The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (13 page)

“But this morning you should have seen the admiration which Emma (my maid) and I bestowed upon this pair of shoes—the “ground grippers”—and the delight with which I acknowledge myself the possessor—the happy possessor—of a pair of shoes and of such quality! I have tried for two or more years to get a pair of shoes. . .

“Fortunately I have the habit of keeping my worn out shoes and clothes, and things which even I thought too shabby to wear have appeared like a gift from heaven when the last shred of a bit of rubber would hold the shoe I was then wearing on my foot. . . for deep snow I found a big pair of flannel lined men's rubber boots. They are Russian and of good quality.”

Times had changed drastically for the Empress. She now regarded the things she had previously possessed in abundance, even taken for granted, such as precious jewels and various physical comforts. In fact, Claribel's letters during the years she
prepared to leave Munich were increasingly about “things”—not people. She even began to write that the necessary disposal of some of her things was keeping her from leaving Munich.

In response to a letter from Etta, she wrote, “You are right—do not let things consume you. But on the whole I find things so much more satisfactory than people, people are interesting but you cannot live with them as satisfactorily as with things. Things are soothing—if they are works of art—most people are over-stimulating—and nowadays—the people who have suffered war and especially a lost war—are irritating. Some are like a bitter medicament.”

That same month, she finally wrote, “I am ready to take myself out of Germany. But the things! the trunks! the boxes! the books!”

While Claribel sorted through her possessions and packed—two tasks that consumed a full two years—the streets of Munich seethed. The beer halls that had once echoed with boisterous revelry were now arenas of political debate. In February 1920, Hitler's party held its biggest rally to date at the Hofbrauhaus and attracted 2,000 people.

And that spring, as its membership increased, the party's name was changed to the National Socialist German Workers Party. Announcements concerning the group were distributed from trucks and posted on bright red placards in the streets of Munich.

The ultra-nationalist meetings, previously held behind closed doors, were bursting out onto the city's boulevards. Enthusiastic crowds under the spell of Hitler's speeches spilled from beer halls and marched through Munich singing pogrom songs. For Hitler, Munich was the “holy city of national socialism.”

Assassinations, random murders, beatings, and kidnappings became the norm in a city that had once been the cultural heart of Germany. Lion Feuchtwanger, in his book
Erfolg
(Success), wrote, “Formerly the beautiful, easygoing city drew to itself all the best talents of the Reich. How is it that they were gone now, and in their place everything that was rotten and evil in the Reich?” Warnings were issued in a Berlin newspaper for travelers to avoid Bavaria. Munich was labeled a “murderer's center.”

The ranks of those joining the nationalist forces were growing by the thousands. For Claribel, it was finally time to leave. The Munich of the kaiser, the opera houses, the symphony, and the theater—the Munich she had once loved—appeared to be gone forever. There was no end to the violence corrupting her European home, and a vast increase in hatred directed at her as both a Jew and a foreigner. Claribel, nearly 57, was not up to the fight.

After finally deciding to leave the bulk of her possessions behind in Germany, the solitary traveler booked a stateroom for three on a ship bound for the United States. It would be her first trip home in seven years.

Before leaving Munich, she wrote Etta: “I shall be so glad to see you again my dearest sister and all my dear ones. A lifetime—many lifetimes—wars, revolutions, upheavals, insurrections. . . strikes. . . strikes. . . strikes. . . all sorts of strikes and all sorts of changes have taken place since we have seen each other, and yet curiously enough I believe we shall both be just the same as before. That seems curious does it not?”

There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it. . .

—Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast,
1964

P
erhaps Claribel wished that the two sisters would be just the same as before the war, but they weren't—nothing was. The war machine had screeched to a halt, but the vivid memory of its horrors lingered. There was a momentary stillness after the fighting while the world assessed the damage. That done, Europe began its arduous cleanup, and America began a frenetic dance that became the ‘20s. It was as if the sheer joy of victory set the U.S. on a wild course of speculation and spending.

But the frenzy may have been more the result of fear than joy. America and the world had seen the depths to which modern man could plunge. Americans and Europeans reacted to the horror by making the most of the peacetime, spending each dollar and each day as if it were their last.

The Claribel who returned to Baltimore in 1921 was not
the dark-haired, finely dressed aristocrat who had boarded a ship for Europe eight years before. The woman who appeared at the Marlborough Apartments was a gray-haired, heavy-set creature wearing threadbare clothes, her face lined with signs of suffering. The proud woman who, once, not very long ago, had been mistaken for a queen still resided in that body, but she had been shaken to her roots. The sight must have shocked Etta, so different was this new woman from the Claribel she had known.

