The Art of Acquiring
A
Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone
MARY GABRIEL
©2002 by Mary Gabriel
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with
permission, gratefully acknowledged, of the Baltimore Museum
of
Art, and are in the Cone Collection of the Baltimore Museum of
Art,
formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Prologue
Two Sisters
Baltimore, 1872
Baltimore, 1892
Florence, 1901
Etta
Paris, 1905
Paris, 1906
Blowing Rock, 1908
Claribel
Frankfurt, 1910
Munich, 1914
Munich, 1918
Abroad Together
Paris, 1922, Part One
Paris, 1922, Part Two
Paris, 1923-1924
Lausanne, 1926-1929
Etta, Alone
Baltimore, 1929
Nice, 1933
Baltimore, 1934
Paris, 1938
Blowing Rock, 1949
Epilogue
Bibliography
Chapter Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Preface
As an undergraduate at the Maryland Institute College of Art, I first encountered the Cone collection in its natural habitat—the stark white walls of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Absorbed by the art in brilliant display—the Matisses, Picassos, and magnificent Gauguin, Vahine no te Vi (Woman With Mango)—I wouldn't have given even a moment's thought to the collectors, Etta and Claribel Cone, if the museum had not recreated, albeit behind glass, a small sliver of one of the rooms in one of the private Baltimore apartments where the Cone sisters had originally housed all their illustrious holdings.
This BMA recreation was no bigger than a large closet, but it glowed with warmth, and it beckoned with a sensuality precisely mirroring the Matisse paintings that I, the aspiring student of painting, had just been examining and dissecting. At that moment, I was struck by the fact that the Cone sisters not only bought paintings to live with, but had stepped through the canvases to live in the paintings they bought.
I was both amazed and curious. For me, the essential question was: why did two seemingly severe, upright women, both born around the time of the U.S. Civil War, both clinging to the cloak of Victorianism in their dress and attitude, surround themselves with such avant-garde and erotic art? Etta and Claribel Cone were paying tens of thousands of dollars for art pieces that were as scandalous in their day as Robert Mapplethorpe's or Damien Hirst's are in ours.
In my search for an answer, I found only more questions, so I began to read. The ample literature narrating the events of 1905 Paris, when Leo Stein discovered Picasso and Matisse, frequently mentions the two Cone sisters, I discovered. But Etta and Claribel Cone are most often referred to peripherally as Baltimore acquaintances of Leo Stein and his sister, Gertrude, who had decided to be a writer. Sometimes Etta and Claribel are described as the Steins’ distant relations. And just as often, they are dismissed as wealthy spinsters convinced by Gertrude Stein to spend some of their fortune on artists they neither understood nor appreciated. They are depicted as decidedly lesser lights in the luminous Paris of the early twentieth century.
In those rare instances where the two sisters gain even a modicum of credit for courageously collecting works by artists the world ridiculed, Dr. Claribel Cone is identified as the more important and visionary of the two sisters.
From this early research, I reached one preliminary conclusion that I believe still to be correct. Had they been men, annually purchasing works by Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, the two sisters would have immediately been accorded the status and stature of accomplished art collectors. Because they were women, however, and women from Baltimore, no less, they were dismissed as indiscriminating “shoppers”—and not just for art, but for many other collectibles as well.
History, I later concluded, was content to ignore or misrepresent the Cones. I came increasingly to blame their plight on Gertrude Stein. In her famous book, The Autobiography oj Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude dismissed the sisters of the world's greatest artists to survive and thrive—and contemporary audiences to appreciate them first-hand. But for the collectors, art history might well have taken an entirely different shape and direction.
During their lifetimes, the Cone sisters allowed selected visitors to view their collection, and lent pieces to specific exhibitions, but the entire Cone Collection was not available for public view until after Etta's death in 1949, when it was bequeathed to the Baltimore Museum of Art. In January 1957, the BMA opened the Cone Wing, and the works went on permanent exhibition, finally allowing the public to see exactly what those two “crazy” sisters had been hiding in their Baltimore apartments—what exactly had kept them so busy for so many decades.
