Glorious, Glorious Collectors

They met in Baltimore — Claribel and Etta Cone, Gertrude and Leo Stein — in the late 1890s at Claribel’s Saturday evening salons, two sets of siblings who would amass unrivaled collections of European art during the first half of the 20th century. From wealthy Jewish families, all four ventured to Paris, the Steins to live abroad for the rest of their lives, the Cones for several long visits. And all met artists who would become their friends and, eventually, icons of modern art. In “Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore,” the Jewish Museum in New York City has sampled their amazing trove of art — more than 3,000 pieces, with an astonishing 500 paintings, drawings and sculptures by Matisse — now wholly owned by the Baltimore Museum of Art. Spinsters who lived in adjoining apartments in Baltimore, they were well educated. Claribel was a pathologist trained at Johns Hopkins, and, in Gertrude Stein’s words, “ … they were sisters, they were large women, they were rich, they were very different one from the other.” Once they began collecting, the sisters bought constantly, compulsively, snapping up fine art, decorative objects, textiles and jewelry. As their nephew observed, theirs was “a collection of collections.” (The sisters’ money came from Cone Mills, the country’s largest producer of denim. Two brothers managed the business, but all nine siblings shared the considerable profits.) The conceit of the current show, curated by the museum’s Karen Levitov, is to present 50 pieces from the Baltimore collection in order of acquisition. This at once sets up disappointment. Fifty works are a meager sampling and some of the sisters’ greatest purchases — the Matisse “Blue Nude” and Cezanne’s “Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibemus Quarry”— are missing. And it results in strange, even jarring juxtapositions: Matisse Fauvist paintings hang alongside three of his later odalisques; a single, magnificent Gauguin confronts a Delacroix rather unhappily. Etta bought the first painting in the sisters’ collection, a gentle and genteel impressionist picture by American Theodore Robinson. But even this modest, calm picture set the model for the sisters’ collecting: It was daring. Impressionism was little known and not much appreciated in contemporary America, and the female figure, clothed or not, became the Cones’ favorite subject. Over the years, the sisters bought drawings of women by Picasso, including a wonderful depiction of Claribel, as majestic and intimidating as his more famous picture of Gertrude Stein. But it was Matisse, with his glorious Fauve still lifes and his languorous, enigmatic odalisques, who captured their heart. His “Interior, Flowers and Parakeets,” a riotous painting of his apartment in Nice with its brilliantly colored textiles, is one of the best in the show. In a separate gallery are some of the textiles and exotica the Cones collected on an around-the-world trip they took with their brother. Colorful textiles from India and Uzbek hang on the wall near exquisite Chantilly lace. Ivory bracelets from Africa are mixed with more formal, jewel-laden belts and pendants. Claribel died in 1929, but Etta — who lived until 1949 and grieved deeply — kept collecting alone. She bought several Matisse sculptures, female figures smoothed and burnished like oiled, bronze skin, and a fretful Van Gogh landscape of swelling, roiling, downward sloping fields from 1889, the year before his suicide. Picasso’s “Woman With Bangs,” an important picture from his Blue Period, was purchased soon after Claribel’s death. Etta bought more Matisse paintings. Two are especially good: a large, reclining nude in pink, outlined and flattened in the painting’s space. It was radical and new and perhaps the artist’s most important 1930s work. In the second work, a ballet dancer is dark, dangerous, almost decadent. Finally there is a single, stunning Gauguin, “Woman of the Mango,” depicting his Tahitian mistress, Tehamana, as a sort of Eve or fertility goddess holding a ripe mango. The beautiful woman in her purple dress is backed by a blue and white pattern and surrounded by brilliant Gauguin reds, greens and yellows. And across the small gallery is the famous Delacroix, “Perseus and Andromeda,” in which the doomed princess is saved from the sea monster by her future husband. Romantic to the core, it is a picture that passed through Leo Stein’s collection by way of Matisse to Etta Cone, perhaps because it inspired a Matisse sculpture she already owned that is on display here, too. “Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters” continues at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St., through Sept. 25. Call 212 423-3200 or visit www.jewishmuseum.org for hours.