Etta, too, had changed. She was now fifty-one and, in the years since her brother Moses’ death, she had become a wholly independent woman. She fully recovered from the loss of her brother, though she was still afflicted with strange maladies that may have been psychosomatic. She had grown into a matronly woman whose angular face had softened over the years. Her hair, now flecked with gray, was still pulled back off her face, but it was worn looser.

Everything about Etta appeared more comfortable—as if she had settled into a life that either was agreeable to her or one that she had accepted as such. She fit easily into the role of “Aunt Etta” to her brothers’ and sisters’ many children, often traveling between Baltimore and North Carolina for extended visits. Etta's household at the Marlborough had grown to include two servants and her younger brother Fred, who took an apartment adjoining hers. She had made a Baltimore home for herself similar to the one she briefly had in Paris in 1906, when she was so happy, and purposely peopled it with those she loved.

Etta offered the returning Claribel a sanctuary in which to recover. The younger sister took charge of the older, nursing her back to health in a setting that must have seemed almost disturbingly calm to Claribel. There were no gunshots or screams, no marching feet or abandoned corpses. For
Claribel, the teeming Munich she had left just weeks before was a terrible other world. That other world, despite her love for Germany, was one to which she would never return.

During her recovery period, Claribel set up house in a small apartment on the sixth floor of the Marlborough, two floors below her brother and sister. She began filling it with the things she had collected in Germany, which one relative described as “mostly junk.” The two sisters and their brother Fred decided that Etta's apartment would be the central home for the Cones in the building, and Claribel and Fred would pay to take their meals there.

How to pay, however, was initially a sobering question for Claribel, who worried upon her return that she was now penniless. According to rumors circulating in Germany during the war, the United States had confiscated the funds of any American citizen who remained in Germany during the war. Her concerns turned out to be unfounded.

During the war, firms that manufactured goods to meet military needs prospered. On Wall Street, the companies were called “war babies.” The Cone Export and Commission Company was one of them, and Claribel's stock dividends had been piling up uncollected since 1916. One relative estimated that Claribel was now worth about $100,000.

Maybe the news of her wealth helped speed her recovery, for, by the summer of 1922, Claribel was ready to travel again. The two sisters, along with Etta's nurse, Miss Nora Kaufman, prepared for their first journey to Europe together in nine years. Claribel was once again the Empress. She had not lost the weight she had somehow put on in Germany, but she had regained her composure.

Out of consideration for Claribel, who was not as interested in “making a tour” as she had once been, the sisters’ travel itinerary changed slightly. They immediately based themselves in Paris at the elegant Hotel Lutetia, where Claribel remained during the summer, while Etta and Miss Kaufman traveled.

The Lutetia, a relatively new hotel built in 1910, was the only palace hotel on the city's left bank. It provided the previously poor bohemians of the Montparnasse quarter, now rich, with a new address. Artists and writers and dancers of means ate in the hotel's brasserie until late in the evening, and then drank in its luxurious salon into the early morning.

The hotel was as grand as the Regina Palast, and may have reminded Claribel of her previous hotel residence. But despite its size, it had an intimacy about it, and it fit nicely into the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and the rue de Sevres. It offered the Cone sisters every convenience, as well as easy access to the adjacent Bon Marché department store, where a delighted Claribel wandered amid the abundant supply of goods, selecting items by the dozen.

The Paris the sisters returned to in 1922 was electric. During the war, a million Parisians had fled the city to the protection of the countryside. The streets were virtually empty then, and nine out of ten street lamps were extinguished. German bombs had fallen on Paris—on the church of Saint-Gervais, on the church of the Madeleine, and in the Seine. The city was left pock-marked and empty.

But with war's end, people once again flooded the streets, and many of them were Americans introduced to the romance of the place while stationed there for work or military duty. The dollar was strong and the franc was weak, so even a down-and-out American writer or painter could afford to live well in the great city. Paris became a magnet for the
“lost generation”—Americans like Fitzgerald and Hemingway—who arrived there with letters of introduction to gain them entrance into the city's legendary salons.

Etta and Claribel needed no introduction to the salons—they had been part of them from the start. They went back, needing and hoping to discover what fate had befallen their friends.

The Cone sisters had not seen Gertrude and Alice since 1913. Gertrude, now forty-seven, still lived with Alice in the rue de Fleurus. The two had spent the war delivering relief supplies in a Ford they called “auntie,” as part of an American charity effort, the American Fund for French Wounded. Gertrude, it was said, could drive “forward admirably,” but could not master the process of backing up.

