The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (23 page)

She decided to fill in the gaps of their collection, making it an accurate and full representation of modern French painting. It would be a labor of love, but the task would also give her life the direction it lacked, now that Claribel was gone. It
was also a project Claribel would have never undertaken—she wouldn't have had the patience.

By spring, Etta had decided to return to Europe to embark on her new mission. A letter from Margot Matisse about her father's work that year no doubt sparked an interest, adding to Etta's desire to leave Baltimore.

The Steins were also eager to resume selling to her. Michael wrote to Gertrude in a letter that year “. . . I am practically sure that Etta is not prepared for any big deal this year: but shall try to pull off a small one. . . .” Apparently the Steins were not overly concerned about their friend's recent loss—except as it might derail their sales plans.

Etta's records of purchases that spring and summer indicate that Michael Stein scored his “small” deal. Etta purchased fourteen Picasso drawings, most likely from Gertrude's collection, for 50,000 francs.

But Etta did not buy any paintings. Perhaps they were too alive for her mood that season. She did, however, buy sculpture, including the remarkable Matisse
Grand nu assis
(Large Seated Nude).

The figure was no longer the beautiful, sensuous, lithe thing of his paintings, but a woman with an almost masculine form exuding strength, self-assurance, and ease. The sculpture was a stylistic departure for Matisse and a change for Etta, who had previously confined her choices to the serene and lovely. The purchase was one Claribel would have made, and perhaps that was what Etta had in mind at the time of the purchase.

In August, Etta was in Luçerne where a cousin, Siegfried Rosengart, had opened a branch of Berlin's Thannhauser Gallery. To the restless and lonely Etta, Luçerne was a cool and neutral oasis that held all the ingredients for a happy stay. No personal history there would prompt sad memories,
as in Lausanne, but Luçerne offered the same easy life she had experienced with Claribel in Lausanne.

It was a place that rose early to the peal of church bells. But the pace was not a hurried or rigid one—champagne was a breakfast beverage choice that could be indulged in without raising eyebrows. And Luçerne had the added charm of Siegfried, who was as eager to discuss art as Etta was.

Etta took a suite at the National Hotel, the most monumental of the great hotels along Lake Luçerne. But while most visitors cast their gaze toward the crystalline, green-blue lake and the picture postcard view of the mountains facing the National, Etta focused on the rear of the hotel. In the shadows of the massive structure, just across the street, was Siegfried's shop.

Every morning at eleven, Etta would sweep her skirts around the corner of the hotel, away from the crowds of vacationers, and into the sanctuary of the gallery. It was not necessarily Luçerne that held her, but the proximity of art and conversation—conversation that usually centered on her collection. Since Claribel's death, Etta had lacked an intimate with whom she could discuss the thing she cared about most in life. In her cousin Siegfried, she found that person.

That summer was to be the first of her annual visits to Luçerne. As if to mark her place, she bought a Manet pastel on canvas,
Femme au Chapeau
(Lady in a Bonnet), from Siegfried's gallery for $17,500. It was the most Etta had ever spent on a work of art and nearly rivaled Claribel's Cézanne for extravagance.

The summer was also a turning point for Etta—she was making her first trip to Europe since 1905 without Claribel's company. She somehow managed to get through it—even enjoy herself—despite her sister's absence. At the age of sixty, and forced to come into her own, Etta emerged from
under Claribel's shadow.

But the year 1930 was to become still more important for her for yet another reason. When she returned to America, a November letter awaited her. “My father,” wrote Margot Matisse, “has agreed to make a large decoration for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and is obligated to travel to America. He thinks he will arrive in New York about the 18th of December and go directly to the foundation. But my father would be happy to be able to come to visit you if you are in Baltimore at the end of December and if the visit would not inconvenience you.”

Etta never dreamed that the great artist who was always her favorite would see his works in her home, or take the time to pay her the honor and tribute of a Baltimore visit.

There would be no inconvenience, she immediately replied. Etta Cone would happily receive Monsieur Matisse.

Art has often been concerned with religion, and something often said of religion can also be said of art, that it is what man does with his loneliness.

—Leo Stein,
Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose,
1947

I
f ever there were doubts that Etta would continue the tradition of collecting, which was generally and mistakenly regarded to be the province of her late sister Claribel, Henri Matisse's visit to Baltimore on December 17, 1930, dispelled them. Etta was only one of two collectors the great French artist sought out during that American visit, and he left Baltimore agreeing not only to do Claribel's portrait, but one of Etta as well.

