The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (9 page)

Etta may have helped facilitate that purchase. In the midst of the drama, sometime in 1906, Etta bought her first Matisse oil painting,
Poterie jeune de Provence
(Yellow Pottery from Provence). It was a rudimentary Matisse, with blocks of vivid oranges and reds and blues hastily and thinly applied to canvas. The painting had a half-finished look, with portions of the under-drawing still evident, and a large patch of canvas untouched.

The work had no relation to the bold painting in the Salon des Indépendants, but purchasing it was a significant step for Etta in part because it involved much more money than she had thus far spent on a single piece of art, and in part because it would be her first of many Matisse paintings (the actual purchase price is unknown.)

There is some question, too, concerning when exactly she purchased the painting, or whether she purchased it directly from the artist or from the Steins. If Etta made her purchase from the Steins that spring, it may have been to help Leo raise
the money needed to buy
Joy of Life.
It would have been a very expensive purchase for him, and he wanted it badly even though his “funds were limited.”

In later years, the Steins often turned to the Cone sisters as a source of ready cash by selling them pieces from their collection.
Yellow Pottery from Provence
may have been the first of those transactions. Etta no doubt was also caught up in the storm around Matisse as a result of the Indépendants show, and would have wanted to come to the rescue in whatever way she could.

In April, the circle surrounding the Stein households began to make plans to disperse for the summer. On April 18, Sally and Mike had learned of the earthquake in San Francisco, and a few weeks later headed back to the U.S. to take stock of the damage. That journey was historic, if for no other reason than they brought with them a Matisse, which became the first of the artist's paintings ever to reach America.

Meanwhile, Leo and Gertrude departed Paris for Italy. Various artists were heading south—Matisse had already left for North Africa, and Picasso would soon go to Spain. Claribel and Etta left Paris, too, for Germany, to prepare for a trip around the world with their older brother Moses and his wife Bertha.

Etta left Paris reluctantly. As the time approached for her trip back to Frankfurt with Claribel, she began to complain of stomach pains. The complaint was one that most often surfaced when she was forced to do something she did not want to do. Etta used illness as a way of indicating what she could not say. But it was a muffled plea that went unrecognized, and she went along with Claribel anyway.

John Stuart Mill wrote, “All the moralities tell women it
is their duty and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves and to have no life but their affections.” Etta did just that. And though her affections may have been strong for those she left behind in Paris, her regard for her family took precedence. She was especially attendant to Moses, whom she idolized.

Ironically, Etta received a marriage proposal that winter from one of the young men who frequented the rue de Fleurus’ Saturday nights gatherings—Mahonri Young, an American grandson of Brigham Young, then living in Paris as a sculptor. But, though she found him “particularly agreeable,” Etta turned him down. Years later, she explained that she had never met anyone who could equal her brother Moses.

Nursing what she called her “bum gut,” Etta stayed with Claribel at their Frankfurt lodgings on quiet Beethoven Street, near the Senckenberg Institute where Claribel worked. Etta had moved from the vibrant circle of revolutionary artists and the smoke-filled and cluttered studios of Paris to the utter calm of a wealthy residential neighborhood set far from the center of Frankfurt. What music there was, played deep inside the massive homes along the tree-lined street. The art was equally private and proper. Compared with what Etta had left behind in Paris, it was dead.

Throughout her German summer, Etta received letters from Gertrude, entreating her to come back to Paris in the fall. Gertrude was spending the summer in Italy working on yet another book—this one a sort of history that would be called
The Making of Americans.
Once again she wanted Etta to type her manuscript. Etta said she would probably return to Paris by the fall of 1906, but cautioned, “Goodness knows
how long we will be there as when I leave Frankfurt I shall no longer be my own boss. Goodbye to little Etta's freedom, but somehow I never did mind being bossed by my biggest brother. . . .”

Gertrude also kept Etta up to date on the Bâteau Lavoir, where the financial struggles of their friend Picasso had not abated, despite their support. Etta responded: “Poor little Picasso! but then I'd swap all around with his health and genius, were it possible, but as it is not, I've just got to fight it out to the end and it's not unhappy I've been lately pain & all included and it's not America either that I'm hankering arter. . . Well, adios, with much love and sort of glad at the prospect of seeing you soon even if I can do no typewriting as wants to.”

The plans for the Cone family trip changed during the summer of 1906. While Etta was convalescing in Frankfurt, her brother Moses and his wife Bertha arrived in Italy. Etta's “ulcer” did not allow her to join them, and in fact she did not meet up with them until that fall, when they traveled north and she traveled south to come together in Paris.

