The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (11 page)

Instead, he continued his own pursuits, which brought him increased notoriety and some new collectors. Matisse also signed a contract with the respectable Bernheim-Jeune Gallery and moved his family yet again—this time to Issy les Moulineaux, southwest of Paris.

The Cone sisters visited him there during their 1912 tour, and they must have been struck by the harmony of the setting. Matisse was robust and healthy. His at-home studio looked out upon a garden of brilliant flowers. He had two dogs as companions and a horse for exercise. In the gentle air and absolute quiet of the French countryside, he and his family appeared the picture of domesticity.

The Matisse household, however, was not entirely happy. With his family settled in the country, Matisse continued to travel to Paris to work with models. For some time, he had been having an affair with a Russian Jewish student of his, Olga Merson, who had posed for a Matisse portrait and sculpture in 1911. Olga is possibly the inspiration for the red-haired nymph approached by the nude male in the erotic
Nymph and Satyr
from 1908-09.

Whether Madame Matisse knew of her husband's indiscretion is not clear. It is also not clear if the Cone sisters were aware of it. But they freely exchanged gossip with Sally Stein, who, like Olga, was a one-time student of Matisse, and who no doubt knew of the affair. There would have been no reason for Sally to have spared the Cones the news of Matisse's dalliance.

Despite his success, Matisse the artist was still viewed in some sectors of Paris as a menace. Urinals in Montmartre were covered in the graffiti: “Matisse has done more harm in a year than an epidemic! Matisse causes insanity!” Someone altered hundreds of emergency bulletins distributed throughout
the quarter. Rather than warning of the dangers of white lead, they now carried—because of the defacement—a warning about Matisse.

And in the United States, Matisse's work continued to be greeted with outrage from critics and collectors alike. The artist had had his first American sculpture show in March 1912—this time, as before, at Stieglitz's gallery in New York. Critics were unanimously appalled by the work. Arthur Hoeber of the
New York Globe
said the sculpture looked “like the work of a madman, and it is hard to be patient with these impossible travesties in the human form. . . Indeed it is unbelievable that sane men can justify these on any possible grounds.”

Some American collectors, just beginning to be interested in Matisse, were warned off by American artists. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney considered purchasing the sculpture
Le Serf
at the Stieglitz show, but was dissuaded by portrait painter Howard Cushing. (The Cone sisters later purchased the piece.)

And Isabella Stewart Gardner was warned away from Matisse by a former Museum of Fine Arts Boston official who said John Singer Sargent considered Matisse's painting “worthless.”

The Cones, however, remained faithful. They also followed Leo's lead and shunned Picasso's new work. Two camps had developed—Gertrude and those who preferred Picasso, and Leo, Sally, Mike, and the Cones, who preferred Matisse.

By 1912, Gertrude backed her loyalty with money, and bought her first Picasso painting, a Cubist piece, which she defiantly hung in the rue de Fleurus. She and Picasso, she believed, were artistic soul mates. Both fantasized about being so famous that if thieves broke into their homes, they would steal his paintings and her writings rather than silver
or coins.

The Cone sisters soon got a taste of Gertrude's Cubistinspired writing. During a visit that fall to the rue de Fleurus, Gertrude announced she had captured the sisters in a word portrait she called
Two Women
. The tortured prose went round and round in an endless and repetitious series of phrases that, taken as a whole, were somehow meant to elucidate the Cone women. Claribel said she was “enchanted” by Gertrude's work, though she admitted she had no idea what Gertrude meant by it, and took the floor to read parts of it aloud. Gertrude said Claribel did so with great aplomb.

Claribel read: “There were two of them. They were each one of them rich. They each one of them had what they wanted. Martha when she was wanting. Ada when she was going to be wanting. And they both had not what they were wanting. The older Martha because she was not wanting it and the younger Ada because she could not come to want it.

