The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (26 page)

Etta was perhaps the luckiest of her old friends. She had the serenity of a close family and a beautiful home filled with the things that might as well have been her children.

On May 18, 1949, she drew up her Last Will and Testament, bequeathing her 3,000-piece collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art, whose staff, in the twenty years since Claribel's death, had proved to Etta that the spirit of art appreciation in Baltimore had indeed improved. In her will, Etta also set aside $400,000 for the museum to build a wing to house the works.

Etta began her collection of French paintings in 1905 with a Picasso drawing that cost her only a few dollars. In 1949, she was offered another Picasso from that era. Allan Stein was ill and needed money, so he telephoned Etta at Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and offered to sell her a gouache Picasso had done of him in 1906.

Agreeing to a price of $15,000, she awaited the piece she was sure she had seen hanging at Sally and Mike's in the early days on the rue Madame. For Etta, the thought of the drawing must have conjured up a thousand other images, making for full and happy days as she waited.

But Etta never saw the drawing in her home. She died of heart failure on August 30, 1949, before the Picasso arrived.

A Pinkerton guard stood outside Etta and Claribel's Baltimore apartments, guarding their collection while assessors examined its many pieces. Before Baltimore Museum of Art staff members arrived to begin moving the collection to their facility, it was as if a time capsule had been opened.

Claribel's long dresses were still hanging neatly in her closet, two decades after her death. Fresh flowers were in a vase in her room, as she would have wanted them.

A half century of collecting, estimated at the time to be worth $3 million, was neatly in its place.

The only missing pieces were the two sisters.

B
efore Etta died, she selected a committee to sort through her vast holdings and to choose works that would eventually become part of the official Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

The committee included the president of the BMA Board of Trustees, museum director Adelyn Breeskin; Etta's sister-in-law, Laura Cone; Walters Art Gallery technical adviser David Rosen; and BMA Board member and U.S. Solicitor General Philip B. Perlman, who also had served as Etta Cone's personal attorney and was named the estate's executor.

Those items not deemed appropriate for the BMA collection, or duplicates, were donated to the Women's College of the University of North Carolina, for use in its art department and at the nearby Weatherspoon Art Gallery.

The remainder of the collection, including some paintings, textiles, and mementos, were divided among Cone family members and friends. Everything else was auctioned off—though the auction house was expressly not permitted to identify the items as being from the Cone family.

Etta's and Claribel's large collection easily satisfied two art institutions, a sprawling family, and an auction house. At
the time of Etta's death, the art collection alone consisted of more than 300 items—149 paintings, 97 drawings, 54 sculptures, 114 prints, and three illustrated books by Henri Matisse, including his much-prized Mallarmé set.

Of a total of 3,000 items ultimately decided on for the collection, one-sixth, or about 500, were by Matisse, and ranged from paintings and sculpture, to prints and illustrated books. Not only did no other museum have nearly as many Matisse items, but the Matisse items in the collection were comprehensive rather than episodic, representing virtually every phase of the artist's long and remarkably diverse career. He died five years after Etta, in 1954. Despite cancer that struck him at the start of the second world war, Matisse had lived to the grand old age of 85, and was still working as an innovative artist almost to the end.

The collection also included a world-renowned textile and lace collection.

Etta set strict conditions on her bequest to the BMA. The collection was not to be modified in any way. Nothing could be sold or traded. And nothing could be added to the collection. If she had not completed her mission to provide a comprehensive view of modern French art and painting, so be it. The collection ended with her.

In October 1949, shortly after Etta's death, the Baltimore Museum of Art allowed the general public to see the new collection. One thousand people attended the official opening.

The Baltimore
Sun
noted, “Last night, although some persons expressed dislike of some of the pictures, the general reaction left no doubt that Baltimore felt it had been greatly enriched.”

Even the city fathers were convinced of the collection's value, and offered to add $175,000 in governmental funds to Etta's $400,000 bequest to construct a special wing to house the Cone works.

The three-story Cone Wing opened to the public nearly eight years later, in February 1957. But even with 470,000 cubic feet of exhibition space, only about 4 percent of the collection has been on view at any given time.

Since its opening, perhaps as many as 20 million visitors to the BMA have been introduced to the Cone sisters through the art they bought. The collection has also traveled to the Wildenstien Gallery and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and museums as far away as Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, among others.

In 2001, the Baltimore Museum of Art opened a renovated Cone Wing. Still not large enough to display more than about 120 out of the collection's 3,000 items at any one time, the renovated wing offers visitors several fascinating additions. Before the renovation, visitors could only see a tiny, glass-encased sample of the sisters’ Marlborough Appartments, to sense how much they collected, and how they displayed it. Now, because of the renovation, an entire room has been set up to simulate one of the apartment rooms, complete with furniture and books.

Even more remarkable is a computer simulation, done through BMA cooperation with the University of Maryland at Baltimore County (UMBC), that takes the viewer through many of the apartments’ rooms, for a much more complete sense of the cozy museum the sisters had made for themselves.

Because of both these innovations, any visitor to the collection can not only imagine the world of Claribel and Etta Cone, but step into the sisters’ home and live with them, during a brief but enriching afternoon, among their much-treasured art.

But while their collection is justly celebrated in its new and glorious environs, and the collection's value in 2002 thought to be nearly $1 billion, the two sisters themselves are a bit neglected—the money set aside for their perpetual graveyard care apparently ran out in the year 2001.

Not more than two hundred yards from the main office of Baltimore's Druid Ridge Cemetery, up a slight hill in a secluded, park-like area called Hickory Knoll, sits, inconspicuously, the family mausoleum. Only the word “Cone”—appearing above the portico in all-capitalized letters—marks the site. James O. Olney, a famous New York City architect of the 1930s and 1940s, designed the stately but modest building (approximately ten feet by ten feet).

Through two heavy, age-darkened, and ill-maintained bronze doors, flanked by two traditional, Roman-looking columns of Vermont granite, one enters the small chamber, which is made of solid Tennessee marble.

On the left side, stretching the building's length, are the final resting quarters of Etta, on top; brother Fred, in the middle; and Claribel, on the bottom.

Imprinted on each vault are simply their names and their respective dates of birth and death: Etta Cone, November 30, 1870—August 31, 1949; Frederick Cone, August 29, 1878—May, 20, 1944; and Claribel Cone, November 14, 1864—September 20, 1929. On the tomb's right side are three distinct but unused burial spaces.

Neither here, nor on the mausoleum's exterior, appears even the briefest commemoration of what these two “maiden ladies” accomplished during their lifetimes. In death as in life, Etta and Claribel Cone thought it undignified to call much attention to themselves as people.

A visitor would have no idea that buried here are two of the world's greatest, most philanthropic, yet least recognized, art collectors of the twentieth century.

P
UBLIC AND
P
RIVATE
C
OLLECTIONS

The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institutions, Washington, DC

The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD

The Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, MD

The Jewish Historical Society of Maryland, Baltimore, MD

The Johns Hopkins University Eisenhower Library, Baltimore, MD

The Johns Hopkins University Welch Medical Library, Baltimore, MD

The Library of Congress, Washington, DC

The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD

The Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT