The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (25 page)

Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang, and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her mistake, nor sickened because of her regret. Time went on, and she dressed herself up picturesquely, as she had formerly done. . .

—Thomas Hardy,
Tess of the d'Urbervilles,
1891

E
tta's great sorrow passed like all the others. For her age and various ailments, she was a resilient woman who would not let an emotional thrashing by Gertrude Stein cripple her for long. Matisse had said that his paintings had a healing effect, and perhaps for Etta they did.

Since 1922, the Cone collection—that massive grouping of objects and art—had threatened to overtake the sisters’ apartments. Behind the glass-paneled door covered in Japanese brocade, a visitor entered another world. The sisters’ textile collection alone comprised more than 1,000 items, including more than 100 Turkish towels used in harems, and arguably the finest collection of lace in America. An expert from the Detroit Institute of the Arts called the Cone textile collection second in the world only to Vienna's.

Years of study had produced an extraordinary art library.
More than a thousand volumes overflowed into an unused kitchen.

The walls were so covered in art that it was difficult to walk down the narrow halls. In some cases, it was impossible to step back far enough to admire the works. In Etta's bedroom hung her latest acquisitions, which she examined in bed—a vantage point, she felt, where she could study them best. Her bedroom was also the sanctuary where she would review favorite older pieces. Though her collection possessed a sampling of works by the recognized masters of French painting, her bedroom was almost exclusively the domain of Henri Matisse.

Etta no doubt cherished the time she could spend quietly among her things, but those quiet times had become less frequent. The Cone Collection attracted hordes of art pilgrims because, as one expert said, “there was no comparable gathering of the work of Matisse accessible anywhere in America.”

Increasingly Etta also received requests from museums and galleries in the United States and Europe interested in including her pieces in their shows—if they could not have all the collection's pieces permanently. When the requests were from the Baltimore Museum of Art, Etta most often agreed. If the requests were from Matisse himself, she always consented, and sent her precious works overseas to exhibitions he designated as worthy.

With all these later year transactions, Etta had the advice and counsel of Adelyn Breeskin, now the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the indispensable help of BMA staff members. Breeskin herself patiently acquiesced to Etta's demands, however odd they might be.

Etta, for example, insisted that, when carrying art from her apartment, everyone, even burly moving men, must wear
white gloves, despite the fact that Etta's own staff took less care with the work. One visitor remembered seeing, with horror, a Van Gogh in Claribel's room hung upside down after being dusted. Breeskin was earning Etta's trust, so that when the time came, the Baltimore Museum of Art continued to stand first in line for her hugely valuable collection—a collection she knew would forever draw art fans from around the world.

As Etta's fame as a collector grew, she increasingly became the target of aspriring artists, who hoped to win her financial support, and were not afraid to beg for it. Letters arrived frequently at her home from numerous young painters who lavished her with gushy praise, to which she, in her loneliness, often succumbed.

If she liked the artists well enough, she bought their work. Leon Kroll, whose paintings Etta bought, wrote her numerous letters saying how much her friendship meant to him. On several envelopes containing Kroll's letters, Etta noted in her own hand that the enclosed missive was “lovely.”

The artist Ben Silbert flooded her with letters of his travels, and described in intricate detail his works in progress. Etta was obviously flattered by the attention, and may not have suspected that the correspondents were at least partly motivated by their own financial considerations.

But, in a new round of letters from Leo, she recognized that old cry for cash. Leo Stein was once again trying to make his living as a painter and proposed that she join a group of collectors who would buy a painting of his a year for $100. This, he said, would help tide him over until “I can get to exhibiting and perhaps get somewhere.” It was the same scheme Matisse proposed at the beginning of his career, but it hadn't worked for Matisse, and it wouldn't work for Leo either.

Leo later wrote to Etta from Florence, “The prospects that I had formed for this winter in America came to nothing. After I wrote to you Nina continued ill and for worse and I had to give up all projects whatever. I didn't write again as I heard nothing from you. . . But anyway, Nina wants me to write to you. . . well, it's a beautiful world and everyone must be happy to be in it. Leo.” On the envelope, Etta wrote “hard up.”

A Baltimore artist, Aaron Sopher, was luckier. He ultimately sold Etta 142 works, and later recalled, “I would come in there a poor artist and she a grand lady.” Sopher visited Etta often at her apartment, but to him she was more an institution than a person. Etta, said Sopher, appeared to him like “Queen Victoria,” with her black dress sweeping the floor. And though she was small in height, he said, she appeared tall because she was so imposing.

She was also a remote figure who studied the art he brought her, saying little by way of small talk. In fact, in all his visits, Sopher said Etta never smiled. The artist's seven-year-old daughter once asked Etta, who appeared to have so much in the way of material things, what else she could possibly want. The much-pursued Miss Cone replied, “I'd like to have one true friend.”

In the spring, Etta was back on the
Statendam
, heading to Europe, where at least one special friend, Monsieur Matisse, awaited her each year. On her voyage, she always had the same stateroom going east, and a corresponding room on the opposite side of the ship on her return trip westward.

Her life, in fact, had become a ritual of coming and going. In the summer, she bought, and in the winter, she displayed. Her pursuits were as regular as a salaried job, and she had not yet reached the age of retirement. But the Europe she returned to in 1935 was very much changing, and the changes would force her to rethink her routine.

France's years of economic depression after World War I
produced political and social turmoil. In February 1934, the public's general frustration, along with protests over political corruption, triggered Parisian riots that left seventeen people dead and 2,000 injured.

While the country was being torn apart from within, a breeze blowing from Germany once again carried the scent of war. Hitler, named chancellor of Germany in 1933, had begun his aggressive program to restore that country to its pre-World War I strength. He denounced the Versailles Treaty that had cost his country much in reparations.

Michael and Sally Stein decided it was time to leave Paris. For the past ten years, they had lived in a house outside the city called Les Terraces. It had a beautiful view of St. Cloud and the roofs of Paris. Inside, its walls were covered in paintings. But in 1935 they left that home to return to California with their grandson, Danny. After 30 years abroad, they quit Europe and settled in Palo Alto, as far from the brewing conflict as possible.

Etta's summer abroad in 1935 was unusually quiet. She bought only one painting, Matisse's
Les yeux bleus
(The Blue Eyes), which she purchased from Margot in Paris. The painting was of a young Russian woman named Lydia Delectorskaya, who had worked as Matisse's assistant on the Barnes mural and been a companion and nurse for Madame Matisse in 1934. But beginning in 1935, Lydia played an increasingly important role in the artist's life—first as his model, then as secretary, household manager, and hostess and, for the rest of his life, companion.

Madame Matisse, confined to her bed since the early 1930s, was acutely depressed, replaced by a young woman who was giving the sixty-five-year-old artist a new life. The Matisse family was distressed by the affair. By no means was it his first, but it was the most significant, and it threatened
to split the family apart.

When Amelie Matisse had finally had enough of the situation, she asked her husband to choose between her and Lydia. Lydia won. Madame Matisse shrieked what she might have been suffering silently for years, “You may be a great artist, but you're a filthy bastard.” The couple, however, did not divorce, and, to the outside world, seemed to continue much as they always had.

Etta knew nothing of the Matisses’ split until years later, when she received word from Margot that her mother was very badly off. “My God, so many terrible things have arrived at our home,” wrote Margot with considerable bitterness. “I am at this moment close to my mother who you should know has lived alone since March. My father lives someplace else. The news could not surprise you. The drama was expected. My mother alone, with the blindness that is general among wives as it concerns their home, did not see it coming.

“A separation after 41 years of living together, and you know what that life was. If I say that my father used the reason that my mother impeded his work and that only his work and the protection of that work is what he is guarding in separating their lives, you will think like me that the reason is false and that he is looking for life elsewhere. I only see my father rarely. . . I will never talk to you again of his work.”

But that official notice from Margot concerning the state of the Matisse household came in 1939. Etta had apparently been spared the drama during its early years. In fact, Etta bought the fruits of the artist's liaison with his young lover. In 1936, she purchased the
Grand nu couché
(Large Reclining Nude), better known as the
The Pink Nude
, a major piece depicting a fully nude Lydia lounging on a print background. The artist gave Etta twenty-two photographs documenting the development of the large painting from its first stage in
May 1935 through its completion in October of that year.