“They both of them were spending money that they had and they were both of them very different one from the other of them. They were both of them doing what they were doing that is to say Martha was doing what she was doing that is to say she was not changing in doing what she was doing, that is to say she was going on and that was something that she was saying was a curious thing, that she was doing what she was doing and not changing and not doing that thing.”

A photograph of that reading would have shown Claribel, with mischievous smiling eyes, large and resplendent in fine but dated clothing, in the midst of a group of admiring younger women reciting incomprehensible prose that would not bring Gertrude widespread recognition for another twenty years. And all around the group of ladies were the pictures that had made the rue de Fleurus famous.

By 1912, the plaster in the Stein studio had begun to crumble, but the decay was barely noticeable because of the hundreds of images that covered the walls. Leo had collected works by Matisse, Picasso, Vallotton, Cézanne, Daumier, Renoir, Manet, Bonnard, Manguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. The image of the women, in their dark turn-of-the-century garb, sitting among paintings that would still be considered bold fifty years later, is an incongruous one, made more so by Gertrude's indecipherable prose.

The sisters returned to America again at the end of 1912. Etta had taken an apartment in the Marlborough, near Claribel's, and the two sisters began filling both apartments with odds and ends picked up during their travels. Etta's apartment contained the few paintings and drawings she had acquired. Both homes were enlivened by the brilliant textiles they had collected on their world tour.

Claribel, however, was bored. She occasionally spoke to women's groups in the city and attended cultural events, but she lacked the freedom and stimulus in Baltimore that she had had in Europe. As in Gertrude's word portrait of the sisters, Claribel was “wanting.”

A flu epidemic hit Baltimore during the winter of 1913, sending Etta to her bed and indirectly causing the sisters to miss the one art event in America that might have aroused Claribel's interest. The famous Armory Show, held in February in New York, was the official introduction of modern European art to the United States.

Thousands of people lined up to see works the Cones already knew intimately. Leo and Mike and Sally had loaned several pieces to the exhibition, including Matisse's
Blue Nude
. And the dealers along the rue Lafitte had also contributed several works.

The art world in America was as horrified by the exhibition
as the French crowd had been eight years earlier, when first glimpsing Matisse's
Femme au Chapeau.
One American critic labeled the Cubist grouping the “Chamber of Horrors.”

And, once again, the press reviled Matisse. A
New York Times
critic wrote, “We may as well say in the first place that his pictures are ugly, that they are coarse, that they are narrow, that to us they are revolting in their inhumanity.” The academic mural painter Kenyon Cox wrote in the same newspaper, “many of his paintings are simply the exaltation to the walls of a gallery the drawing of a nasty boy.”

Etta and Claribel surely read about the uproar, because it only increased as the exhibition traveled. In Chicago, students made a copy of Matisse's
Blue Nude,
which Leo owned, and burned it in effigy. But the controversy—as controversy most often does—benefitted the artists. In this case, it sparked interest among America's intelligentsia, who now rushed to buy the ridiculed work.

In the summer of 1913, the sisters were back in Europe for their annual visit. But Claribel decided hers would be an extended stay this time. She would not return this time to Baltimore. She would live in Germany instead.

Etta could have stayed in Paris while her sister remained abroad, but she did not. By the fall, she and her nurse-attendant, Nora Kaufman, were aboard ship heading back to the United States. Perhaps Etta recognized that the Paris of 1913 was not the Paris that loomed so large in her memories. The innocence and conviviality of the early years were gone.

That fall, Leo prepared to move out of the rue de Fleurus. He told the collector Albert C Barnes, “I can't stand Gertrude. She's crazy.” Leo took the Renoirs, Matisses, and Cézannes for his house in Florence, and Gertrude kept the rest.

During that same period, a depressed Matisse was having trouble working. He said the success of Cubism, which was at its peak, left him “virtually alone.” Because he had chosen not to join that particular school, it threatened to eclipse him.

