring beautiful things. I've picked them up here and there all over the world, some of them at first hand, some from dealers. I took beauty where I found it. . . .”

Before the two sisters left Paris that fall, they arranged for Michael Stein to send back to Baltimore the many items they had purchased. From that point forward, he was to serve as a kind of manager for them on that side of the ocean, in the same way their brothers functioned on the other side, in America.

The Cone sisters had grown increasingly close to Michael and Sally Stein, in part because the attraction of the rue de Fleurus had faded. Leo was living in Italy, and Gertrude's social life was designed to achieve just one end—“the furtherance of her literary career.”
Vanity Fair
magazine ran a picture of Gertrude that summer. She was trying desperately to get published in the
Atlantic Monthly
.

But Michael Stein's services as the Cone business manager in Paris were not entirely altruistic. The Stein family was short of cash, and the Cones had it in abundance. In the 1920s, a new relationship developed between the two families—whenever
the Steins needed money, they sold the Cones a piece of art or furniture. For both parties to the transactions, it was better than going through a dealer. The Steins received cash immediately, and the Cones picked up pieces from collectors whose taste they considered impeccable.

The full evidence of the Cone sisters’ 1922 shopping spree could be measured—in seven crates shipped to Baltimore. In them were fifty-seven works of art, including six Matisse paintings, four Matisse bronzes, and twenty-two Matisse lithographs. Also in the crates were one Picasso painting, one Picasso drawing, two Picasso engravings, and one Renoir etching.