The pair's small income was diminished during the war—everything, including the necessities of life, had become so expensive—and found themselves forced to scrounge through French markets just to buy food. Gertrude said she and Alice had once been offered German sausage, but she warned Alice away from it, saying, “Take care, it might be Claribel.” In a characteristic understatement, Alice called the times “confused.”

But Gertrude's passion for writing had not been affected by the confused state of things war had brought—nor had her work become more understandable to ordinary readers. She continued to write despite little recognition for her troubles. She worked at night and left the pages for Alice to patiently type in the morning. In the evening, they received visitors.

Increasingly, however, the crowd was literary and drawn to the rue de Fleurus not by the paintings on the walls but by the
sheer force of personality—the very aura—that surrounded the heavy-set woman holding forth from her armchair.

Gertrude would talk to the “geniuses,” and Alice would entertain the wives. Sherwood Anderson was among the first young American writers to make a pilgrimage to Gertrude's door. At the end of 1921, with a note of introduction from Anderson, Ernest Hemingway arrived as well.

Leo Stein had spent the war years in America undergoing psychoanalysis, or as one writer put it, pursuing his three major complexes—inferiority, castration, and pariah. Nina, the artist's model who had been his companion, stayed behind in Europe because she could not get the necessary papers for travel. They remained attached through the war years by way of passionate letters, many of which described Leo's sexual escapades with other women.

Upon his return to Europe, Leo declared in a letter to Gertrude that his whole life up to that point had been a “prolonged disease, a kind of mild insanity.” But, despite his warm tone in letters and almost conciliatory attitude toward their differences, he and his sister never reconciled. He married Nina in 1921 and continued his obscure existence away from the rue de Fleurus culture he had almost singlehandedly created in 1905.

The artists who had been part of those early years were also changed or gone. Apollinaire was dead, Max Jacob had become a Christian and joined a monastery, and Picasso, who had quarreled and broken with Gertrude, was married.

Picasso's great love, Eva, had died in 1916, and in early 1918 he married the Russian ballerina Olga Kokhlova, whom he had met in Rome while designing a set for Diaghilev's ballet
Parade
. As Picasso's professional fortunes improved, his art became sweeter. No longer doing the analytical Cubism that had made him infamous before the war, he was now mixing
Cubist principles with his old love of circus figures and with his latest influences—musicians and dancers. He also painted portraits of his new wife in a classical style that was nothing less than an homage to Ingres. It was perhaps in reaction to war that the artist who had previously sought to shatter reality on canvas turned now toward the most traditional of subjects.

He and Olga moved into an apartment on the rue la Boetie off the Champs Elysées and near his new dealer, Paul Rosenberg. His life had turned decidedly bourgeois under Olga's influence, and in February 1921 he and Olga had a child, Paulo. Infants became a subject for the revolutionary artist—Picasso had entered a new period.

Matisse spent the first year of the war in Paris, back in his old studio on the Quai St. Michel, without his family and unable to paint. The gray desolation of the city and the despair into which it was plunged left the artist incapable of producing his richly colored works, and so he turned to the violin, which became an obsession.

Matisse, however, may have also been blocked artistically by worry over the fate of many of his works, which had been stuck in Berlin since the war's outbreak. A Matisse retrospective had opened at the Gurlitt Gallery in July 1914, including nineteen paintings the Michael Steins lent. But the Berlin show had been forced to close in August when war was declared. There was no indication when or if the paintings would be returned.

The prolonged lapse without work, however anxious it might have made the artist, proved important and, in some ways, beneficial to him. By 1916, Matisse was painting again, and that year and 1917 are characterized by one of his earlier biographers, Alfred Barr Jr., as perhaps the greatest years of his career. Claribel explained the change simply. The war, she said, had taught Matisse, who had been essentially a decorative
artist, to be more complex.

Matisse was working with the Italian model Lorette, and occasionally her sisters, painting interiors that exhibited an intimate sensuality—a feeling of close flesh—that would dominate the remainder of his artistic life. The paintings were portraits of Matisse's world—the sanctuary of his studio or the comforts of his home at Issy les Moulineaux. Like Picasso, he had returned to a kind of traditionalism in his subjects.

But unlike Picasso, who celebrated his new domesticity on canvas, the 48-year-old Matisse spent the war years documenting his desires. The shocking experimentation that characterized Matisse's pre-war works was largely gone. And though the newer works were in no way classical, they were much more accessible than the
Blue Nude,
for example.