They roamed the galleries of Europe like addicts, for 45 years that spanned two world wars, and built and donated one of the most important art collections in the world. Yet the story of Etta and Claribel Cone has been the subject of only a handful of publications. In her latter years, Etta Cone herself worked furiously on, and spared no expense for, a catalogue setting forth all the elements of the collection. But when the catalogue became popular, she decided not to reprint it or to widen its distribution.
The Baltimore Museum of Art, which houses the collection, has published several Cone catalogues linked to exhibitions or anniversaries, the most recent being Jack Flam's Matisse in the Cone Collection: The Poetics of Vision (its 2001 publication coincided with the April 2001 opening of the renovated Cone Wing); and Brenda Richardson's Dr. Claribel & Miss Etta—first published in 1985, and reprinted in 1992, it apparently went out of print in 2000.
In addition, Barbara Pollock, for Bobbs-Merrill, authored a biography of the sisters in 1962, The Collectors: Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone, which is out-of-print as I write this prologue, and has been for some time.
Finally, various members of the Cone family have added their writings on the sisters over the years.
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
Prologue
Baltimore, 1930
. . . 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
On 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.
Two Sisters
Baltimore, 1872
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
Claribel 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.
Baltimore, 1892
Then we went to Baltimore and there everybody knew us and it did not make any difference about our knowing them since they all knew us. . . So Baltimore was full of everything which was natural enough and soon it was natural enough that there were so many and we knew them. Not now but then.
—Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography, 1937
Claribel continued her medical studies until 1893, first at the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then at the University of Pennsylvania, and finally at the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane, known as Blockley.
Though granted two of Blockley's five medical residencies, she and a female colleague did not receive the same treatment as their male counterparts, they discovered. The women were put in charge of arranging teas for the male members of the medical staff. Claribel returned home.
Much had changed while she was away. Her brother Monroe had died of a syphilis-related illness. Her brother Moses had married and built a country estate near Blowing Rock, North Carolina. In 1890, the family dissolved H. Cone and Sons. The following year, Moses and Ceasar established the Cone Export and Commission Company in New York as a selling and financing agent for forty-seven southern cotton mills. While Etta managed the family household, a brother and sister duo from San Francisco arrived to breathe new life into the Eutaw Place social scene.
In 1892, Gertrude and Leo Stein, accompanied by their older sister Bertha, moved to Baltimore to live with a maternal aunt, Fannie Bachrach. Gertrude was eighteen and Leo twenty. Their family was financially insecure—their father habitually made speculative investments and lost, often requiring them to relocate. The two youngest Stein children were so accustomed to physical upheaval that they stocked up on books during the good times in anticipation of their father's subsequent and not-too-distant ruin.
When Gertrude was fourteen, her mother died, leaving her and Leo with almost no parental guidance. They began raising themselves and each other. Three years later, their father died, and they went to live with their oldest brother, Michael.
Michael Stein was a bit of stability in an otherwise tetherless existence. An assistant superintendent at a cable company, he scored a financial coup by selling his father's railroad franchise to Collis P. Huntington of the Central Pacific Railroad. From the proceeds of the sale, he was able to give each Stein child a modest income for life. Leo and Gertrude took the money and headed east to Baltimore.
To the Cone circle of wealthy children and settled families, Leo and Gertrude Stein must have appeared like two unbridled horses. Fiction often depicted women from the West as independent. Now the genteel Baltimore society of gloved men and mute women saw that independence first-hand.
Gertrude was a dark, attractive, buxom young woman with flashing eyes. Her cousin, Helen Bachrach, said she was “quick thinking and speaking. . . you found yourself laughing at everything she found extremely amusing, even yourself. . . .” Everyone, according to Bachrach, found themselves drawn to Gertrude—even casual acquaintances.
Leo, a tall, slender, serious young man, had strong ideas on just about everything. It was Leo who first attracted the attention of the women in the Cone circle. He was something of a dandy compared with the industrious Baltimore men Etta and her friends knew, and he flirted with women. Rather than discuss money and business—perhaps the only two things he knew nothing about—he spoke of art and music and travel.
