The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (7 page)

Claribel wrote: “The walls were covered with canvases. . . presenting what seemed to me then a riot of color—sharp and startling, drawing crude and uneven, distortions and exaggerations—composition primitive and simple as though done by a child. We stood in front of a portrait—it was that of a man bearded, brooding, tense, fiercely elemental in color with green eyes (if I remember correctly), blue beard, pink and yellow complexion. It seemed to me grotesque. We asked ourselves, are these things to be taken seriously.

“As we looked across the room, we found our friends the Steins all earnestly contemplating a canvas—the canvas of a woman with a hat tilted jauntily at an angle on the top of her head—the drawing crude, the color bizarre. This was
La Femme au Chapeau
.”

The Steins were among the few visitors to the salon to
appreciate Matisse's painting. Leo found
La Femme au Chapeau
(Woman in a Hat) brilliant and powerful, “but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.” He declared it to be exactly what he was looking for.

The other critics generally followed Vauxcelle's lead and denounced the new works. In the
Journal de Rouen,
the critic Marcel Nicolle wrote, “What is presented to us here—apart from the materials employed—has nothing whatever to do with painting.” But to Leo, it was “art with a capital A,” and on the last day of the salon he purchased the painting of Matisse's wife in a plumed hat for 450 francs, about the equivalent of $100.

The purchase was a significant one for the thirty-three-year-old collector. He had just $150 a month to pay his living expenses, and it is unlikely Leo had managed to set aside much if any money for discretionary purchases. He told Matisse, through the secretary of the salon, that he could offer 400 francs for the painting, but Matisse, despite being broke, would not accept it. The price, said the artist, was not excessive, and he would take no less than 450 francs. Leo apparently wanted the painting badly enough, accepting the artist's price.

The sale of
La Femme au Chapeau,
as much as the painting itself, caused a stir in the Paris art world. Leo and the Steins gained instant notoriety. The artist who painted the portrait became notorious too, but not necessarily in the way he would have liked.

Henri Matisse, considered the leader of the “Wild Beasts,” was accused of perpetrating a hoax on the Parisian art world. Horrified at the reception his paintings received at the salon, he ordered his wife to boycott the show, in part out of fear for her safety. The money from the sale to Leo Stein was welcome, but it was only a temporary salve to Matisse's floundering career.

Matisse had not set out to be a painter. In fact, he had studied law, but very early in that career, his interest in visual arts became overwhelming. After much persuasion, his father allowed him to enroll in the Ecôle des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he studied and lived on an allowance from home.

Matisse followed the traditional course for an art student, studying with respected masters. In 1896, at the age of 26, he even received some official recognition in the Salon de la Nationale for work done under the guidance of Gustave Moreau. But soon Matisse's personal and professional life plunged into turmoil.

Caroline Joblaud, the woman with whom he was living but had not married, gave birth to their child, Marguerite Emilienne. The child, however, could not keep the couple together, and they split. In 1897, Matisse met Amelie Payrayre and, a year later, married her, just as he fell into disrepute as a painter because of his early experiments with color.

By 1900, Matisse and Amelie had two sons, and his daughter Marguerite had come to live with them. Though his wife worked in a millinery shop around the corner from the rue Lafitte, the family was destitute. Matisse took a job painting theatrical scenery, but it soon became clear this was not his métier. He was so different from his fellow artisans that they called him “the professor.”

His poverty notwithstanding, Matisse's outward appearance was dignified. A large solid man, with a full blonde beard, small, thick glasses, and worn-thin but respectable clothes, he carried himself with a stiff, straight back—as if his shattered life were not getting the better of him. But it was.

In the spring of 1901, Matisse and his fellow artist Marquet used a wheelbarrow to transport ten paintings to the Salon des Indépendants. Matisse's father was so shocked at the work that he cut off his son's meager allowance.

In order to collect the insurance money, Matisse and Marquet considered staging an accident that would destroy the works at the end of the exhibition. They didn't follow through on that scheme, however, and no money issued from the exhibit, so Matisse was forced to divide up his family, keeping Marguerite with him in Paris and temporarily sending his sons to their grandparents’ homes.

In August 1904, Matisse wrote to the artist Manguin, “I think painting will drive me crazy. So I'm going to try to drop it as soon as I can.” But the next fall, he was still at work, and entered his paintings in the Salon d'Automne, where Leo made his initial Matisse purchase.

Early in his struggles, Matisse tried to establish a syndicate of twelve art collectors who, in return for paintings, would guarantee him an income, but the plan collapsed when only his cousin expressed an interest. Matisse did not know that Leo Stein's purchase would start a similar, informal syndicate. He did not know that his money problems had ended with the sale of just one painting to just the right collector.

For his part, Leo could not have understood the importance of the purchase. Unbeknownst to him, he had now stumbled upon the “Big Two.” Leo's previous theory had been about the four primary artistic forces who would influence, and provide a foundation for, the new crop of painters. What Leo didn't know was that Picasso and Matisse, his latest and least heralded discoveries, would leap past Cézanne, Manet, Degas, and Renoir to become the most influential European artists of the twentieth century.

Soon after the exhibit closed, Gertrude and Leo met the 35-year-old Matisse. Leo found him intelligent, witty, and capable of discussing his art, which Leo said was “a rare thing with painters.” Matisse and his family were living in a studio on the Quai St. Michel, which looked out on Notre Dame
from the left bank of the Seine.