During that 1936 summer abroad, Etta made up for a lack of purchases the year before by buying with a frenzy. She purchased twenty-three pieces of art, including works by Braque, Manet, Matisse, Renoir, Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, de Chirico, and Picasso.

Etta bought the Picassos even though her interest in the artist had sharply diminished. She had no time for Cubism, though she was said to be the subject of Picasso's shattered portrait,
Femme a l'eventail
(Woman with a Fan). She was not intrigued by his post-Cubist works, either.

But her duty to develop a collection representative of modern French painting required her to buy works by the artist, who, along with Matisse, had been central to its development. She had not seen Picasso for years, in part because it would have embarrassed her to see an artist whose work she bought but no longer actively supported.

Etta's unusual number of purchases in 1936 may also have been an indication that she knew her time in Europe was running out, and she felt she had to collect as much as she could while she was still able to visit. It was not that Etta was physically unable to make the trip, but that the political situation in Europe grew increasingly tense each year.

Italy, now led by the fascist dictator Mussolini, had invaded Ethiopia. Germany had sent a force of 22,000 troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. And civil war had erupted in Spain. All around, France was surrounded by war and hatred. Fear was everywhere, and France was reluctantly beginning to re-arm.

During the next two years, 1937 and 1938, Etta returned to Europe, spending thousands of dollars on art as she went. In Luçerne, she purchased a Degas for $1,080, a Gauguin for $15,000, a Picasso on paper for $1,800, as well as a Modigliani
and an Ingres. In Paris, she bought Matisses, a Cézanne, a Toulouse-Lautrec, and a Rouault. She squirreled away her prizes, as if fortifying for a long winter, while France and the world conserved provisions in case of war.

By 1938, Germany had invaded Austria, Mussolini had proclaimed Libya part of Italy, and domestic violence had erupted in France. Even the United States geared up its war machine. After much hand-wringing by politicians and continual and blatant provocation, France declared war on Germany in 1939. The majority of Americans believed the United States would eventually be drawn into the conflict.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

—W.H. Auden,
Ten Songs,
March 1939

E
tta returned to Baltimore to wait out the war. There was no reason for her to think it would not end soon, and that she would not soon resume her travels. Her collection was full, but not complete, and she no doubt felt the agitation of a job left partly done.

But 1939 would be a dreary year for her. Not only was she to stay in the United States for the entire year—the first time since 1922—but the situation in Europe grew darker by the day. In the fall of 1938, reports trickled back to the United States of a German pogrom called
Kristallnacht,
which resulted in the disappearance of 20,000 Jews in Germany alone.

As Etta read and listened to dispatches from abroad, she found herself saddened by her own personal tragedies. Two of her brothers, Sydney and Sol, died in 1939. With their deaths, just four of the original thirteen Cone siblings survived.

Etta bought a sentimental Picasso painting that year,
Mere et
enfant
(Mother and Child). Its soft pastel tones and comforting subject—a mother's clear but unspoken love for her daughter—were tinged with melancholy. It must have spoken to her mood. She was surrounded by her ever-growing family and her nieces and nephews, but the original Cones were dying off, she had never married nor had children, and the Europe she loved was denied her, its symbols of civilization perhaps in the process of being irreparably damaged.

Etta also began to feel her own mortality. She received a letter from Sally Stein, who was similarly alone with her grandson now that Mike had died: “My dear, I am living in the past a great part of the time. . . living on here in the home that Mike chose and arranged with every contrivance for convenience—surrounded by the things that meant beauty and experience to us. . . .”

Etta must have felt the same way. She was living among her things and the memories they evoked, but increasingly the people who were part of those memories were departing.

Etta split her time between Baltimore, New York, and Blowing Rock, North Carolina. She bought what art she collected through New York dealers, including Pierre Matisse, who had a gallery in the city.

At her best socially when people came to see her collection, she guided them through the paintings and sculpture, watching their reactions as they looked at the works and heard the stories behind them. Otherwise, she was shy in company—some people thought her mean and haughty. She was neither. Increasingly, she simply chose to let her art speak for her.