The following morning, the Baltimore
Sun
featured Matisse's visit prominently, describing him as one of the world's most important living artists and remarking—as had so many others—that the reserved and kindly gentleman did not at all match his artwork.

A
Sun
reporter interviewed Etta's personal maid, Minnie Harvey, who said, “Oh, Mister Matisse is a nice man, an easy gentleman to serve. Of course, Miss Cone knew what he liked and gave him nothing but the best.”

But the appearance in Baltimore of the French master did more than just confirm Etta's intention to collect. More importantly, it brought her and Matisse closer together. He had now seen first-hand the loving care that his works received in Etta's home, and he had glimpsed, for the first time, the true nature of the collection the sisters had amassed.

It was not at all like that of Albert Barnes, whom he had also visited and who kept his art behind the limestone walls of his mansion, protected by a piked iron fence. Barnes’ collection was on a grand scale, large enough to match his eccentricity and his ego. Etta's collection was as intimate as the room in which Matisse labored in Nice. It was a true and fitting home for his works.

With Claribel gone, Matisse also emerged as a kind of collecting partner with Etta. Siegfried Rosengart said Matisse would put aside three paintings for Etta each year, and if she could not decide which to take, she would ask Matisse, “What would you like us to have in our collection?” Rosengart said the buying and selling from then on became a “unique collaboration” between the two.

When Etta was in Paris, Matisse sometimes accompanied her to the framers, taking care to meet her at the Lutetia if his daughter Margot was unavailable. Etta, in turn, would await his visits with special glee. Her nephew, Harold, who accompanied her to Europe, said she ordered azaleas for her hotel room and arranged them in a silver pot for the artist's visits, because she said he liked the interplay of silver and petals. Matisse would dine with her, entertaining her young nephew with antics like balancing ashtrays on top of wine bottles.

Matisse and Etta, now intimate friends, were bound together by their long personal history, and by their love of his art. She once complained to him about his rising prices: “After all, Monsieur Matisse, I helped make you.” To which
he replied, “No, Mademoiselle Cone, I made you.” In fact, the two longtime friends “made” each other.

During the winter of 1931, Etta basked in the joy of having hosted Matisse at her Baltimore home. “The visit of your father has given me pleasure that is impossible to express,” she wrote to his daughter Margot. “He was at our home like a member of my family and my only regret will always be that my sister did not have the pleasure.”

“My father was very touched by your reception of him and enchanted with the moments he spent with you—he has told us about it in great detail,” Margot answered. “Upon his return my father showed us the photographs of the doctor [Claribel] which he brought back. He wanted to be relieved of all agitation from moving, to be at last in the right frame of mind for work, to study the photographs with a drawing in mind. It is, I believe, the best method in order that his effort will give the best result.”

The move Margot referred to was to a larger studio. When Matisse returned to France from his visit to Etta and to Barnes, he was obliged to rent an abandoned film studio in Nice large enough to accommodate the Barnes murals. He would spend the next three years working on projects that were wildly different in scope—the Barnes paintings, at one extreme, and a commission to illustrate a book of poems,
Poèsies de Stéphane Mallarmé,
on the other.

The Barnes murals were huge and robust, big enough in size and subject to command attention in a public space. The Mallarmé drawings were intimate and quiet works, not meant to dominate, but rather to enhance, the poet's words. The two projects simultaneously consumed Matisse.

Despite that heavy workload, he took on a third project—his small commission from Etta. In 1931, he began his drawings of the Cone sisters, making study after study from memory
and photographs of his two loyal collectors. He worked on the drawings for three years.

While Matisse was busy in Nice, Etta decided to embark on a project of her own—one that she saw as a tribute to Claribel. Etta wanted to publish a catalogue of their collection and, seemingly without regard to cost, she began the book in 1931 with the help of her cousin Siegfried in Luçerne.

It was not to be a minor listing of the Cone collection works, with merely a smattering of pictures. It was to be a large volume—with full-page images of each work and a face-page detailing the history of each piece. The project was a massive one that consumed not only Etta, but Siegfried, as they struggled to document the ever-growing collection.

In March 1932, Matisse wrote to Etta that he wanted to visit her again when he was in America—this time to install the Barnes murals. He completed one set in France, only to discover that the measurements given him were wrong, so he had to paint yet another set of murals. The job was an enormous undertaking for the aging artist.