The household was not particularly bohemian. Amelie Matisse was a traditionalist, but the Matisse family life revolved around the artist's work. Even during their worst poverty, Matisse used the few coins he had to buy a Gauguin and a Cézanne for inspiration, and did not eat the luscious fruit he used in his still lives.

Leo continued to buy Matisse's works, but his brother Michael and sister-in-law Sally bought even more. Sally considered herself an artist, and it was under her direction that she and Michael began filling their apartment on the rue Madame with Matisse paintings. In fact, years later, Matisse would say that Sally was the “really intelligently sensitive member of the family.”

Etta must have taken part in conversations about Matisse, and seen and heard the Stein family's interest in his work, but there is no indication she was inclined to follow suit. In fact, the only recorded Cone comment about Matisse at that time was when Claribel, at the salon opening, wondered if his work was to be taken seriously. Perhaps Etta was still not sure she spoke the language well enough to buy something as bold as a Matisse.

The artist's subjects were recognizable as a woman or a landscape or a vase, but beyond that they were almost frightening in their intensity. The color, departing harshly from reality, appeared to be randomly applied, with alternately violent and sensuous brush strokes. But if the excitement of the Steins’ discovery did not embolden Etta to buy a Matisse, it did whet her appetite to buy something.

Ten days after the fall salon opened, she purchased a painting by a Russian artist living in Paris named Nicolas A. Tarkhoff. It was timid stuff compared with Matisse's work, but the purchase was, for her, a tiny, additional step into the collecting pool.
Three days later, Etta truly plunged in.

On November 2, 1905, Etta wrote in her account book that she had purchased “1 picture 1 etching Picasso 120.” That brief mention was all Etta recorded—she eventually owned 113 of Picasso's works.

Etta must have known Gertrude was having her portrait painted by an artist in Montmartre. Gertrude made frequent trips to the artist's studio—as many as ninety of them in less than a year. Gertrude most often walked to the Bâteau Lavoir from the rue de Fleurus—a one-way, two-hour journey, with a good deal of it uphill. In early November, Gertrude invited Etta along.

No doubt Etta imagined a sun-drenched studio and an uplifting afternoon of tea and chatter on her favorite topic, “the arts.” She had met many artists at Gertrude's and Leo's Saturday night gatherings, and the events were always lively and stimulating. But when they arrived at 13 rue Ravignan, Etta entered a squat building, closed up with shuttered windows, that was nothing if not derelict.

Once inside, she must have wondered if her friend had gone a bit mad. The building smelled of fetid water and cat urine. A smiling though harried concièrge, Madame Coudray, tried unsuccessfully to bring order to the chaos. Coudray knew Picasso worked at night and slept during the day, so she woke him only when the visitors were “serious” about purchasing. Etta and Gertrude qualified, and were escorted into a dim entryway.

Gertrude led the way down a wooden staircase that opened onto a labyrinth of intersecting corridors. The doors were scarred by doodles and inscriptions from the tenants. The walls seeped.

One can imagine Etta, her long skirt folded over her arm to keep it from dragging along the dirty floor, walking on tiptoe to avoid the damp conditions, yet trustingly following her determined friend into the depths of the squalid den. Etta must have been surprised that anyone could live in a building that relied upon the dripping faucet of a communal sink, rather than a hall clock, to keep time.

Gertrude finally found her way to Picasso's studio. At the end of the row in the building's bottom floor, Etta, relieved about reaching their destination, probably looked forward to the friendly comforts inside. But the room she found herself in was even worse than the corridor that led to it.

The studio was filthy. Cinder was piled beside a round cast-iron stove held together by wire. Broken furniture was scattered about the floor. A rusty frying pan, politely called a “chamber pot,” was also on the floor, and a tin bucket overflowed with dirty water.

The curtainless windows let in tremendous amounts of heat in the summer, so that Picasso and his friends were forced to wander around naked, or with a scarf tied at the waist if they had visitors. In the winter, a bitter cold came in through those same windows, which caused tea left in cups at night to freeze by morning.

Etta was introduced to the artist and his companion Fernande, whom Etta, remembering her upbringing, referred to as Madame Picasso. With Gertrude seated, Etta too found a place to rest in the cold and dismal room, and the painter got to work.

Picasso painted standing up or sitting on a low stool, with his colors, brushes, and rags spread out around him on the floor. He could afford paint, but oil was a luxury, so he used the same oil for his paintings and for his lamp. His palette was dirty, as were his brushes. And, in fact, after the Steins
bought a canvas, Picasso would go to the rue de Fleurus with a paint brush to “clean” it up.

Whether Gertrude had suggested in advance that Etta buy something, or Etta was moved to make a purchase by the artist's obvious poverty, is not known. But she spent her time in his studio sifting through the drawings that littered the floor. She found not the radical deviation from convention that she had seen at the fall salon in the work of Matisse and his group. Picasso was a masterful draftsman, and his drawings showed it.

There is no documentation indicating exactly what Etta purchased on that first visit, but her choices would have been from among “rose period” paintings of animals and acrobats, or sketches Picasso made while on a trip to Holland in 1904.

In any case, before she left, Etta gave the artist 120 francs for two works on paper. The money must have been a tremendous help. At the time, Fernande said, the Picassos were living off 50 francs a month, and Etta had just handed them more than twice that amount. Later, Gertrude teased Etta, saying she had indulged in “romantic charity.”