The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (2 page)

But in the general literature of 20th century art history, the full and accurate story of the two Cone sisters has been omitted. In this book, I have attempted to do what is long overdue: resurrect and bring to life two of the world's greatest art collectors, and to depict their undying passion for art that so many others initially despised, and that now is almost universally revered.

Mary Gabriel
Baltimore
July 5, 2002

. . . My two Baltimore ladies. . . are sisters—one of them. . . a great beauty, noble and glorious, lovely hair with ample waves in the old style—satisfied and dominating—the other with a majesty of a Queen of Israel. . . but with a depth of expression which is touching—always submissive to her glorious sister but attentive to everything. . .

—Henri Matisse to Simon Bussy, May 24, 1934

O
n December 17, 1930, Etta Cone waited anxiously in her Baltimore apartment for Henri Matisse to arrive. Eight stories above a once grand street, now the site of scattered gambling dens and prostitutes, Etta and her sister Claribel had built a virtual shrine to the French master. Like his paintings, their rooms off the dark halls of the Marlborough Apartments were vibrant with exotic patterns and bursting with color: Eastern rugs on the floor, needlework pillows on overstuffed chairs, and Indian shawls and Italian textiles that luxuriously draped every available surface.

And, as in so many Matisse paintings, there was a woman in the scene. But instead of the artist's willowy model, lounging in Moroccan pantaloons, the figure in this tableau was a sixty-year-old spinster sitting bolt upright.

The liberating styles of the Jazz Age left Etta unmoved. Heavy black fabric hung from her waist in layers and underlayers that hid every hint of the body beneath. Etta's handsome face was framed by thick dark eyebrows and a crown of silver hair drawn back in a knot—the same style she had worn for more than 30 years. Like a bird, with eyes trained to comprehend, she quietly watched the world.

Etta Cone was considered a bit deranged by at least some of her fellow citizens. At the very least, hers was a world apart. Outside her expensive apartment, America was suffering from the excesses of the previous frenetic decade. Wall Street had crashed with a mighty thud, ushering in the Great Depression, but Etta's world had not changed, nor had her annual income, which was about $60,000 at the time. She lived in her perch high above the city—a sentinel guarding a time capsule. Her home preserved the art from turn-of-the-century Paris—art that had given her young life meaning and purpose. Now, in her later years, she was sustained by that art and the memories that each piece evoked.

Etta, and for a shorter time her sister Claribel, made a career out of collecting. They spent the bulk of their fortunes on works by artists who, at the time, were dismissed as charlatans, or denounced as pornographers, and sometimes both. The Cones were oblivious to the criticism, selecting art without regard to fashion (at the time, Barbizon was all the rage), and also largely without expert advice, unless that advice came in the early years from Leo Stein and in later ones from Matisse himself.

In 1930, Matisse, for the first time, would see his works in the sisters’ home. Etta's only regret was that sister Claribel was not alive for his visit.

Etta first met Matisse in Paris in 1906, when the artist was so poor and in such disrepute that he vowed to stop painting
because, he said, it was driving him mad. So dire was his situation that while carrying his paintings home from an exhibition where he received nothing but ridicule, he considered burning his works for the insurance money. Etta was not an art collector at the time, but she came to the rescue and bought two of Matisse's works on paper out of a sense of “romantic charity,” which was the same reason she purchased a few drawings some months earlier from a young Spanish painter named Pablo Picasso.

In those days, the prim Miss Etta Cone was an “angel,” helping to support the artists seeking to launch an aesthetic revolution. In Paris, she could shed her strict Victorian standards, ignore the filth, the opium, the absinthe, the illegitimate children, and the ever-changing mistresses, and see only the men who needed her help to survive and paint. While Etta, at the beginning, didn't understand their art, it eventually consumed her as much as it consumed the artists who produced it. In fact, Etta and Matisse would argue years later over whether she had “made” him or he had “made” her. Their relationship was symbiotic. The artist could not exist without his collector, and the collector had no life without his art. Together, the two thrived.