Claribel, having by now moved back to her family's home on Eutaw Place, hosted Saturday evening salons where people from the worlds of art and science would meet. The Baltimore Sun said Claribel's “weekly gathering together of friends more nearly approaches the old idea of the salon than any other drawing-room coterie in the city.”
The Steins attended, but knew no rules and had no regard for appearance. While other women, shored up with corsets of bone and wire, sat politely—if uncomfortably—on the edge of their chairs, Gertrude put her sandaled feet up on the furniture and let her chubby, corset-less body breathe freely.
The eighteen-year-old Gertrude was among the youngest of the Cone entourage, but she was most like Claribel, ten years her senior. In fact, Dr. Claribel would serve as a role model for Gertrude. Her friendship was to be the first important relationship Gertrude had outside her own family.
It is easy to imagine the younger Stein roaring out her reaction to Claribel, who held forth during evening salons, or see her cheeks flushed or her eyes streaming with laughter, while others less appreciative of the bold doctor's wit sat quietly aghast. Etta, a mere shadow participant, no doubt delighted in the proceedings just the same.
As Gertrude looked up to Claribel, Etta would look up to Leo. At twenty-two, Etta was two years older than Leo, but his grasp of a world much wider than her own must have made him seem more mature. It may have been his influence that brought Etta out into Baltimore's cultural life—to recitals and lectures. It was clearly Leo who awakened in Etta an interest in visual art.
Leo's stay in Baltimore, however, was brief. He left for Harvard in the fall of 1892—the first time he and Gertrude had ever been apart. During their separation, Gertrude wrote that she became more “humanized and less adolescent.” But by the next fall, though she hadn't graduated from high school, she enrolled in the Harvard annex for women, later called Radcliffe, and rejoined her older brother.
That fall, everyone was busy except Etta. Claribel was doing research, and Gertrude and Leo were attending college, but Etta had no activity to call her own. With no immediate prospect of marriage or a career, Etta fell into managing the growing Cone household and caring for her elderly parents. Her world revolved around the many gas-lit corridors of Eutaw Place, and especially her brother Moses, who had assumed the role of patriarch as their father grew more frail.
Moses was a large, handsome, square man with arresting brown eyes under dark brows. Inside the family, he was warm, passionate, but stern. Despite his marriage, he was, Etta felt, especially fond of and dependent upon her.
Hands crossed neatly on her lap, Etta became the nurturer, the manager, the helpmate. She was the epitome of “a redundant woman”—without a home and family of her own. And though she liked and took part in music, she had no truly consuming interest. Hers was not a world of William James’ philosophy, as it was for Gertrude, or scientific research, as it was for Claribel, or history and art, as it was for Leo.
But, thanks to brother Moses, art would soon become Etta's world, and her passion.
In the 1890s, artists began to attract the attention of Americans who might not have thought of them a decade before. Popular magazines featured stories on the artists’ bohemian lifestyles, and etiquette books described the proper ways for women to visit artists in their studios. In 1894, George Du Maurier added to the craze with his racy novel Trilby, about an artist's model in Paris. The book became a huge hit in the United States.
Interest in artists grew at about the same time home decorating began to focus on culture rather than simply comfort, and the trend became one of filling a home full of stuff. Against that background, Etta made her first grab at independence.
A year after their father's death, Moses gave Etta $300 to buy something to freshen up the family home. It would have been reasonable to expect her to buy new curtains or rugs, or furniture for the parlor. But Etta had been introduced by Leo Stein to the world of art, and it was to art that she turned with her brother's money. After seeing paintings by American Impressionist Theodore Robinson, she authorized a bidder to get “as many for the money as possible” during an estate sale in New York on March 24, 1898. Her money purchased five Robinson paintings.
When the purchases arrived in Baltimore, most of the family was shocked, though Moses’ wife Bertha admired the pictures. Not only were they of the ultra-modern Impressionist school, but they were astronomically expensive.
