The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (16 page)

Paris had seen two significant marriages while Etta and Claribel were away in Baltimore. Mike and Sally's son, Allan, married a dancer named Yvonne. And Matisse's daughter Margot married the art historian Georges Duthuit. The Cone sisters were fond of both Allan and Margot. They had known the Stein boy since he was a child.

Margot Matisse, always attentive to the Cone sisters, sometimes worked as an intermediary between them and her father. Sometimes she designed frames for the Matisse pictures they bought. During the summer of 1924, Pierre Matisse, the artist's son, was also married, and the Cones fell in with the happy families during that summer of joy in Paris. In fact, the harmony of the season was only diminished by a letter from Gertrude at the end of June asking Etta to buy the manuscript for
Three Lives
, which Etta had typed nearly twenty years before.

“I want to tell you something a propos of the thing you mentioned in connection with the autographed
Three Lives
selling for $13,” Gertrude said. “It seems that the latest passion of the art collectors in America is the buying of manuscripts ever since Quinn made such a success with Conrad and
Ulysses
manuscripts that he bought through the editors of the transatlantic.

“Some one has suggested my selling the manuscript of Three Lives for a thousand dollars, I don't suppose that you want to pay any such price for a manuscript but since you had a connection with that manuscript I want to tell you about it before I consider doing anything. I think it's kind of foolish but I wouldn't want you to think that I would sell it to any one else without telling you about it first,
a bientot
Gtude.”

Gertrude, needing money, was trying to coax Etta into parting with some of hers. When the Steins were short of money, the Cones had bought more than a few paintings from
them. But, for Etta, this particular proposition was different. It crossed the line into indelicacy. She felt hurt, being offered—and at such a high price—the very thing she had typed lovingly and without charge. Etta, who referred to the manuscript as “partly” hers, now saw a $1,000 price attached to it. The incident was evidence of just how far apart Gertrude and Etta had grown.

To be sure, Gertrude was now a “famous personality”—just as she and Picasso had fantasized when they were younger—and had a habit of rejecting old friends who could no longer be of any use to her.

But Etta's estrangement from Gertrude was also Alice's work to some extent. She was territorial when it came to Gertrude, frequently and purposefully driving away those who had had intimate relationships with Gertrude. She would eventually drive off Hemingway, too. And she had already cut off Gertrude's American friend Mabel Dodge. Alice could easily vanquish Etta.

Etta responded a day later to Gertrude's letter. “I do indeed appreciate your kind thought of me in realizing my personal pride and interest in your
Three Lives,”
she wrote. “I simply have to face the truth and that is, that I am seriously considering putting all I can spare of what I have left of my income into a Renoir painting. This, with other expenses somewhat heavier than usual are handicapping me a bit this year.”

In fact, Etta did not buy a Renoir that year, but she could not come out directly and say she was hurt by Gertrude's proposition—though it was common knowledge among her close associates that she was.

She would have been even more hurt had she understood the duplicity of the Stein family's relations with the Cones. Michael Stein, who had gained the sisters’ utmost trust, also
acted—without disclosure—as an agent for Gertrude and Alice in cajoling the Cones out of their money.

Shortly after Etta refused to buy Gertrude's manuscript, Michael wrote Gertrude that he would try to “work” Etta “for MSS of the 3 lives.” In another case he wrote Alice, “The Cones came last night & Sally at once got busy for Gertrude. She has sold 9000 francs worth without the Favre pictures. Pretty swifty as Allan would say. . . .”

For all their eccentricities, the Cones were loyal, devoted friends and would have been shocked to think that the Steins, especially Michael and Sally, were anything less. In letters, Claribel described them as family. In fact, Claribel scolded Etta in a letter that fall, holding up the Steins as models of excellent behavior.

“You train people to take you pretty much for granted and they count—not what you do in your favor—but what you do not do against you,” she wrote. “The Steins are an example of a principle I have observed—the people who do the most for you are always the people who evidence most pleasure in little attentions you show them.”

Claribel even took into account Michael Stein's supposedly delicate sensibilities when considering whether to invite him along to see George Bernard Shaw's
Mrs. Warren's Profession,
a play about prostitution. “I am not quite sure,” she concluded, “but that the play is a bit too ‘
intime,
’ shall we say naughty, for Mike to see.”

In truth, the Cone sisters never understood the Steins. Claribel was too disinterested in her fellow human beings to recognize their scheming. Etta was not shrewd enough.

E
tta Cone began collecting in March 1898 by authorizing a bidder to use $300 to buy as many Theodore Robinson paintings as he could at an estate sale in New York. Her money bought five paintings.

Theodore Robinson, Mother and Child, mid-1880s, oil on canvas. BMA Collection.

H
erman and Helen Cone moved their eight children to Baltimore in 1871 from Tennessee and made their home on Eutaw Place, among the city's wealthiest families.

c. 1895. BMA Collection.

M
oses Cone, the eldest of the Cone siblings, was called the “denim king” in the press because the Cone mills produced the world's largest supply of denim.

BMA Collection.

C
easar Cone began the Cone Export and Commission Company with his brother Moses, and gave Claribel and Etta an annual income for life.

BMA Collection.

E
tta Cone played the piano throughout her life and used the medium of music to establish some of her closest friendships.

c. 1900. BMA Collection.

I
n 1901, Etta Cone, her cousin Hortense Guggenheimer (not pictured), and her friend Harriet Clark traveled to Europe on the first of Etta's many trips abroad.

BMA Collection.