When he finally arrived in the United States in the spring of 1933, he was exhausted. He did not visit Baltimore, but wrote Etta from New York, “Dear Mademoiselle, I leave New York without having come to Baltimore. I arrived the eleventh of May and leave the 29th after having installed in Marion the marvelous decoration. Dr. Barnes is very content. He will open the foundation for a few days at the beginning of October but you can always ask to visit it. I am very tired and am obligated to return to rest. . . Believe, dear mademoiselle, in the expression of my respectful and entirely devoted sentiments.”

Etta was no doubt disappointed that Matisse did not visit,
but she was even more concerned about the artist's health. They were both getting on in years. She herself was “always tired,” she wrote daughter Margot. “The visits with artists and curators have become very frequent. The contact with intellectuals gives me great pleasure but it distracts me from accomplishing the work that I have begun.”

During the winter, Etta worked on her catalogue. During the summer, she bought. For Matisse, her patronage during those years was particularly important. The Depression put a halt to most collecting. Even many of Matisse's most important buyers, including Barnes, held back during the 1930s.

By 1933, a quarter of the U.S. labor force was unemployed. The national income had been cut by half. The suicide rate, though reaching its highest level ever in 1931, was surpassed in 1932. Many Americans were desperate. Squatter camps called “Hoovervilles” had sprung up in almost every major city, and were occupied by people who had lost everything.

Outside Etta's windows in Baltimore, one in eight of the city's residents had no work. Bread lines had opened in nineteen locations. But, as if oblivious to her surroundings, Etta continued to spend vast sums on art. In fact, she purchased three of Matisse's four most important paintings between 1930 and 1935. And in 1933, at Matisse's request, she purchased the drawings for the Mallarmé book of poems.

The artist wanted to keep all of his work on the book together, so he asked Etta to buy 250 items—the original drawings, printed and rejected copper plates, three proof volumes, and the signed first copy of the printed edition. He trusted that Etta, more than anyone else, would care for the materials and not disperse them.

Etta was thrilled with the drawings, which she purchased, for a huge 140,000 francs, in March 1933. The transaction
coincided with what was probably the lowest point of American capitalism. She wrote to Margot, “It is the most beautiful illustrated book I have ever seen.” Acting on the artist's behalf, almost as a fiduciary would, Etta guarded the set in her Baltimore apartment, and rarely displayed it.

The just-purchased Matisse line drawings of nudes were charged with eroticism, and explicitly carnal. Image after image depicted women intertwined in sensuous repose. Their bodies were soft and submissive and sated, and could never be explained away merely as an artist's device. The man who did the drawings desired the bodies he drew, and that desire leaped off each page.

One of the great mysteries concerning Etta was how she could surround herself with a virtual harem of nude and seminude women and still maintain her image as the prudish spinster from Baltimore. At sixty-two, she was purchasing art that was sexually bold, even by current standards. And yet she lived her life as if she had just stepped out of a Jane Austen novel, hungering for “approbation.”

In her dress, she was still covered neck to ankles with pounds of fabric. And she still kept her sexuality hidden. Even through the 1920s, when lesbianism was considered cosmopolitan, she confined her relationships to “passionate friendships.” She once told a great niece that people believed there was “something between Gertrude and Alice,” but she did not think so. “After all,” she asked, “what can two women do?”

Contrary to her protested naiveté, the art that Etta purchased showed she had a keen sense of the erotic, especially the voluptuous images produced by Matisse. In pretending that she knew nothing of carnality, was she simply trying to keep her true nature and the depth of her knowledge hidden
from her family?

Most likely. Even Alice B. Toklas, who undoubtedly did have “something” with Gertrude, was prudish in her language. She was known to use the word “compromise” instead of “seduce,” “outspoken” in place of “shameless, “impure” rather than “bisexual,” and “inadequate” in lieu of “dead drunk.”

That summer, Etta headed back to Europe, this time in the company of her sister-in-law, Laura, and Laura's two children, Edward and Frances. Etta's traveling was no minor undertaking. She brought with her as many as twenty pieces of luggage that had to be counted at several points along the journey to make sure none had been misplaced.

She was met at the Paris train station by Raymond Wahl, whom she hired each summer to act as her chauffeur. He would drive her in his black Minerva wherever she traveled. At the end of the season, he would deposit her at the train station for the start of her return trip to Baltimore.

Etta always stayed at the Lutetia in Paris—if possible in the same room each year, but at the very least on the same floor so she could be attended to by Rachel, a housekeeper who knew her habits. Every morning began with a group breakfast, during which she and her companions would plot the day's activities.

Etta allowed herself one excursion per day. She kept her passport, money, and valuables in pockets in her numerous petticoats, which she referred to as her “underground.”