Most families that hung art in their homes then show-cased reproductions of Italian Renaissance Madonnas whose prices started at 15 cents. Louis Prang and Company of Boston offered popular facsimiles of paintings touted as equal to the original, and cost from 10 cents for landscapes and floral paintings, to $15 for a large Madonna based on an original by Murillo. But few families paid $300 for original art.
For Etta, these purchases did not represent decoration but personal rebellion. She had taken one of the few liberties afforded a woman in Victorian society—the opportunity to buy something—and she had made a bold statement.
In the fall of 1897, after concluding her studies at Radcliffe, Gertrude Stein chose not only to remain in Baltimore, but, following in Claribel's footsteps, enrolled in medical school. Johns Hopkins Medical School had opened its doors in 1893, with fundraising assistance provided by a group of women on the condition that the school accept women students. Hopkins became the first major U.S. medical school to do so. The place had the excitement of an experiment.
Apparently having nothing more pressing to do, Leo decided he, too, would return to Baltimore and to take up research at Hopkins in biology.
Claribel at the time was one of forty-six people at Hopkins taking special courses for doctors with the renowned Dr. William Welch. Her interest in science was based on a love of abstract principle—the mysteries of life under a microscope. Gertrude was interested in the meat of life—blood, birth, and death. For her, medical school was a way to continue studying human behavior.
Until 1900, Gertrude and Leo lived together in a house on Biddle Street, not far from Etta and Claribel's Eutaw Place residence. The four were good friends, mingling socially and taking part together in the city's meager cultural offerings. Leo, declaring he could “do nothing in a laboratory,” disrupted the relationship and routine, declaring that he would go to Florence (Italy) to study art history and to find his “great idea.” With that proclamation he was gone.
Gertrude, however, remained in Baltimore to continue her medical studies. Claribel and Gertrude would ride the trolley together and then stroll leisurely toward the school and hospital—two black, mountainous, hat-topped shapes, their skirts swaying as they walked.
It was during one of these walks that Claribel asked Gertrude to address a Baltimore women's group. Gertrude philosophized often on the role of women in society, based partly on her scrutiny of classmates at Harvard, and partly on the women she saw at a Hopkins clinic for poor patients, where she put in time. Seeing the socio-economic gap between the two groups, Gertrude came up with a theory that Claribel asked her to lecture on. The result was the first public piece by Gertrude Stein: “The Value of a College Education for Women.”
Anyone who knew Gertrude wouldn't have expected her to mince her words. Her years in school hadn't tamed her. In fact, she had recently begun sparring with a welter-weight boxer to improve her health. But those at Claribel's lectures unacquainted with Miss Stein were in for a surprise. Women's rights were a favorite subject among the enlightened group assembled before her. What was not common ground was an open discussion of sexuality.
Gertrude's thesis was that women used sex to pay for their keep. She explained that as women spent less time with household duties—such as making clothes, growing vegetables, caring for children—in the maintenance of their homes and households, they would become more like sex objects than their husbands’ equal partners. If women did not use their freedom from household responsibilities to go to college, Gertrude concluded, they would become mere “peacocks,” spending useless years “learning the mysteries of self-adornment.”
Claribel must have seen something of herself in her young friend—a disinterest in the approval of her peers and an unshakable self-confidence. And intellectually, Claribel's and Gertrude's time had come. The “new woman” or “bachelor girl” debunked Victorian myths of womanhood. She was mentally assertive and physically vigorous. Exercise was the rage and the tall, thin, and athletic Gibson girl was the image of the age.
Even Lillian Russell, the former standard bearer of beauty, got in on the craze. In the second half of the 1890s, the American press ran columns of copy on Russell's struggle to drop pounds from the voluptuous figure that had made her famous.
Etta, however, was not a new woman, intellectually or physically. Her immediate fate was to live retiringly among her family in the home where she was raised, caring for her nearest relations while their lives changed and expanded. In fact, by age 30, the only real mark she had made were the five Robinson paintings she purchased and hung on the parlor walls.