If Etta was quiet with her memories, so was Matisse. The artist spent the summer of 1939 in Paris at the Lutetia, but
when France declared war, he headed south. He even secured a Brazilian visa and passage to Rio, but decided not to leave.

“When I saw everything in such a mess,” said Matisse, “I had them reimburse my ticket. It seemed to me as if I would be deserting. If everyone who has any value leaves France, what remains of France?” Instead, he returned to Nice, where he lived in a huge, pink Victorian hotel outside the city.

Matisse was nostalgic for the old days and wrote Etta in October 1939: “We did not see you this summer and we supposed that the rumblings of war made you put off your usual trip to Paris—you were only too justified, alas, in doing so. All the same we would like to hear your news—to know if all is going well with you, if your health is satisfactory—a word from you about this would indeed give us pleasure.

“The whole family is well, but Pierre who had not yet gone back to New York was mobilized in Paris—his wife is managing his gallery and Jean has also been mobilized in Paris. I do not want to talk to you about the sadness of the moment which everyone knows about.

“As for me, I am always working happily. When it becomes easier to ship books I will send you an album of drawings. . . and another one of color reproductions of paintings from the same publishers. . . Wishing you good health and also that this terrible war may not be as dreadful as one might expect it to be, I send you our very best, affectionately and devotedly, Henri Matisse.”

But by November, his mood was less optimistic. He wrote, “You would say that I work always, more than ever—at this moment, what better way to forget?”

In 1940, another of Etta's brothers, Julius, died, just as the world appeared to be imploding. Europe was at war. Hitler was marching virtually unimpeded through Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. He began aerial
bombardments of England, and entered Paris unopposed.

To Etta, it must have seemed inconceivable that her other home was now occupied by an anti-Semitic army, and it must have made her feel even more isolated. Paris had been synonymous with happiness for her since 1905, when she first fell in love with its spirit. Now Europe's great lady was being trampled on by a beast and his minions, who had no appreciation or regard for her splendor.

There was one bright spot for her amidst the growing darkness, and that was the discovery of “one true friend.” Etta had met a German refugee named Lily Schwartz, hiring her to play four-handed piano with her in Baltimore.

The two became intimate. Miss Schwartz was a widow in her forties with no family or ties in America, and thus could devote all her time to the seventy-year-old Etta. The association enlivened Etta's life in the same way the relationship with Lydia had energized Matisse's.

Etta's years in Baltimore during the war were marked by a steady stream of visitors from around the world. In fact, she was visited by a who's who of art world figures hoping to see—and perhaps win—the now-renowned collection.

Margot Matisse's husband, Georges Duthuit, visited in 1941. He wrote Etta: “I had for many years cherished the desire to know your collection more intimately but in reality, I had not imagined that it was so unusual and important. You and your sister have erected a monument of the art of your time that seems to me to be without comparison anywhere.”

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso's old Paris dealer, visited her and wrote, “I still remember the wonderful hours spent at your home.”

The art historian Herbert Read saw Etta's collection and
remarked, “It was one of the most memorable experiences of this visit of mine to America.”

And Alfred Barr, Jr., the reigning authority on Matisse, said the Cone Matisses, taken as a whole, far surpassed those of any museum in the world.

While Etta surely enjoyed the praise, she became in the next several years less inclined to show her collection or to have people in to visit it. She had received all the accolades she desired, and wanted time to be alone with her art. A lifetime of collecting required contemplation. She had, after all, purchased the pieces for her own pleasure, and in the 1940s—now stranded in America—she would take the time to enjoy them.

Her correspondence with Matisse continued despite the war. Each year he would send Christmas greetings, and keep her up-to-date on his situation through letters. They were two elderly people exchanging stories and reminiscing in a world dominated by young people bent on killing.

They had known each other for more than thirty years and had gone through much. The physical distance would continue to divide them, but their thoughts likely drifted back to happier times, when they themselves were young, and the world revolved around their bohemian Paris.

In 1941, surgery left Matisse physically drained. He wrote Etta, “For three months I have had to remain in bed and I think often of you, also of my other old and dear friends, and I wanted to tell you, that is the object of this letter.”

