Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta come to Raleigh
Edward Cone
News & Record
9-26-04
Etta and Claribel Cone assembled one of the world's great art collections, and then they gave it away for the world to enjoy.
Now a substantial part of the Cone Collection, as the treasure trove built by my great-grandfather's sisters is known, is coming to North Carolina. A show called "Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris" opens Oct. 10 and runs through mid-January at the N.C. Museum of Art in Raleigh. About three-dozen works by Matisse and Picasso will be on display, along with pieces by artists including Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Monet.
A companion show, "Matisse and American Drawing," opens this afternoon at Greensboro's own Weatherspoon Art Museum, to which Etta Cone bequeathed a fine, small collection of Matisse lithographs and bronzes. A film about the sisters by Monty Python alum Michael Palin will be shown at both museums.
Aunt Etta and Aunt Claribel wanted people to see their collection, and it seems fitting that it should spend some time in North Carolina. The sisters lived in Baltimore -- the Cone Collection resides at the Baltimore Museum of Art -- and spent much of their time abroad, but they visited their brothers in Greensboro and Blowing Rock, and it was the Greensboro-based textile business founded by their brothers that bankrolled much of their activity.
The legacy of the sisters goes beyond their great collection and beyond their philanthropic example. Etta and Claribel refused to be confined by the expectations of others, and their lives showed that following your own path can lead you to remarkable places.
They started out in the less-than-remarkable location of Jonesboro, Tenn., where their father, Herman, ran a general store. After the Civil War, the growing family (which would include 12 children) moved to Baltimore. There Herman prospered in the grocery business, and the family became part of a German-Jewish community that was (as I put it in Forbes a few years ago) "so hermetic that I am my own distant cousin."
Claribel's independent streak showed early, and she became one of the first women to graduate from medical school. It was she who made some of the sisters' boldest purchases, including Matisse's Blue Nude in 1926. But it was Etta, younger by six years, who first started collecting and who first went to Europe in 1901. Their life's work was a collaborative project.
Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, as they were known, lived a kind of bohemian fantasy. In Paris, Etta typed manuscripts for Gertrude Stein, a friend from Baltimore, and the sisters befriended then-obscure artists like Matisse and Picasso. They traveled around the world, collecting anything that caught their fancy -- furnishings, snuff boxes -- along the way. Until they finally took adjacent apartments in Baltimore, in which great paintings lined the walls, they vagabonded from ocean liner to grand hotel to the homes of their brothers, their huge trunks of booty in tow. Their tastes were broad, and often ahead of the curve. Their extensive collection of textiles and needlework, once viewed by the museum world as mere craftwork, is increasingly understood as fine art.
The sisters came from a talented and unusually close family. Brother Fred lived in their Baltimore apartment building. Their oldest brother, Moses, was a visionary who saw that cotton cloth produced in the South could be branded and marketed around the world, and with his brother Ceasar helped transform both the textile industry and the North Carolina Piedmont. Brothers Julius and Bernard helped keep the mills running (and the sisters spending) after Ceasar's death, and Solomon added color through his careers as a speculator and a gambler.
Etta and Claribel did not see the art they bought as a financial investment, and their business-minded siblings wondered if they were wasting their money by spending it on these strange paintings. Ironically, a single painting from the collection -- say, that Blue Nude by Matisse -- may be worth far more today than the successor company to Cone Mills.
The decision to share the works they loved with the public -- suggested in Claribel's will when she died in 1929 and implemented upon Etta's death 20 years later -- seems completely in keeping with the way the sisters collected and the way they lived their lives.
I have from my great-great-aunts a lovely but unimportant landscape painting and a now-tattered Bokhara rug they picked up along the Silk Road. What they really left to me, though, they left to everyone: a sense of possibility, a demonstration of the power of idiosyncrasy, and an example of generosity.
For the next few months, the most tangible proof of their philosophy will be on display in Raleigh.
Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
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