The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (15 page)

“My dear Etta,” Michael Stein wrote. “There are seven cases in all. 1-2-3-4 are Claribel's, 5-6-7 are yours. . . I had made out the paper of declaration ‘Purchased in various antique shops in Paris during the summer of 1922.’ That would not do so I made out names as near as I could remember.”

On the tariff declaration, Michael Stein wrote, “I further declare that it is impracticable to obtain declarations from the artists as they are either dead or their whereabouts are unknown to me.” Stein knew the names and the whereabouts of the artists perfectly well, but he saved the Cones aggravation and money by pretending their crates did not contain a single twentieth century art treasure.

Back in Baltimore, the sisters anxiously awaited the arrival of their crates. That winter was the first of many spent arranging their homes to accommodate the new items, and showing mystified visitors what they had bought.

Soon Claribel's small apartment on the sixth floor was full, but rather than throw anything out, she took a second apartment. The expansive “museum” she established on the
eighth floor near Etta's apartment had at least seven rooms—all needed and used—to house her acquisitions.

The world outside their Marlborough apartment windows had changed. The streets previously disturbed only by the clatter of horse-drawn carriages were now noisy with the roar of cars and honking horns. The houses in the neighborhood, once urban palaces for the city's wealthiest families, were slowly being broken up into multiple-family homes. The German-Jewish community was moving out.

Prohibition, which was aimed at boosting society's morals, had accomplished just the opposite. A few blocks to the west, Druid Hill Avenue—which W.E.B. Du Bois had called one of the finest black streets in the United States—was now considered a vice district. Nearby Pennsylvania Avenue, which showcased some of the best black musical talent in America, was home to speakeasies, prostitution, and cocaine.

The Cones’ small neighborhood was changing, but the sisters seemed unaffected by the drift. They focused increasingly on their treasures. Each spring, after a winter of securing their European acquisitions, they set out to buy more.

I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things! One's self—for other people—is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive.

—Henry James,
The Portrait of a Lady,
1881

I
n the spring of 1923, having returned to Paris with her sister, Claribel Cone faced a new challenge—filling her museum back home. Whether unconsciously or by design, the Cone apartments in Baltimore began to look like the Stein homes in Paris. The two sisters covered their walls with paintings, and furnished their rooms with exotic pieces and antiques in the same manner their friends had when they began their collections in 1905.

But the Cones had a long way to go before their walls were as full of art as the rue de Fleurus or even Mike and Sally's at the rue Madame. The sisters were arguably limited in what they could buy. Their Baltimore apartments were comprised of tight, intimate rooms. Thus, theoretically, they could only purchase smaller pieces. And what art they did hang on the walls competed for space with their many chests
of drawers, cabinets, bookcases, and buffets.

The sisters, however, felt largely unencumbered by these limitations. They easily found, and bought, pieces to suit them, regardless of size.

In June 1923, back at Bernheim-Jeune, they purchased six more Matisse oil paintings costing a total of 73,500 francs, or about $4,000 (in 1923 dollars). Etta's purchases tended toward lovely domestic portraits:
Violiniste et fillette, Divertissement
(Violinist and Young Girl) of 1921;
Jeune femme a la fenêtre, soleil couchant
(Young Woman at the Window, Sunset) from the same year; and
Femme au pull-over rayé, violin sur la table
(Woman in Striped Pullover, Violin on the Table), which Matisse finished in 1922.

But Claribel struck out for something bolder. In addition to two still lives, she purchased the Cones’ first Matisse odalisque,
Odalisque debout, tambourin dans la main droite
(Standing Odalisque, Tambourine in her Right Hand), which Matisse painted in 1922. The painting dripped with sensuality. In some quarters, it was even called pornographic.

Its subject aside, the odalisque was a daring purchase merely because it was a Matisse. In 1922, the Detroit Institute of Arts became the first American museum to purchase a Matisse. The acquisition was considered so audacious that the museum released a bulletin assuring visitors the artist was “wholesome, human, sane and well ordered.”

Matisse, now fifty-four, called his odalisques “the bounty of a happy nostalgia, a lovely, vivid dream.” But they were also the result of a very tangible reality. In 1920, a local movie agency had begun supplying Matisse with nubile young actresses to serve as models for his erotic canvases. More than once, models with whom he conducted affairs surfaced later in lustful images. But his new series of odalisques, painted in a type of bedroom setting, had a bordello feeling that was
undeniably carnal.