By 1930, the Matisse collection Etta had assembled, with sister Claribel's help, was considered by some to be the most important in the United States. Fortune by then had also smiled on the artist. The once penniless Matisse had become the highest paid living artist of his time.

Matisse finally arrived in Baltimore just before lunch. The day began as cold and rainy, and by afternoon, snow had begun to fall. But inside the Cone apartments, warmth radiated from the walls and from a woman thrilled to be escorting her favorite artist through her family's suite of apartments. Normally, it could take Etta up to two hours to guide a visitor through the family collection because she would explain each work's rich history and recall anecdotes about that heady time in Paris when the art world revolved less around the official salons than it did the shabby Bâteau Lavoir in Montmartre, and a studio on the rue de Fleurus in Montparnasse. But Matisse had lived those stories, so she did not repeat them.

Claribel had once told Matisse “art and its appreciation are a God-given gift,” to which Matisse replied, “Yes, but sometimes the artist has to descend to hell to get it.” Yet there was no evidence of that hell on the Cone walls—only the stunning fruit of the artist's travail.

Matisse surveyed the Picassos hanging alongside Renoirs, Van Goghs, and Cézannes, but everywhere were his own paintings and sculptures. The Cone home was a harem of Matisse's women. His painted nudes beckoned from every room. Nearly every surface was dotted with his lustrous figures in bronze. After weeks in America, performing official duties as a judge at the Carnegie International Exhibition and meeting admiring crowds, Matisse must have finally felt at home. Later, in an interview, Matisse paid Etta the ultimate compliment. The Cone apartments, he said, were the perfect setting for his work.

Claribel and Etta were so different from America's other great collectors—Albert C. Barnes or Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner, for example. The latter two created temples to themselves and their treasures. The Cone collection, however, was a private affair gathered by two bachelorette sisters who lovingly kept their masterpieces in cramped apartments among bric-a-brac from around the world. Every wall was covered in layers of paintings, drawings, and prints. Even the bathtubs were employed as repositories for works of art. A friend of the artist once said Matisse liked to be so close to a model that he could touch her with one hand while painting with the other. The Cone collection afforded the sisters that same intimacy. The paintings that hung on their walls were their noisy companions—companions who were given the complete run of the place.

Matisse and Etta attended the symphony together that night, causing a stir in Baltimore, which was, despite its aspirations, a sleepy southern town. The artist's work had been the target of barbs by the
Sun's
most famous newspaper columnist, H.L. Mencken. But Etta braved convention to display her foreign friend. If Baltimore was looking for a bohemian, however, it came away from the encounter disappointed. The bespectacled artist in spats, with eyes as steady as a marksman's, looked much more like a well-fed German professor than the painter whose stabs of gloriously hideous color once earned him the title “wild beast.”

The artist spent the night in the apartment adjoining Etta's and departed for New York the next day. Among Baltimore's Jewish community, there had long been rumors that Matisse and Etta were lovers. Why else, went the speculation, would she spend so much money on his crazy pictures? And for many, his overnight visit only confirmed their suspicions.

But in fact no such relationship existed. Etta worshiped Matisse as an artist, perhaps because he committed to canvas the sensuous life she didn't dare live. She also venerated him because he was strong and bold and brilliant—a lion, in her eyes. Etta lived her life in the shadow of lions—her brother Moses, Gertrude and Leo Stein, and, of course, sister Claribel. Despite her revolutionary collection, Etta was nothing more than the perfect Victorian woman.

I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry. Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing! But I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall. And without love, I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want: consequence I do not want.

–Jane Austen,
Emma,
1816

C
laribel and Etta Cone were among thirteen children born to Herman Kahn of Bavaria, and his sweetheart Helen Guggenheimer, whom he married in Richmond, Virginia, in 1856. The young couple, now bearing the anglicized last name of Cone, did not stay long in Richmond, however.

The established Jewish community there scorned him as a new immigrant, the family history indicates, and his “friends” so wanted him out of town that they gave him a stock of goods and a horse and wagon to set himself up elsewhere as a salesman.