But those paintings did not just represent the past for Etta—they represented the future. They were evidence of a world beyond her family—windows into a world of light made from swift brush strokes and rich earth oozing from ochre. They represented a world where a child's delicate movement was forever frozen in a mesh of thinly applied blues and yellows and pinks—where a mother's love was conveyed by a barely discernible thread of paint.
The Robinson artwork transformed the dark, formal rooms of the Cone home in the same way a brilliant newcomer enlivens a dull family gathering. For Etta, the five paintings would turn out to be the first of hundreds of new and welcome friends.
Florence, 1901
There was an open door in her prison wall! If she chose to slip through it, who could follow? The voice of scandal was loud and bitter, but it would be lost in the great breadth of the Atlantic.
—Sidney Nyburg, The Buried Rose: Legends of Old Baltimore, 1942
During the years Gertrude attended medical school at Hopkins, she summered with Leo in Europe and brought back to Baltimore numerous stories of their wild escapades abroad, including nude bathing and drunken revelries. But, thanks to Leo, summer vacations also involved an immersion in art. Etta's fantasy of life on the other side of the ocean must have been fueled by the Steins’ tales, but it was not until 1901 that she finally embarked on a similar excursion.
After their father's death, she and Claribel began receiving an annual stipend of $2,400—their brothers gave them their share of the inheritance because, by then, they assumed that neither sister would ever marry. Celebrating her new financial independence, Etta boarded a ship that May with her cousin Hortense Guggenheimer and a friend, Harriet Clark, to make a summer tour of Europe.
In addition to trunks, hat boxes, travel guides, and numerous books, Etta took with her a leather bound diary, its cover engraved “Etta Cone, Baltimore, Maryland,” in gold lettering. That diary detailed a transformation in Etta that has been described in other women as a “holiday from Victorianism.”
On the very first day of her Atlantic crossing, Etta threw overboard the woman her family knew—the retiring, eager-to-please, sexless helpmate—to become an adventurer. By the second day's diary entry, she was drinking champagne.
On May 23, the ship reached Naples. “Awoke at 4:30 am to find the steamer had anchored and on looking out of the port hole the most wonderful spectacle I have ever seen greeted me,” she recorded. “There in the dim dawn was Vesuvius just in front and the densest, blackest smoke I have ever seen issuing from the crater. As the sun gradually arose from behind one of the peaks of the mountains that completely surround Naples on the three sides, the smoke of Vesuvius became lighter until with the sun's full rays it was almost white by reflection.
“Leo Stein surprised us by being at the docks and we almost hugged him with delight.”
A travel book, published in 1900, offered suggestions for women venturing abroad alone. . . . “As a general rule, if the woman will dress quietly, walk quickly, and look ahead of her, she will not be molested.” But when the three women docked in Naples, the travel guide was jettisoned. Shedding the constraints of family and society, Etta and company had only one goal—to enjoy themselves with the inimitable Leo.
The Etta who visited Italy that May was not a beautiful woman. Her mouth was thin and straight, her jaw protruding and large, and her body, though curvaceous, was not sensuous. “Isn't it odd,” she once remarked, “that someone who loves beauty as much as I do should look the way I do?” But as in so many people with a vivid inner life, her eyes betrayed a keen eagerness for beautiful things.
Etta's diary entries from her first excursion to Italy contain the usual tourist outbursts on native charms. After visiting the Colosseum in Rome by moonlight on May 29, 1901, she wrote: “It was glorious. The quiet with only the crickets in the ruins and exquisite shadows was delightful. We walked backwards down a street so as to get last glimpses of the magnificent spectacle.”
But the diaries also contain page after page on the world of art according to Leo. It is quite clear from Etta's private writing that she loved even the sound of his name—it dots every page like a punctuation mark. With the help of his friend, Bernard Berenson, Leo would introduce Etta to the art he had been studying in Italy for more than a year.
Whether it was Leo himself who inflamed Etta, or the world he was unveiling before her, is unclear. But whatever the source, her writings in Italy contain a passion and intensity it would be difficult to ascribe to the woman who left Baltimore less than a month before.
