The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (6 page)

“Walked to the Fiesole with Aimee, Gertrude and Sis C and heard nightingales for the first time. It was superb. Had a table d'hôte dinner at Fiesole and all got drunk. Took a cab from Fiesole back to the hotel and sat up as usual talking over the situation.”

Etta did not describe what that situation might be. But
within four days, she wrote in her diary, “Gertrude and I had a fine walk and she almost worked me up to the pitch of going to Rome with her but I was able to resist.” It appears Gertrude was still trying to convince Etta to accompany her to meet Bookstaver and Haynes.

Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing how much of her private life Gertrude detailed for Etta, and why Etta continued to decide against making the trip to Rome. Etta may have simply felt obligated to remain with Claribel. Throughout her life, when given the choice, Etta would choose her family and their needs over her friends’. Whatever the reason, Gertrude and Etta would soon part.

On July 2, Etta wrote, “The woods were gorgeous and the scenery all about most ideal. Gertrude was at her best and we were all happy. We went into the woods overlooking a wonderful valley. . . had our lunch and afterwards Gertrude and I lay there and smoked while Sis C and Aimee went through the buildings with the little director. . .

“Were sad when we had to wend our way to the depot for it meant leaving Gertrude. Gertrude went on to Rome and we back to Florence.”

Shortly after, Claribel and Etta left Florence for Germany. Claribel had made arrangements to join the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt and work with the institute's director, Eugen Albrecht.

For Etta, being in Frankfurt with Claribel must have been like being back in Baltimore. Architecturally, the area around the Senckenberg was similar to the Eutaw Place corridor, only more massive. Its houses were built of the same brown stone, with rows upon rows of windows—some rounded, some shuttered—but all closed and silent, offering no hint of
the life inside.

Claribel shunned physical closeness, feeling comfortable in the quiet of the residential neighborhood, but Etta had traveled to Europe to escape just that.

Etta endured a summer of isolation in Frankfurt before returning with Claribel to Paris, where Leo and Gertrude had taken up residence at what was to become a famous address—27 rue de Fleurus. When she first arrived in Paris in 1901, Etta had referred disparagingly to the street as narrow and obscure. It extended in bends between the Boulevard Raspail and the Luxembourg Gardens, not far from the cafés of the Boulevard Montparnasse.

Leo had settled on a studio rather than an apartment because, he declared, he would be an artist. Gertrude announced that she would be a writer. For the brother and sister duo, it was as if saying it made it so.

The Steins’ studio, accessible through the building's courtyard, looked like a strange afterthought—a kind of two-story pagoda growing from the inside of the building. On the walls, Gertrude and Leo hung Japanese prints, and Leo displayed his first “modern” painting, which he had picked up the previous year in Britain.

It was by the post-Impressionist artist William Steer and, though hardly daring, Leo said it made him feel “like a desperado” and “proved that one could own paintings even if one were not a millionaire.” In fact, the brother and sister were living on about $150 a month.

The visit was a short one for the Cone sisters. Claribel went back to Germany to begin her work in Frankfurt. Leo remained in Europe, establishing his home on the left bank of Paris.

Gertrude said she would live with him there, but only on the condition that she be allowed to take a trip back to
America once a year. Within several months, she set out on that visit.

In the fall of 1903, Etta returned promptly to Baltimore, more to take care of herself than her family. She may have needed the grounding of a family in order to be the free-spirited bohemian she fancied herself becoming in Europe. But her family was changing and growing, and her role in it was becoming less clear.

The city, too, was about to change. In February 1904, the Baltimore laid out in 1730 was destroyed in a fire that lasted three days and consumed 70 blocks and more than 1,500 buildings. The eastern portion of the city was left a charred rubble, and those areas that hadn't been licked by flame were left smelling of it. It would be a turning point for the city.

It was also a turning point for Etta. She left that spring for Europe, and saw Baltimore for the first time again three full years later. On her return, it was as if a new, more modern city had grown up where the old had previously stood. Among other things, it installed a sewer system, which it had always lacked.

Etta herself was no less changed. In her pursuit of art, she left behind the safety of the museum to enter the sordid, subterranean world of the artist's studio.

The art of the time is paradoxically that which only a tiny minority at the moment consider as such, and which even they can't be sure. . . will be considered so in retrospect. . . What counts vitally is one's experience, to use superior people as stimulants to one's attention, but not as authorities, which they aren't. They are just a little herd who have their own herd leaders. . .

—Leo Stein,
Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose,
1947

I
n June 1904, Etta and Gertrude left New York together for Europe. Etta did not return to the United States until 1907, and Gertrude not until 1934.

As they embarked from New York harbor, the two found, to their surprise, fresh grapefruit in the cabin they were sharing. Claribel, then in Germany, had asked brother Bernard to send the fruit. “I told him not to have it dressed up fancy, just to have it sent plain so you can have your dressing done from day to day,” wrote Claribel. “I sincerely trust your ocean trip may be a comfortable one—that the captain and passengers will be ‘nice’ and that you may enjoy it to the utmost.—Also Gertrude (this may be taken in both ways.)”