During the weeks before the planned December rendevouz in Vienna between Etta, Moses, Bertha, and Claribel, their social calendar in Paris was full of dinners and parties and afternoon visits. It was no doubt with some alarm that Moses, like Claribel, viewed the circle in which his younger sister traveled.

Sunday newspaper supplements at the turn of the century were full of stories about the free life in Paris and the “dudes” and “mashers” who preyed upon single women. In popular literature, the amorality of the artist's life was legend. Now Moses saw that Etta had been living among that set and realized
that he indirectly had financed it.

That fall, Paris was abuzz with news from the art community. Cézanne died, and Picasso and Matisse met for the first time at the rue de Fleurus, a full year after Leo purchased his first works from each artist. “It may seem very strange to everyone nowadays that before this time Matisse had never heard of Picasso and Picasso had never met Matisse,” wrote Gertrude. “But at that time every little crowd lived its own life and knew practically nothing of any other crowd. Matisse on the Quai St. Michel and in the Indépendant did not know anything of Picasso and Montmartre and Sagot.”

Picasso's companion Fernande documented the meeting between the two artists. Matisse, now thirty-seven, appeared to be a “grand old man of art” compared with Picasso, whom she described as looking like a small gangster. According to Fernande, the older artist was a “great western” and “sympathetic character,” with regular features and blazing red beard. Behind his big spectacles, she said, he seemed to mask the exact meaning of his expression.

Whenever he talked about painting, Matisse chose his words deliberately. He argued, affirmed, wanted to convince. Fernande called Matisse “clear, of an astonishing lucidity of spirit, precise, concise, intelligent. Perhaps much less simple than he wished to appear. . . Very much the master of himself at his meeting with Picasso, who was always a bit sullen and restrained at such encounters. Matisse shone imposingly.”

The twenty-five-year-old Picasso, according to Leo's account, “had nothing to say except an occasional sparkle.” And when he didn't know what to say, he burst out laughing. The younger artist came away from the meeting convinced he and Matisse were as different as the “north pole” and “south pole.”

As different as they were personally, professionally they
were following similar timetables. Within a year of each other—Matisse in 1906 and Picasso in 1907—they completed the paintings that became their signposts, indicating the direction each artist later took in his mature works. For Matisse, it was
Joy of Life
, which he exhibited in the spring of 1906, and which, when, barely dry, Leo immediately bought.

For Picasso, it was his
Demoiselles d'Avignon
(Young Women of Avignon), which has been called the “first truly 20th century painting” for shattering the human form and perspective, and “effectively ending the long reign of the Renaissance.” Remaining in his studio for a dozen years, rolled up or turned to the wall, it was not publicly shown until 1937.

Make up your mind to a brief disappointment. Life is full of them. We have all got to be broken in; and this is a mild beginning for you.

—George Eliot,
Daniel Deronda,
1876

I
n December 1907, Etta and her family left Paris for Vienna to meet up with Claribel and to start their world tour. Etta's year of independence was over. If traveling with Claribel alone was difficult, it was much more so with Moses and Claribel. Both were used to having their own way, and both had very firm ideas of what that way was.

In the years after Moses and his brother Ceasar began the Cone Export and Commission Company in New York, they developed a textile empire. The Cone family business owned three cotton mills in North Carolina, and Moses was referred to in press reports as the “denim king” because his mills turned out the largest denim production in the world. He expanded his Flat Top Manor estate at Blowing Rock, North Carolina, to include man-made lakes, formal gardens, forests, and orchards.

And, fully in charge of the large Cone family since the death of his parents, Moses even went so far as to dictate the careers of two younger brothers. He decided, for example,
that there should be a doctor and a lawyer in the family, and since he apparently did not consider Claribel suitable in the role of physician, he directed his brother Sydney to study medicine. Bernard, he decided, should be the lawyer in the family.

Despite Moses’ firm grip on family members and family matters, one younger brother caused something of a problem. Solomon, four years younger than Claribel, was a womanizer and a gambler—tax assessors eventually determined he had an annual gambling “turnover” of $30,000, and lived, according to rumors, with a “bullet behind his left ear.” His brothers finally bought out his share of the family business because he was “forever putting his friends in trouble, both customers to whom he made impossible promises and his associates who were embarrassed by them.”

If Moses felt it necessary to control everyone around him, Claribel was just the opposite, at least while traveling. She utterly exasperated Moses with her perpetual tardiness and lack of regard for her traveling companions. While Moses was interested in ancient “dynasties and the size of entombed kings’ treasuries,” Claribel was interested in “sanitation conditions in foreign hospitals.”

A photo of the group taken in India that year shows them on top of an elephant with an Indian driver. Bertha looks vaguely disturbed, Moses fierce, Etta not quite happy (she's attempting a smile), and Claribel bored.