In fact, when he entered the café La Coupole on the Boulevard Montparnasse one evening, he was greeted by an unusually excited crowd. But, he soon learned, the uproar was not for him. The gathering had mistaken him for Picasso.

For his part, Picasso's moment had come. He had left Fernande and moved to Montparnasse with his latest love, Eva, to begin a new life. But, Gertrude said, Picasso never laughed any more.

The bohemian and naïve world of the Bâteau Lavoir and the rue de Fleurus had vanished. The artists and writers were no longer in the business of indulging themselves and each other. They had found respectability and a place at wealth's table.

We had seen three days of the German army by now; and it seemed to me. . . that the whole world had turned into a gray machine of death. . . And over it all lay a smell which I have never heard mentioned in any book on war—the smell of a half million unbathed men, the stench of a menagerie raised to the nth power.

—Will Irwin, writing in
Colliers Weekly,
1914

P
icasso's “Empress” roamed the streets of 1914 Munich with a freedom and leisure she lacked in every other city. Claribel had just enough acquaintances there to keep her social calendar full, but no obligation to see any of them. For her, it was a perfect existence that revolved around music, the opera, and the cultural heart of Bavaria.

Munich in 1914 was the city of Thomas Mann and the country's poets, and the center of Germany's modern art movement, then led by the director of the Bavarian State Gallery.

Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej Jawlensky also lived there, as did Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and other members of the expressionist movement known as
Der Blaue Reiter
(The Blue Rider).

It was also home to a destitute young Austrian who had taken an attic room above a tailor shop in the bohemian district of Schwabing. Adolf Hitler, still struggling to be an
artist, supported himself by selling postcards.

The year Claribel took up residence in Munich, the city was celebrating the 25th anniversary of the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and was bursting with nationalist pride. On August 1, 1914, a declaration was read to the public from the steps of the Feldherrnhalle in the Odeonplatz.

Germany was declaring war on Russia. The kaiser was forced into the conflict, the declaration said, when Serb nationalists, two months earlier, assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Archduke, before his death, had assured Austrians that Germany would come to Austria's aid if the Serbs’ ally, Russia, was brought into the conflict. By July 30, Russia mobilized along Austria's border, and Germany seemed to be standing by its pledge to defend its ally against the great Russia.

United States news reporters stationed in Munich sent home urgent dispatches.

“This city is feverish with excitement over the prospect of war. We arrived from Berlin and Dresden, where the mobs in the streets and processions of students singing
Die Wacht am Rhein [Watching Over the Rhein]
and other war ballads were of such magnitude that old residents said nothing like them had been seen since the beginning of the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870.

“We had just been driven out of the famous picture-gallery by the four o'clock closing bell, when we found excited throngs eagerly calling for immediate and complete mobilization of all reserves and indicating that the great European war had come.”

One American writer said the first reports of war “gave an impression. . . [that] Europe by some dark enchantment had become a witches’ cauldron brewing mephitic shapes.”

By August 4, France had declared war on Germany, Germany on Belgium, and England on Germany. Some 70,000 Americans traveling in Europe were caught in the conflict.
“Suddenly,” wrote one reporter, “the paralysis of civilization that war brings left them stranded. Waiters left the dining rooms for ‘mobilization,’ trains were diverted to become troop carriers, traveler's checks were worthless and boundaries between countries became impassable.”

The correspondent for the
New York World
reported, “In their eagerness to get away from the perils of war, Americans even abandoned all their belongings, fought for places on the last train from Paris and arrived in London starved and moneyless. President Wilson means to provide them gold and ships to bring them home.”

Claribel, however, did not join her countrymen in the mad rush to leave Europe. After the first few heady days of war and mobilization, Munich calmed down and life returned to much of its pre-August 1st character. In fact, during the first years of the war, Bavaria would be spared most of the hardship the rest of Europe suffered. Germany was the aggressor, pushing its troops across other countries’ borders.