While in Naples, the group stayed at the Grand Hotel, a luxurious five-story building on the bay whose shuttered windows looked out on Mount Vesuvius, the Castel dell'Ovo, and the bustling city that smelled of the sea. From their rooms, they could see the huge white rocks that littered the shore as if they had been spit up and deposited there by the hovering volcano.
Fishing boats bobbed off the coast, and the morning air was filled with the shouts of fishermen as they pulled up their nets and brought in the day's catch. The cobble-stone streets clattered with horse-drawn carriages. The intense heat of the place made everything shimmer.
Etta and company used Naples as a base for side-trips to Pompeii, Amalfi, Sorrento, and Capri. Day after day, they dragged themselves and their long dark skirts along the dirt roads of southern Italy, beneath a scorching sun that rose early and set late. Leo, it appears, accompanied them on these journeys. Etta appreciatively acknowledged his contributions in her diary.
En route to Rome on May 27, 1901, she wrote: “Saw women ploughing and working the fields side by side with the men. Also saw the women washing in the streams, using rocks as wash boards. (Leo tells us this is a common practice). . . the beautiful red poppy fields are a delight to our eyes. Had veal sandwiches and wine on the train.”
While in Europe, Leo added a long beard to the mustache he sported in Baltimore, and now looked even more the intellectual that he aspired to be. He still did not have an occupation, but continued to immerse himself in art history, and considered writing a book about the Italian Renaissance painter Mantegna.
In Florence, he visited often with Berenson at his villa, I Tatti, to discuss art and to use his library. Berenson, thirty-six, was also a Harvard graduate, and had been living in Florence for sixteen years. Mary, Berenson's companion and soon-to-be wife, observed that all Leo appeared to want in life was “an ear.”
That is precisely what he had in Etta. She had been trained to do nothing so well as listen. Soon, she would also learn to see.
Leo's pet maxim when looking at paintings at that time was simple: “Keep your eye on the object and let your ideas play about it.” But Etta rarely had “ideas” that were not someone else's, or if she did, she didn't express them. That deference to others, rooted in a lack of self-confidence, began to change as she became more acquainted with art.
On May 28, during a visit to the Vatican, Etta saw her first original Michelangelos and Botticellis. Her comments are full of a neophyte's exclamations, but also include the bold observation that the Last Judgment is “too much covered in drapery to still belong to ‘Angelo.’” The phrase may in fact have been Leo's and only copied into the diary as Etta's own, but in either case it is the first time in writing she criticized an object of art.
On June 1, the touring party arrived in Florence, where Etta would spend nearly a month—mostly at the Uffizi—immersing herself in the Italian masters. It was expected that a traveler, on her first visit to Florence, would pay an obligatory visit or two to the great museum. Then her attention would likely turn toward the city's other charms—especially its many shops and restaurants. For Etta, Florence held one main attraction—art. On June 3, she made her first trip to the Uffizi and returned there nearly every day during her stay.
“Made our third visit to the Uffizi and as usual had Leo in his own leisurely way flitting (I should say creeping) from one to the other of us, each one of us delighted to welcome this wonderful brain.”
Based on her journal entries, Etta's initial interest in art appears to have been literal. Fascinated by the stories behind the paintings, she wrote of being “keenly” interested in Filippo Lippi's Madonna with Child and Angels because the madonna was actually a nun the artist married.
On June 13, 1901, she wrote: “Finally reached Uffizi by 11 am, had a delightful time wandering around among my pets, reading up stories of saints, gods and bible characters. I had a long sit before Botticelli's ‘Birth of Venus’ and then had a good time going from picture to picture becoming better acquainted with my St. Jean the Baptists, St. Sebastians, and the other saints and saintesses.”
Etta had not yet developed to the point where she could look at a painting and appreciate it as a painting. She still looked at it as a picture of something. In fact, her taste in art was largely limited to the Renaissance. Late in June, she went to the Galleria dell'Accademia to see modern paintings, but wrote, rather matter-of-factly, that those works did not appeal to her.