In fact, the only concession Claribel seemed to have made to her surroundings was that she was astride an elephant. Otherwise, she was dressed head to toe in dark fabric, as if the heat of the subcontinent did not exist.

During a journey down the Nile, an English-speaking sultan took a fancy to Claribel, and offered to buy her from Moses. The Cone patriarch might have been inclined to
accept, if only to have a more pleasant journey, but in the end Moses did not strike a deal.

Luckily, the group did have something in common—they were all great shoppers. Moses purchased stone Buddhas for his North Carolina estate. Etta and Claribel bought fabrics, brass, wood carvings, saris with gold thread, and Hindu jewelry.

In Turkey, the two sisters bought dozens of towels; in Japan, ivory and lacquered ware; and in China, imperial robes and ceramics. In fact, the journey's bounty proved to be the start of another aspect of the Cone collection—jewels, textiles, and artifacts.

Etta's letters from the trip were surprisingly cheerful considering the many compromises she must have made along the way. Their journey took them, among other places, to Budapest, Constantinople, Athens, Jerusalem, Cairo, Canton, and Shanghai.

On February 6, 1907, from Cairo, she wrote to Gertrude, “Every whit of my oriental blood rejoices in hot sympathy for these charming people, and if my brother weren't so dead set against leaving us out here or in Europe I might be a haremlady, who knows?”

In the same letter, Etta indicated that a major piece of information had reached her—her place as Gertrude's typist had been taken by a San Francisco woman who had just arrived in Paris.

Alice B. Toklas had initially been invited to Paris by Sally and Michael Stein on their return from San Francisco after the earthquake in the spring of 1906, but Alice didn't make the trip to Paris until the following winter. When she did, she stepped in to fill the spot Etta left vacant.

As Gertrude's assistant-companion, she began correcting proofs of
Three Lives
and typing Gertrude's latest manuscript,
The Making of Americans
. For the rest of their lives, the two
women were inseparable.

From her great distance, Etta did not know what Alice's arrival meant to her relationship with Gertrude, so she continued to write her warm, flirtatious letters. From Cairo she wrote Gertrude, “I am most jealous that it's you and not me what's got a Renoir. Guess I'll take out my joy in viewing it (happy thought) in your atelier. . . P.S. Has my successor done her duty by my place what she usurped and does she your typewriting & takes she care of that nice Mikey man.

“I am sometimes envious, but I guess I am greedy, cause so far, this trip has not been at all a bad stunt. It's not Ameriky I am hankering arter and every night my sister says: Etta, I don't expect to like American life & I lays low and says nothing & only hopes.”

In Darjeeling, she wrote Gertrude, “I am hating the idea of America more everyday and unless it all turns out different from what I anticipate, I don't expect to tarry long in the U.S.”

In a Rosh Hashanah greeting Etta sent Gertrude, she wrote, “Happy New Year to you, you heathen, but I like you even if you be a heathen & I wish I had you a little nearer, but it's a good thing I haven't, or you'd get too much material for your novels and it would keep you busier than is good for your health.”

From China, she wrote Gertrude yet another letter, this time saying: “Now do be amiable and send me some good hot Italian breezes to Baltimore, 2326 Eutaw Place, my brother Sydney's home, where my mail must come for the present. My wanderings promise still to be a perpetual motion proposition, for there is no happy home awaiting the Cone sisters and no prospect of one. Good bye. Take much love and get the typewriter in good condition in case—but I don't know. . . .”

Etta's uncertainty about her future was no doubt linked to
Moses’ health. The trip had been partly designed to give him the rest that he wouldn't have had if he had remained in the United States attending to business.

But by the time the group reached port in San Francisco, Moses was ill and Etta put her plans to return to Europe on hold. And though Etta would never mind coming to the aid of her brother, she wrote Gertrude, “I hate, I despise Baltimore. . . .”

Claribel apparently regarded the city of her youth more favorably. She took what Etta called a “bachelor apartment” in the new Marlborough apartments, built next door to the family's one-time home on Eutaw Place.

The Marlborough was as close to a European-style apartment building as Baltimore had at the time. Its massive facade, ringed by a wrought-iron balcony near the top, would have fit quite neatly in Paris. Claribel did not invite Etta to join her there, but she did ask her younger sister to help set up the apartment.

After completing her chores for Claribel, Etta spent the winter in North Carolina, but fully planned to return to Paris that spring if Moses were well enough for her to leave without worry. Etta's Paris fever was heightened in January 1908 by a letter from Gertrude—it contained Picasso's self-portrait, along with the artist's handwritten greeting, “Bonjour Mlle Cone.”