Etta responded, “Dear Monsieur Matisse, Nothing in the world could give me the pleasure of your charming letter written on May 20. It is real evidence that your health is returning and I am very happy. The good news of Mme. Matisse and Marguerite and Jean is also welcome.” But Etta admitted to him, “My life without my annual visit to France is empty.”

Etta also corresponded regularly with the artist's son Pierre, now back in New York. It was through him that she learned the terrifying news that both Madame Matisse and Margot Matisse, while working for the French underground, had been arrested by the Gestapo. Margot was captured by the Germans in Brittany, tortured, and sent to Germany in a train, then to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Madame Matisse, arrested the following day, was sentenced to six months in jail for helping her daughter.

Because of an Allied air raid, Margot managed to escape before she arrived at the concentration camp, but the seventy-three-year-old Madame Matisse remained in prison for some time before being released. Pierre's friend wrote, “I have never seen such supreme courage and heroism in my life. In spite of her terrible experience, Mme. Matisse carries her head high.”

Jean Matisse was also involved in the resistance—he hid dynamite in his sculptures. But Henri Matisse was not able to aid the resistance. Enfeebled by duodenal cancer, he convalesced in Nice while his family fought against Germany.

At the end of the war, after the Germans agreed to surrender, the aging artist was honored. In 1945, the Salon d'Automne was dedicated to Matisse. It was the only one-man show featuring a living artist ever mounted at the salon. The painter with the bold vision symbolized the freedom France had fought to preserve. And while it was a great moment for Matisse—and perhaps his greatest moment—Etta did not travel to see it. She was, she decided, too old and too unwell to make the trip.

Etta's heart was weak, she suffered from persistent stomach troubles, and her younger brother Fred had died. That left just Etta and her brother Bernard as the only living members of the original Cones.

All around her, Etta's contemporaries were quickly passing away, too. On July 27, 1946, Gertrude died of cancer. Leo Stein read of it in
Newsweek
magazine. He wrote to his cousin Howard Gans, “I can't say it touches me. I had lost not only all regard but all respect for her.”

But Leo did not last much longer. He died the next year, almost to the day of Gertrude's death, on July 29, 1947.

That year, Leo's book
Appreciation: Painting, Prose and Poetry
was published. It might have brought him some money had he lived long enough to learn of the book's favorable reception. He had sent Etta a copy of the book's manuscript, apparently as a thank-you for something she had sent him. She thought the book brilliant.

George Boas wrote to Etta of Leo soon after his passing. “I had a letter from him a week or so before his death, which I knew nothing of until a friend of mine mentioned it. It was a great shock, as his letter didn't even speak of an illness, but on the contrary mentioned a trip to America as in the cards. One by one they seem to go, and I confess I don't see who is going to take their places. For a man like Leo had such depth of learning and experience, in spite of all his funny little ways, that he was really unique.”

Even though Etta had not been entirely responsive to Leo's financial straits in his later life, she always remembered, and cherished, their friendship. As the years passed and Gertrude's fame grew, Gertrude was often mentioned as the discoverer of the great generation of European artists at the turn of the century. And she was invariably mentioned as having introduced the Cone sisters to the new art.

But Etta knew better. It was Leo's lessons in Florence in 1901 and Paris in 1905 that formed the foundation for her career. His lessons still guided her purchases forty years later. No matter how much she had taught herself, or by whom she
had been influenced, it was Leo, she always said, who taught her what she knew about art.

With Leo and Gertrude dead, Alice was left to guard the Stein reputation in France. She eventually converted to Catholicism, but the conversion brought with it a new worry. Alice was afraid that, under Catholic doctrine, because she was baptized and Gertrude had not been, she wouldn't see Gertrude again after death. But Alice found a sympathetic priest who assured her that “heaven can be fixed,” and that he would work on getting Gertrude out of limbo.

Sally Stein, widow of Michael, Gertrude and Leo's brother, was living in California with her grandson Danny, to whom she was blindly devoted. But her financial situation was difficult. Danny had a taste for race horses. Sally sold off her art collection—piece by piece—to pay for his hobby, and losses. She lived a long life, until 1953, but it was not a happy one.