In Paris, however, the evidence of war was everywhere. Search lights, mounted atop the Eiffel Tower, roamed the sky for the enemy. For Paris’ artists, life fundamentally changed. “Paris is dark at three in the afternoon,” Max Jacob wrote. “Each day is like Sunday; absinthe has been outlawed, there's only one kind of bread to eat, hardly any films to see, and no one dresses up or plays music.”

Picasso remained in Paris, living with Eva in a plush apartment, but their life was made gloomy by the zeppelin alarms and the cemetery the apartment overlooked.

Braque, Derain, Apollinaire, and Lèger left for the front, and Matisse tried to enlist in the service, but was rejected. He moved his family to Collioure and then returned to his studio in Paris where, unable to paint, he spent the first year of the war playing the violin.

Gertrude and Alice had been in England when the war broke out, but eventually made their way back to Paris, and then headed south to Palma de Mallorca, where the war played out in a bizarre burlesque. A German governess hung out her country's flag every time there was a German victory, and the Allies’ supporters on the island did the same when their side won.

In America, the New York Stock Exchange shut down after Germany declared war on Russia. It did not re-open until that December. President Woodrow Wilson had vowed to remain neutral, and declared October 4, 1914, “Peace Sunday,” instructing Americans to pray for an end to the conflict.

But despite the distance and the prayers, the battle continued, and soon its direct effect on the United States was felt. As one of its first acts of war, Britain cut the only German cable linking the United States and Germany. Britain also seized and examined all German mail bound for America.

For those, like Etta Cone, cut off from family and friends in Munich or Berlin, who hoped to get a glimmer of what might be happening to them there, the news reports were no help either. Correspondents traveled with the Allies and practically all their reports were censored.

It was as if Claribel, in her insulated way, did not exist. Nor, apparently, did she recognize the danger she was in. Her “Day's Work” from the start of the war lists: “1. get red buttons. 2. write check for $1,000 to pay for antiques. 3. tip room maid 50 cents.” Claribel lived in the eye of the storm, yet was undisturbed by its turbulence.

In September 1915, she wrote Etta. “My dearest sister: I think very often of you and hope you are well. Take things a bit easy. That is the only way to make life worthwhile. I say this and have just finished writing for 3
¹
/
₂
hours part of a long list of things I mean to do (or hope to do) this winter in Munchen. My schedule of work if I finish
¹
/
₂
of all this I shall
be satisfied. A man's reach should exceed his grasp else what's a Heaven for? Here it is wonderfully beautiful.”

In 1915, Claribel was 51 and living the life of a bohemian above a shop. There is no indication she ever knew any of the painters of
Der Blaue Reiter
living in Munich, or purchased any of their art, but Claribel was apparently in contact with poets.

In one letter to Etta, she wrote of a Hungarian poet who had her read his work aloud and told her she gave it just the right emphasis and expression. And she said “over here they put me in the category of Poetry-Art. And when I say I have never written a line of poetry in my life, they say, not in that sense.”

She had also grown philosophical about the war. In apparent response to a question from Etta about her loyalties, Claribel wrote in July 1915, “I am strictly neutral my dear sister. Please do not mistake that. But being in the midst of so much suffering, so much heroism and so much nobility of soul and self-sacrifice, I cannot but feel deeply sympathetic and sincerely interested in the cause of the German.

“This does not mean however that I cannot sympathize equally as much with all the tried peoples of the earth—who are suffering through this mistaken notion of upholding one's own dignity—I cannot lend my acceptance to a situation which makes it necessary for human beings to slay each other in order to make wrong right.

“But as all of the nations appear to be guilty of this error, I must complacently accept the situation and simply feel deeply for those poor maimed bodies and wounded souls that are the result of such a system of error. I speak of all the nations—for as Thomas Paine said years ago—’War is murder, all the more heinous for being gloried in.’”

The kaiser was still in Munich, the operas were plentiful, the beer gardens full, and the good life persisted. Claribel was enchanted by existence there. Except for news reports of soldiers
killed in war and a steady stream of men in gray green leaving for the front, life in Munich was untouched by the horrors unleashed in Belgium and France. It was as if the war ripping the continent apart were nothing more than a distant drama.