Their European itinerary was familiar. First came Italy, where Etta split from Gertrude. Then traveling to Germany,
Etta stayed with Claribel until March of 1905. Finally, in September 1905, after a summer of travel, Etta and Claribel returned to Paris together.

Gertrude and Etta exchanged numerous letters during their months of separation. But though they were full of gossip, they apparently didn't discuss Leo's latest endeavors. While the Cone sisters were away, Leo had come upon a new generation of artists and, as Etta wrote earlier, “had the fever bad.”

In 1903, Bernard Berenson had told Leo about Cézanne after Leo complained that the salon art he was seeing in Paris was “not art with a big A” and that he was in search of a larger adventure. What he found in Cézanne was more foreign than even his precious Japanese prints. And with this discovery, out went any notion of writing a biography of Mantegna. His interest in art, he said, was aesthetic, not historical, and he “didn't really want to write it anyway.”

Like a detective, Leo followed Berenson's trail to Cézanne, which led him to Vollard's gallery on the rue Lafitte. But to call Vollard's a gallery was a slight exaggeration—the place looked more like a junk shop. With pictures piled on the floor and against the walls, there was no readily apparent exhibition. There was nothing to even indicate a visitor would be welcome, said Leo, but he went in anyway and soon bought a Cézanne painting,
La Maison du Printemps
(The Spring House).

The purchase was not his first in Paris, but it was the most important, in part because it introduced him to the right-bank street, and enabled him to find works by artists later known as the most important of their time.

The rue Lafitte was a narrow, short, dusty stretch between the prosperous Boulevard des Italiens and the rue de Chateaudun. The street was easily missed, nestled as it was between two larger boulevards. But in its unassuming storefronts—at
Vollard's, Bernheim-Jeune, Durand Ruel, Berthe Weill, and Clovis Sagot—an adventurer like Leo found a treasure of contemporary art.

Soon Gertrude was accompanying him on his visits to the rue Lafitte galleries. Vollard, said Leo, liked to sell them pictures because “we were the only customers who bought pictures, not because we were rich, but despite the fact that we weren't.” Leo stretched out on an armchair in Vollard's, his feet up to relieve digestive troubles, and Gertrude squatted on a chair as his partner, contemplating their next joint purchase.

During his frequent musings on art, Leo developed then one of his many theories. The art being produced in Paris, he asserted, was built on a foundation of artists he called “The Big Four”—Manet, Renoir, Degas, and Cézanne. Soon the Japanese prints on the walls of his rue de Fleurus studio were overwhelmed by the works of these four artists and their more obscure offspring. And Leo himself found an occupation—collector.

The Leo who haunted Paris’ galleries was rail thin, and his long rabbinical beard made him look drawn, the very picture of an aesthete. But his emaciation seemed even more extreme next to his younger sister. Gertrude was a short, round woman of 30, who, taking a cue from her brother, covered herself in brown corduroy. She wore a top knot in her hair, and sandals on her feet, and everything in between jiggled with life and energy.

While Leo immersed himself in visual art, Gertrude began to write. Set up at a huge table with a tiny typewriter she could not master, Gertrude finished one manuscript, about a love triangle involving three women, but put it aside in a cupboard. Now she moved on to another project called
Three Lives.

It had been two years since the Cone sisters had seen Gertrude and Leo's place in Paris, and though they surely came to expect anything from their unpredictable friends, they could not have been prepared for what they found. On the walls of the rue de Fleurus studio were images the likes of which they had never seen. The Impressionism of a Theodore Robinson, as revolutionary as it had seemed in 1898 in the Cone family parlor, was nothing next to the shattered image of a Cézanne or the savage color of a Gauguin.

Etta must have felt especially disturbed by the scene because she was the more fluent of the two sisters in matters artistic, but what she found at the Steins was a new language in art that she did not speak.

Years later, Leo wrote, “‘What you don't know, won't hurt you,’ says the proverb. But it often makes you talk nonsense and what one man sees and another does not, makes intercourse difficult when it has to do with the kinds of things that are not really capable of explanation. The qualities of art are perceived, as it were, by a multitude of senses, and he who hasn't them operative, is not in communication with him who has.”

Etta suffered from that very communication problem when she and Claribel first arrived in Paris that fall. But with her usual attentiveness, she listened to Leo, as she had years before in Florence, and became as absorbed in the new art as he.

She could not have been more fortunate in her choice of art teacher. From 1905 to 1907, wrote Matisse biographer Alfred Barr Jr., Leo “was possibly the most discerning connoisseur and collector of 20th-century painting in the world.”

In addition to “The Big Four,” Leo had stumbled upon a new painter along the rue Lafitte at a drugstore-turned-art gallery. Clovis Sagot's establishment was even more bizarre than Vollard's. To the public, he sold art. To the artists, he dispensed medicine a former chemist had left in the store.

With a pointed beard, bright eyes, and a hat tipped on the back of his head, Sagot was about as far from the official salon crowd in Paris as one could get. This ex-clown, said Leo, “twinkled with enthusiasm” when the subject was either the Zan licorice he always chewed or contemporary painting. More important, he told Leo of a promising young Spanish painter who lived in Montmartre. Sagot, as the owner of some of this artist's work, assured Leo he was the “real thing.” His name was Pablo Picasso.