On June 18, Leo left the group. For the first time since arriving in Europe, not only were they without male escort, but the driving force behind their little group was gone. Etta described their “lonely march” without him down the arched, marble tile walkway to dinner at Gambrinus on the Piazza della Republica. As their footsteps echoed in the dark shadows of the city's many monuments, Florence must have seemed more melancholy than usual.
Two weeks later, the band of traveling Victorian ladies left Florence, first for Venice, then for Germany.
An independent woman for more than two months, Etta first encountered her distant German relatives on the Munich leg of their trip. In her diary entry for July 21, 1901, she barely disguised her resentment, writing that she found their “hospitality touching but I am glad I do not live among them.”
Etta's diary in Italy was sun-drenched, light-hearted, and bursting with enthusiasm. It was the journal of a woman doing what she wanted, when she wanted to do it, without thinking for a moment how her actions might be viewed.
The woman in Germany was suddenly shuttled from place to place by a hovering family whom she did not really know, and whose tastes were unlike her own. Irritated by the place and the people, she found herself annoyed even by the art. During a visit to Dresden, she saw a Rembrandt and proclaimed it “vulgar but beautiful.” By the time the group left to head south to France, Etta was weary of traveling, more thrilled to receive letters from home than intrigued by her exotic environment.
When Etta and company arrived to the heat and haze of Paris in August, they had been touring Europe for three months. “I was not in the mood to enjoy the prospect of living in one of the narrow obscure Paris streets,” she wrote. “However, we ended up at the Quai de Voltaire and found to our amazement that Leo and Gertrude had arrived an hour before us. Of course we talked a lot and had dinner at the Boeuf a la Mode and it was fine. Coffee at the Café American on the Italian Boulevard and Paris with a vengeance.” In less than one day, Etta had revived.
The Hotel Quai de Voltaire was a small, intimate, woody place on the left bank of the Seine. An occupant of one of the hotel's front rooms had a commanding view of the Louvre directly across the river—to the left the Tuileries, and to the right, Notre Dame. It was a picture postcard world that evidently captivated Etta.
“Went to the Louvre and had a perfectly delicious time. In fact the whole place is so redolent of glorious warm color and form that I actually felt enthused once more and forgot any fatigue I had.”
If Leo had been the commanding presence in Naples and Florence, Gertrude became the driving force in Paris. Etta had not seen Gertrude for several months, and even when together in Baltimore before Etta's trip, Gertrude had been closer to Claribel because of their work at Hopkins. But Gertrude dropped out of school two weeks before graduating, saying that her medical education was a farce and that she had no interest in pursuing medicine as a career.
In fact, the decision to stay or leave Hopkins was really not hers to make—she had flunked four senior-year courses. And she had drawn the ire of the chief of obstetrics, Dr. J. Whitridge Williams, who, according to H.L. Mencken, “detested women doctors and, in addition, had a violent prejudice against all women who were fat.”
During those tumultuous Baltimore days, Etta lost track of Gertrude. Now that they were reunited in Europe, both women found the other changed.
The air of experimentation at the Johns Hopkins Medical School extended into the social life around it, and some of the students engaged in same-sex relationships. Gertrude, now twenty-seven, had been involved in a romantic triangle with two women—May Bookstaver and Mabel Haynes—during her last years in medical school. The affair is generally believed to be documented in Gertrude's book Q.E.D., which was not published until after her death.
In it, she described the summer of 1901 as the time when the character Adele began to understand the meaning of her relationship with the character Helen. Did the passage indicate that Gertrude discovered her sexuality during her summer in Europe—the same summer she met up with Etta in Paris? The answer is unclear. But scholars are in general agreement that the Bookstaver-Haynes affair was Gertrude's first foray into lesbianism.
The entire issue of a woman's sexuality at the turn of the century is difficult to gauge. Delicacy dictated that the nature of relationships—heterosexual or homosexual—not be spelled out clearly. And in some cases, relationships that would today be described as lesbian were regarded then as mere friendships.
As early as the eighteenth century, women were engaging in relationships with other women that were referred to and accepted as “romantic friendships,” and contained all the elements of great passions, including physical intimacies.