Cone moved his growing family to Jonesborough, Tennessee, where Etta and Claribel were born, but life was not easy there, either. The Civil War forced the closure of the store Herman Cone started with a cousin. Cone and his partner
were Conferederate sympathetizers. Many of their East Tennessee neighbors were Unionists. That, coupled with the order by General Ulysses S. Grant to expel “the Jews as a class” from Tennessee, compelled Cone to move his family to a farm to wait out the war.

After the fighting ended, Cone's reputation as a Confederate sympathizer lingered, and he and his partner found it necessary to add a Union man to their partnership in order to attract customers. But by 1870, it was evident that one of the three partners had to leave the business because it wasn't big enough to support the families of three men. Once again Herman Cone moved on, this time taking his brood north to Baltimore.

The move was not without its reasons. Southerners—black and white—hoping to escape the turmoil of the war years or the financial ruin of its aftermath, settled in the busy town of Baltimore, where shipping and rail businesses were thriving on Reconstruction era trade. Baltimore was home to a large German Jewish population among whom the Cone children could find suitable mates. The city was also about to enter its Golden Era.

But the place in which the Cones found themselves was by no means an example of civilization at its finest. In the second half of the 19th century, Baltimore was a border town. It straddled North and South, offering the best and worst of both.

In 1870, only about thirty percent of Baltimore's schoolage children attended classes. Sweatshops were rampant, with a steady stream of European immigrant workers flowing in from the port's Hamburg American line. Southwest Baltimore, not far from where Herman Cone opened a wholesale grocery store, was described as “foul streets, foul people, in foul tenements filled with foul air.” In the center of town, opium dens run by Chinese immigrants contributed to the general decadence of the place.

In addition, horse-drawn cars were the main means of transportation between the downtown and the city's outlying areas. But an epidemic wiped out many of the horses in 1872. Rather than stop the flow of cars entirely car owners hitched black men to the vehicles. That cruel spectacle, of men pulling wagons full of other people or goods, passed directly in front of the new Cone store.

Herman Cone and his two oldest sons, Moses and Ceasar, worked in the midst of the chaos not far from the city's waterfront. But the family resided well out of its reach—on Eutaw Place, an elegant boulevard northwest of the city's center that was styled after the Champs-Elysées in Paris and the Unter den Linden in Berlin.

Eutaw Place, the widest of Baltimore's streets, was divided in the center by a narrow park and dotted with fountains, benches, and flowering trees. From May to September, a canopy of leaves and flowers offered relief from the hot sun and intense humidity. Children played in the park under the watchful eyes of nurses and nannies. Along the street, massive homes were constructed by the families who dominated the city's retail and apparel industries. The Cone family home sat on the 1600 block of Eutaw Place, surrounded by a who's who of Baltimore gentry.

A photograph of Claribel in the 1880s shows a young woman with thick, dark hair wound into a bun and plaited in the back. Second oldest of three Cone daughters, she had the romantic look of the period. Dressed in flowing fabric and lace, she carried a single rose in her gloved hand. But the picture of nineteen-year-old Claribel was not that of a pretty girl; it was of a handsome one. Her back was straight and strong, her feet large, and her demeanor challenging. Her
voice, though melodious, boomed. She fired questions at her brothers’ friends and laughed raucously—women of the time were viewed most favorably when they emitted polite giggles, or when only the gentle swoosh of their skirts was heard.

The role of the proper Victorian woman was to protect and preserve the hearth, but Claribel hated women's work. She refused to assume charge of the family household after the marriage of her older sister, Carrie, and was a general nuisance unless busy reading. The summer after her high school graduation, when Claribel made it clear that those in her immediate circle didn't suit her, her parents sent her to a hotel in Atlantic City so she could meet a nice young man. But she mailed strange messages home that must have sent her parents’ hopes for marriage sinking.

“Today, for the first time, I succeeded in rising early and taking a stroll, which was enjoyable because I was entirely alone with my book and the ocean. . . .”