Matisse's friend, the French poet, novelist, and journalist Louis Aragon, said Matisse's nearsightedness forced him to sit close to his models—sometimes so close that his knee pressed against their knee. In one photograph, Matisse is shown with one hand touching the model while he worked with the other.

But it was not entirely trouble with his eyes that brought the painter so near his subject. “When I paint or draw,” said Matisse, “I feel the need for close communication with the object that inspires me. . . A cake seen through a store window does not make you salivate as much as when, having entered the store, you have your nose on top of it.”

In Matisse's sculpture, the contact between artist and model went even further. Of one model, he said, “She was a pretty girl, a perfect model. I touched her body, my hands enveloped her forms, and I transmitted into clay the equivalent of my sensation.”

Baltimore's nationally known columnist and critic, H. L. Mencken, wrote, “. . . the truth is, as everyone knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No moral man—that is, moral in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at. . . .”

Perhaps the Cone sisters shared that view, and ignored the rumors designed to tarnish the great artist's reputation. In any case, the sisters must have recognized in his works the intense sensuality they conveyed. The seemingly prudish pair bought their favorite artist's new paintings. In fact, in the summer of 1923, they bought art only by Matisse.

In July, they purchased two more Matisse oil paintings. Etta bought a Matisse from 1899 that Leo had owned, and in September she purchased her first odalisque,
Odalisque debout
reflétée dans la glace
(Standing Odalisque Reflected in a Mirror) from 1923—for 19,000 francs. The painting was of a barebreasted woman with a fleshy midriff, in pantaloons, facing full front—a sliver of her reflection in a mirror.

The Cones spent an estimated 121,500 francs on Matisse paintings—or about $6,700—during a single summer. The average American at the time earned about $760 a year.

In fact, the sisters, on a sped-up course of spending, didn't really know—and didn't much care—how much money they had. Periodically, though, they faced reality, realized they were running low, and wrote their brother Bernard, asking him to deposit more cash into their accounts in Greensboro.

In July, Etta set off for Venice with Miss Kaufman and left Claribel to her Parisian pursuits. Claribel detailed her every move in voluminous letters that she sent to Etta's Italian hotel, where they were dutifully kept. But Etta's responses were not saved, so the existing correspondence is a monologue by Claribel on the people she saw and the things she bought in her sister's absence.

The letters show a remarkably brisk schedule for an enormous woman of fifty-eight. In the afternoon of July 23rd, for example, she lunched with Pierre and Margot Matisse, the artist's children, took a taxi up to Clichy and bought a rug, attended the opera, took a car drive, and then signed up for a trial Berlitz course.

On July 24th, after lunch with Michael Stein, she visited antique shops. And on July 25th she shopped, causing a stir in the various stores she visited, which were most pleased to have her business, but must have wondered at the ways of this strange American woman.

“Went to Ararat's. . . Ararat is away—but madame was there—they had nothing new—but because I got her to
upset things a bit I bought a Persian dagger and a Japanese gold lacquer inro. . . From there I went to the Bon Marché and bought a few things—I took my nice interpreter to the purse department, sent up for my old friend Mr. Dupré at the head of the purse work rooms—asked for my salesman who speaks English—Mons.

“Just—and when all the clerks and the head of the purse department, and the head of the working room and the interpreter were surrounding me—I told them what I wanted—and they all smiled and seemed glad to see me and remembered me quite well—because I had caused them so much trouble last year. . . they all seemed awfully glad to see me come back—strange to say—I suppose it was an evidence that their work gave satisfaction to one so ‘difficile.’”

Bon Marché's sales staff undoubtedly found her difficult. But Claribel's imperial manner and free spending combined to make her a charming and valued customer. She was becoming even more of a character than she had been before. Her more marked eccentricities made her all the more flamboyant.

She ordered silk stockings and handkerchiefs by the dozen and had them monogrammed and numbered so she could rotate their usage. She wore two extra blouses under a new dress during fittings at the dressmaker to make sure it would be roomy enough. She had over 120 Liberty scarves on approval at her hotel room at any given time. And once, when she saw Miss Kaufman wearing a sweater she admired, instructed Miss Kaufman to buy her a dozen just like it.

Claribel ordered multiples of everything—three sets of shoes, three copies of a book. Her brother Sydney once found her sick in bed with three thermometers in her mouth.