Even mainstream publications like Ladies Home Journal and Harper's carried romantic tales of relationships between women. The unions were not believed to be sexual, because women themselves were thought not to be interested in sex except to please their husbands, or to procreate, and so society had no objection to the attachments.
But by the late nineteenth century, as the movement toward women's general independence grew, research into the nature of women's relationships emerged, and an alarm bell sounded from Europe. Women who were attracted to women were found to be abnormal and neurotic by German psychologist Carl von Westphal, who said the condition “explained why some women had such a grave craving for independence from men.”
In 1897, Havelock Ellis, a noted American expert on sexuality, declared that love between women was a form of insanity that led to murder and suicide. A sensational 1892 case, where a Tennessee woman, Alice Mitchell, slit the throat of her female lover, Freda Ward, supposedly reinforced Havelock's view.
It is not clear whether Gertrude's first affair in 1901 progressed beyond the intensity of a “romantic friendship” and into a sexual relationship. But, from her writing in Q.E.D., it can be assumed that she was in the thrall of a grand passion when she arrived in Paris that summer.
Etta, for her part, was a new woman, too. Out from the shadow of her dominant older sister Claribel, she was broadening herself with travel, and was in the grip of a passion of her own. In the museums of Europe, she had discovered an occupation—the study and appreciation of art.
In Paris, Etta traveled across the Pont des Arts to the Louvre, where she would wander alone for hours, eagerly hunting out clues to the treasures housed in the famous French museum. Her visits there were almost obsessive, as her diaries attest. It was as if she had set herself a task of making art and its history her own by constantly roaming among the Louvre's artistic masterpieces.
Etta spent her days expanding her intellectual horizons, but devoted her nights to reviving her spirits. Her diaries were full of dinners and cafés and the theater, which sometimes resulted in her remaining in bed until 1:30 the next afternoon. And at the center of each activity was Gertrude.
During the first portion of her trip, it was Leo whose name appeared most frequently in Etta's diary. But after the reunion in Paris, it was Gertrude who consumed the younger Cone. “Arose late & Gertrude came in most inopportunely to my room. . .”
“. . . Got up at 1 p.m. when Gertrude came in with her enthusiasm over French literature. . .”
“. . . talked with Gertrude on her pet subject of Human intercourse of the sexes. She is surely interesting.”
Etta describes a dinner with Gertrude at the Gare de l'Orient as “the greatest meal for me in Paris.” Gertrude left her at 2 a.m. that night. Etta retired for the evening at 3:30. Etta, once the picture of Victorian womanhood, found her way to the bawdy Follies Bergère, noting in her diary, “I never saw more charming athletics.”
Gertrude and Leo were interested in Japanese art and sought it out in Paris galleries. Etta accompanied them on their visits and, on September 17, according to her diary, she purchased 41 francs’ worth of Japanese prints.
It was her first art purchase since the Robinsons in 1898, and foretold her future as a collector, not so much because of what she bought, but how she bought it. In her diary of that day, she stated her initial intention of spending no more than 15 francs, but, she confessed, “I've got the fever bad and could not help it.”
During that visit, none of the Stein-Cone circle appears to have visited the galleries displaying the work of artists living and working in Paris. The only diary entry that hints they might have seen work by modern artists was on September 13, when Etta wrote that she visited the Luxembourg and saw works by Rodin and the “so-called impressionist painters, Monet, Manet and others.”
She also noted that she “went with Gertrude to Rue Lafitte & saw art stores.” But it is certain she knew nothing of the painter working less than a mile from her hotel who would dominate her life.
While Etta and her group ate and drank with abandon, Henri Matisse and his family, living along the Seine in a studio on the Quai St. Michel, subsisted on rice brought back to Paris from the artist's father's store.
The Baltimore group's brief sojourn in Paris ended on September 24, when Etta and Hortense Guggenheimer left for London. The bleak grayness viewed from her room at the Victoria Hotel perfectly reflected Etta's mood—she was sullen and tired. Even when Etta and Hortense met up with Gertrude, who would travel with them to America from Southampton, Etta continued to be blue.