Etta commented: “I love Picasso and have him & his full tummy before me always & I am just hungry for the nice good old times. . . I am going to Balto & get entangled in hateful old clothes & teas & dinners & such like. . . .”

Shortly after, Etta wrote Gertrude, “I shall sail sure as fate on May 2 for I am wild to see you'ns and Italy and all that I love best in the world outside of this tiny little group down here. Your postal with all the nice signatures gave me pleasure and
if I don't get back to Italy and Paris soon I'll go crazy. . . .”

Throughout that fall and winter, Etta had also been writing to Gertrude of her new passionate friendship with a woman named Ida Gutman. Ida, a prominent woman in Baltimore's cultural set, had married into a retail Baltimore family, and, while considered one of the city's beauties, was also said to be “mad as a March hare.” Etta described her “love of Ida” and how her “heart still beats hot when her letters come.” But she complained she saw very little of her. “The poor thing,” she lamented, “is so walled in with an excited household.”

It is difficult to imagine that Etta would have written of her love for another woman if her relationship with Gertrude had not already ended. It could be that since leaving Paris, Gertrude had written Etta about Alice in similar ways. But, in any case, by the time the Cone sisters were once again on their way to Europe, the attachment between Gertrude and Etta had died away and become simple friendship.

In May 1908, the sisters reached Rome. Shortly after, they met up with Gertrude and her new friend, 31-year-old Alice B. Toklas, in Florence.

Gertrude's new companion was small and birdlike, with gray-green eyes and a light growth of hair above her top lip—in sum, an unattractive woman. Gertrude, by contrast, positively glowed with health and vigor. Years later, Alice wrote a brief description of the first meeting with the Cone sisters. “Gertrude took me in Florence to lunch with Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone, whom she had known first in Baltimore and then in Paris. Dr. Claribel was handsome and distinguished. Miss Etta not at all so. She and I disagreed about who should pay the lunch bill.”

Despite Alice's account, the reunion of the Cone sisters with Gertrude in Florence was doubtless a lively catching-up session, with stories to tell on all sides. Gertrude learned of the Cone family journey, and the two sisters learned of the many recent developments in Paris.

Much of the talk was about the new pecking order in Paris’ artistic community, where major shifts were occurring. With his death in 1906, Cézanne was finally gaining the recognition denied him in life
—
Leo went so far as to describe him as “the man of the moment.”

That title, it seems, actually belonged to Matisse. Those interested in radical art were now turning to Matisse for guidance, and regarding him as leader of the avant-garde. But as early as 1907, Matisse felt Picasso threatening his new position at the front of the radical line.

Matisse called Picasso “unsympathetic as a man and less than negligible as a painter.” And he accused Gertrude Stein of going to the rue Ravignan not out of interest in art but for “the spectacle she saw there.”

Despite his apparent dismissal of Picasso, and perhaps in response to the younger artist's growing consequence, Matisse began and completed in 1907 what would be his most controversial painting to date,
Nu bleu (Souvenir de Biskra)—(Blue Nude—Memory of Biskra)
.

The
Blue Nude
was regarded at the time as nothing short of hideous. The painting was based on a distorted bronze reclining figure that Matisse also produced that year. The sculpted figure's upper body was massive, and what were traditionally the soft curves of a woman's body became jutting angles in Matisse's hands.

But the figure in the painting, which was based on the bronze, was even more tortured. It was twisted around itself in a painful pose, its flesh outlined in black and shadowed in blue.
The Parisian art world was coming to expect the unexpected from Matisse, but his entry of the
Blue Nude
at the spring Salon des Indépendants “served to increase Matisse's popular reputation for gratuitous ugliness and iconoclasm.” Once again, Leo bought the scandalous canvas, but it would be his last Matisse purchase.

Just as Picasso and Matisse began attracting a wider audience, Leo began to lose interest in both artists. He was particularly brutal about Picasso's “pink” or Iberian period. He said the work was “deplorable,” accusing Picasso of borrowing from African art because he lacked his own ideas.

For Matisse, Leo's support was no longer as critical as it once had been. Now, a sufficient number of younger artists were interested enough in his work that he started a formal school. The “Académie Matisse” attracted a range of students, nearly all of them foreign, and including American expatriate Sally Stein. But the artist gave the school up after a short time because he said he was depressed by the students “doing Matisse.”

The prospering artist also moved his family from the Quai St. Michel in 1908 to the Hôtel Biron near Les Invalides, the same building where sculptor Rodin took up residence. The Matisse family began to dress in expensive clothing.

Perhaps the best evidence of Matisse's growing artistic success, however, came in April 1908. Matisse took part in his first show in America, which photographer Alfred Stieglitz staged in his New York gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. Though the show's contents were relatively modest (the works were all drawings), the response from the American critics was rabid.