In Paris, Claribel surrounded herself with things—and people, if she chose. But the people, always peripheral, mainly served as facilitators in her quest to acquire things. “I find
my chief objection to all these people is not that they have faults (which all of us have of course) but that they and their personalities get in my way,” she wrote Etta. In fact, her misanthropy was an accepted part of her personality.

During a drive together, Gertrude asked Claribel whether she liked Paris, to which she replied, “Very much.”

“And do you still like the Germans better than the French?” Gertrude asked.

“They are all human beings to me,” said Claribel.

“Which means that you do not care much for either of them!” Gertrude replied.

When the sisters returned to Baltimore that autumn, they were struck again by the meager cultural life of their native city. Compared to Paris, Baltimore surely seemed a deadly dull and backward place. It was not merely a relative thing, either. A.D. Emmart, then a literary and art critic for the Baltimore
Sun,
described the city as “sedentary, uneventful and ingloriously safe.” He called it “middle aged in spirit.”

Baltimore was not cosmopolitan enough to support even one large continental restaurant. It had just three book stores, and only two second-hand bookshops. The opera season listed just three nights. And the director of Baltimore's only art school called modern art “poppycock.”

To that environment, the Cone sisters retreated for the dreary months of winter, which in Baltimore meant a steady cold rain that only occasionally turned to snow, and, most of all, a bleak grayness from November to April.

The sisters might have become involved in an important project that winter—the Baltimore Museum of Art was just opening its doors for the first time. The new museum, one would have thought, would have been anxious for the kind of
publicity it could receive by exhibiting the budding Cone collection. But while the museum was happy to receive the sisters’ donations of money, it was uninterested in their art. The sisters’ collection, concluded museum officials, was too avant-garde for the provincial city.

Their fellow Baltimoreans saw the Cone sisters as alien creatures—eccentric if not downright crazy. A Maryland doctor wrote, “The very few Baltimoreans who knew or had heard of them were apt to regard the sisters as a single legendary figure” who collected “disturbing” modern art in large amounts under the guidance of “somewhat questionable” bohemians—Gertrude and Leo Stein.

Miss Kaufman relayed to the sisters some of the stories she heard about them, but rather than get angry, they laughed. They were unique—as unique as the art that hung on their walls.

Claribel began to drape her body in her collection. She wore numerous colored shawls, exotic jewelry around her neck, and a silver skewer in her hair, which she also used as a letter opener. At private dinner parties, she wore a red velvet gown trimmed in gold lace. In public, she and Etta always wore dark floor-length skirts with black silk petticoats equipped with pockets that held valuables.

Etta did not top off her dress with the exotic, as Claribel did, and when the two were spotted in Baltimore at the symphony, which Claribel attended as often as three times a week, their appearances contrasted sharply. In fact, those differences told their stories at a glance. The majestic and bejeweled Claribel sat dozing a few rows in front of Etta, taking up two seats—one for herself and one for her possessions—while the retiring younger sister sat quietly behind her in a single seat, always in the shadow of her older sibling.

Etta's life still revolved around her older sister and her younger brother, Fred. She ran her own household, as well as
theirs, arranging all their meals, and serving as hostess whenever guests visited.

As recreational pursuits, Etta lavished time on her art collection and read. Every Wednesday at 11 a.m., she played piano with a woman named Cecilia Gaul, a former Franz Liszt student debilitated by a fear of performing. It was a quiet but full life, and yet it is not clear if it satisfied Etta.

Claribel did what Claribel had always done—busied herself with minutia. She carried around with her a palmsized note pad, on which she wrote lists of things to do and things she had done. She noted what time she went to her own apartment on a given day, and how long she slept during an afternoon nap. She even wrote a note to herself that she should write herself a note. She did not use a key to enter Etta's apartment—she always rang the bell, most likely because it was easier than fumbling with the lock.

And her relations with her brother and sister were not always easy. She angered Etta by consistently arriving late for meals. On one of her note pads, Claribel recited the dialogue of a fight with Fred.

“Please do not get the book sticky, Fred.”

“Damn it! Shut up!”

“Well, you are holding the honey very near the book.”

“‘Go to the devil,’” he replied before throwing honey, pencil, book, and paper on the floor and leaving the room in a rage. In summation, Claribel noted, “They did not break but made the floor sticky.”

By the end of the long winter, in their increasingly cramped apartments, the sisters were eager to escape to Paris. The real question was why they had ever left France in the first place.