Claribel Cone was well-enough educated to realize that a woman aspiring to independence would encounter more than ample pitfalls during the courtship process, not to mention during marriage. The 19th-century woman was expected to subjugate herself to her husband—to become “less” than the man. She was supposed to strive for a “bee-stung” mouth, and if the shape didn't come naturally, to pepper her speech with words like “prunes and prisms” in order to force her lips into the proper configuration. She was to pretend she had no appetite (it was unladylike to enjoy food), and to dress in clothes that were, in effect, torture chambers.

Photographs show Claribel did not rebel against the clothing deemed appropriate for a woman of her age. Her waist was bound tight and her skirts hung heavy. But she would challenge the other part of the equation defining ideal womanhood—that a woman was not to develop intellectually,
because to do so would destroy her feminine nature.

In 1874, Dr. Edward Clark wrote that a great many American girls became ill because they were forcing their brains, through study, to use up the blood that was needed for menstruation. He called excessive education for women a “crime before God and humanity that physiology protests and that experience weeps over.”

In a speech to the Maryland Chirurgical Society in 1881, Professor William Goodell of Philadelphia issued a dire warning: there were grave dangers threatening the American home life, he said, because of a trend among women not to become mothers, an increasing number of divorces, and abortion. He advocated “redeeming women from the bondage of her education.”

Claribel did not heed the warnings. She would have none of the courtship, marital, or intellectual submission that her parents, and society, expected of her.

While most of the Cone family was irritated by the headstrong middle daughter, one family member seemed to enjoy Claribel's rebellion—her younger sister Etta. Etta delighted in Claribel's strength and was only too happy, while still in high school, to take on more household chores so her sister could continue at-home studies in botany and German.

Etta was physically similar to Claribel, with the same dark eyebrows and dark hair pulled back in a knot at the nape of her neck. She, too, was large boned, and slightly taller than Claribel. But while Claribel's physical size carried over to her personality, Etta simply seemed awkward. Where Claribel was fierce, Etta was shrinking. Where Claribel was direct, Etta was tentative. Where Claribel was noticeably brilliant, Etta barely displayed her intellect at all. Claribel was what Etta could not be, and Etta grew to adore her.

In 1884, Cone brothers Moses and Ceasar retired their father on a guaranteed annual income and took over the Cone family business with the help of two younger brothers, Monroe and Solomon. That left Herman Cone time to worry about his daughter Claribel's future and, with that in mind, he took her to Germany in 1886.

He and his twenty-one-year-old problem-child spent the fall and winter with relatives in Munich. Whether Herman was seeking a European spouse for his daughter is unclear. What is clear is that Claribel returned to the United States with a commitment—she announced she would study medicine.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a batch of popular novels told stories of conflicts between a young woman's “mistaken desire for medical education and her true vocation as a wife and mother.” The formulaic books had similar endings—the young woman abandons her studies and finds true fulfillment not in becoming a doctor, but in marrying one.

In Germany, a number of articles were written at the time on why women should not be allowed to practice medicine. One reason offered was that women were inferior because of lower brain weight.

The novels and articles were a backlash against reality. During the late-nineteenth century, U.S. women in significant numbers were becoming doctors.

In the mid-1800s, a Boston city directory listing “women physicians” included clairvoyants, Indian doctresses, and midwives. Thirty years later, the field had not only grown, but also became more regulated. The U.S. boasted more than 2,000 women doctors and four medical schools specifically for women—one each in Philadelphia and Chicago, and two in New York.

In February 1882, Baltimore joined those cities, opening the Women's Medical College with twenty-eight students. It
was founded on the premise that “women were ‘particularly fitted’ to treat diseases of women and children.” Its goal was to provide a medical education for ladies of the South and the adjacent Midwest and Western states. In 1886, Claribel enrolled at the Women's Medical College of Baltimore, graduating first in her class in 1890.

Women doctors at the time usually indicated their professional attainment by placing the letters “M.D.” after their names. But when Claribel printed her calling cards, she declared herself to be “Dr. Claribel Cone,” demonstrating to others that she considered herself a doctor first, and a woman second.