To look at the twenty-three-year-old Picasso, it would have been difficult to see anything more than the leader of a band of derelicts with artistic pretensions who did their drinking on the butte of Montmartre. A photograph from 1904 shows a handsome, if disheveled, young man with thick dark hair split by a crooked part and combed back from a broad forehead. His mouth is full and sensual, his almondshaped eyes black as coal, and penetrating. When Picasso looked at a drawing or a print, said Leo, little was left on the paper because his gaze was so absorbing.

But while Picasso's face was bold and arresting, his dress was shabby. His short canvas jacket, because of frequent washing, was a bleached, powdery blue. He favored a spotted, red-and-white shirt and a crêpe de chine tie that was torn and dirty.

And to top off his costume, Picasso wore an old felt hat, which he had brought from Spain to Paris. But he reserved that bit of adornment for what he called “occasions”—an infrequent dinner with an art buyer or dealer. Picasso's mistress Fernande Olivier described life with the struggling artist as hard: “There weren't many collectors, and the dealers were still suspicious and kept away.”

Montmartre was rural when Picasso joined a colony of art students and writers on the peak overlooking Paris. It had
none of the sophistication of Montparnasse. In fact, it might as well have been another city—its denizens knew nothing of their counterparts across the Seine. One ramshackle building on the Place Emil Goudeau at 13 rue Ravignan attracted Picasso. It had been home to painters, sculptors, writers, washerwomen, dressmakers, political anarchists, and other Catalan artists. Picasso moved there in 1904.

Opposite the building later known as the Bâteau Lavoir was the Hôtel du Poirier, which was filled with poets and painters. And on tangled and steep streets emanating from the square were cafés and bars whose prices were cheap and whose owners often allowed the artists to eat and drink on credit. It was not necessarily a good idea. The Picasso gang would come home drunk and shouting, and wake up any stillsleeping neighbors by firing shots from the Browning revolver Picasso always carried. Then they returned to their warren of studios for work that no one recognized and no one bought.

The Bâteau Lavoir (so called because it looked like a washboat) stood one story above ground and two below street level. On the bottom floor, Picasso occupied two studios—one for his work and the other in which to live.

On arriving at the rue Ravignan, the young artist was still in his “blue period,” painting images of despair in a monochrome palate. Considering his living situation, it is not surprising that he continued that style for some time. Picasso painted at night, but André Salmon, who also lived in the building, said the Bâteau Lavoir lacked electricity or gas. If he really wanted to see the canvas, Picasso was reduced to painting by the illumination of an oil lamp and using a candle as an auxiliary source of light.

Shortly after purchasing the Picasso painting at Sagot's, Leo and Gertrude visited the artist at his studio. Pierre Roché,
whom Leo described as a natural-born liason, made the formal introductions. The pair made as much of an impression on Picasso as he did on them.

Fernande Olivier wrote: “I remember how surprised Picasso was one day when two Americans, a brother and sister, visited him. What an odd couple they were! He looked like a professor, bald and wearing gold rimmed spectacles. He had a long beard with reddish streaks in it and clever eyes. His large stiff body fell into curious attitudes, his gestures were concise and neat. He was a typical American German Jew.

“She was fat, short and massive, with a broad, beautiful, noble head, over accentuated, regular features, and intelligent eyes, which reflected her clear-sightedness and wit. Her mind was lucid and organized and her voice and her appearance was masculine.”

Leo described Picasso as saying little and being “neither remote nor intimate—just completely there.” On that first visit, the Steins purchased a number of Picasso's rose period works and gave the artist the vast sum of 800 francs. At some point during the fall of 1905, Picasso also agreed to paint Gertrude's portrait.

The Cone sisters began to accompany the Steins on similar artistic outings. One such event, the Autumn Salon of 1905, took place in October. In addition to Leo and Gertrude, the Steins’ older brother Michael and his wife Sarah (whom the family called Sally) joined the party. The Michael Steins had moved to Paris and were living with their young son Allan, not far from the rue de Fleurus.

The fall salon exhibition was a favorite among the Parisian art world because new artists showed their work there. The sisters entered at the Grand Palais, through plush
chambers—its walls covered in purple fabric and its floors in dark green carpet. Paintings were visible from between the ladies’ plumed hats—the public came dressed in high fashion befitting an important gathering.

The Cone-Stein group made its way through salons containing paintings from the recognized schools toward a room called the “central cage,” which contained works by painters roundly condemned by those in attendance. The art critic Louis Vauxcelles had reviewed the exhibition the day before it opened and declared the artists in the “central cage”—Matisse, Manguin, Marquet, Jean Puy, and Rouault—
Les Fauves (Wild Beasts)
.

That commentary set the tone for the works’ reception. Hushed, respectful murmurings from the outer chambers gave way to raucous sarcasm in the “Wild Beast” room. Etta and Claribel watched in horror as the normally cordial Parisian crowd turned savage, trying to scratch the offending paint off the canvases.