By October of 1916, Claribel had moved out of her apartment for the comfort of the Regina Palast Hotel. She was concerned about the cost, she wrote, but said the landlord at her previous lodging, an “eccentric hysterical little woman,” made continued residence there impossible. The new quarters Claribel took up were in a luxurious hotel billing itself as the most modern in Europe.

It was a large building with 240 rooms overlooking the Maximiliansplatz in the heart of imperial Munich. To the southwest was the Justizpalast, and to the northwest the Arco Palais, Palais Ludwig Ferdinand, and the Leuchtenberg Palais. The wide boulevard in front of the hotel had two massive fountains on either end. In between were landscaped paths frequented by the city's wealthy residents. Claribel's suite included three rooms with a private bath and balcony.

Her daily routine included twenty minutes of exercise involving steps she copied from Isadora Duncan's dancing, visits with relatives and friends in Munich, and talks with other hotel guests. Among them was a soldier who she said was interested in psychic research. Claribel, he told her, should have been an actress.

In fact, her life in Munich amounted to something very close to that. She thrilled at being a mystery to her tablemates, who wondered about the imposing figure among them, all alone in the great city. But her ultimate thrill, she wrote Etta, was an encounter with King Ludwig himself, who apparently mistook her for visiting royalty in the lobby of a concert hall in Munich.

Claribel, it seems, had heard the royal party being
announced. “Along with the rest of the guests I bowed. The procession continued and I returned to the occupation of fastening the laces of my sleeve. My head being bent I did not see what was happening. Presently I was conscious of someone standing before me—and heard a voice say
Ich hatte Sie Nicht geshen,
(I had not seen you). There stood the king—with outstretched hands—charming, apologizing for having failed to acknowledge my bow.”

In 1917, Claribel's family tried to persuade her to return to the United States. Ceasar Cone used political connections in President Wilson's administration to arrange for Claribel's return home in the American diplomatic corps’ private train. Pressure was building for the U.S. to enter the war, and if that happened, Claribel had to be out of Germany, Ceasar reasoned.

But despite Ceasar's efforts, Claribel refused to budge. She would not go, she said, because she was not permitted a private compartment on the train—for herself and her ten or fifteen trunks—and “she would not change her habits just because of a world war.” The normally calm and kind Ceasar “hit the roof.”

Claribel wrote to her brother Sydney, “I thank you for wishing me to come home. I try somehow to arrange to come—but I seem to have taken root here and believe I am thriving. Physically I feel better than I have felt for a long while. Is it the climate or the life I lead here I do not know. I have such interesting personal experiences and meet such interesting people.”

For Claribel, Munich was a stage grand enough for her performance. And the thought of leaving her richly appointed hotel suite in a dynamic city for what she called cramped rooms in the cultural backwater of Baltimore made the shadow of war a mere minor obstacle to her staying.

But she soon discovered the ramifications of her decision.
In February 1917, Claribel received letters telling her that Ceasar had died. She tried to respond, but her letters were returned. Claribel found herself cut off from any communication with America. The United States had entered the war, and she was living in hostile territory.

It had taken President Wilson three years from the start of the European war to commit U.S. forces. Even after the Germans torpedoed the
Lusitania
in 1915, he chose to remain out of the conflict, saying the United States was “too proud to fight.”

But repeated German attacks on merchant and passenger ships, and growing anti-German sentiment among the American people, weighted the scales in favor of war. By February 1917, the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Germany, and on June 5, American men were registering for the draft to fight the battle in Europe.

War hysteria gripped the United States. The great German gun “Big Bertha” was trained on Paris, dropping shells from seventy miles away, and Americans vowed not to be victims of a similar attack. Thirteen percent of the U.S. population at the time was of German birth or descent, and that large group became suspect.