Welcome, ArtCurious listeners, to our bonus series, A Little Curious. A Little Curious provides you with short and sweet bonus content about art history in between our normal episodes, and a couple of times in the middle of Season 11, I’ll pop in here to share some shorter stories about some other amazing women who worked to spread the love of art. I had a long list of ladies whom I wanted to showcase in this season, but I ultimately chose eight of them for my full episodes, but now I get the chance to give you a little peek into the lives of a few others. 

So today, it’s time to get a little curious about Claribel and Etta Cone. 

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Episode Transcript

Welcome, ArtCurious listeners, to our bonus series, A Little Curious. A Little Curious provides you with short and sweet bonus content about art history in between our normal episodes, and a couple of times in the middle of Season 11, I’ll pop in here to share some shorter stories about some other amazing women who worked to spread the love of art. I had a long list of ladies whom I wanted to showcase in this season, but I ultimately chose eight of them for my full episodes, but now I get the chance to give you a little peek into the lives of a few others. 

So today, just after a quick break, it’s time to get a little curious about Claribel and Etta Cone. 

Claribel and Etta Cone, typically referred to as The Cone Sisters, were two Victorian-age women who ended up becoming among the most important collectors of Modern art—especially French art—in the United States in the early years of the 20th century.  The Cones were a large, family from Jonesborough, Tennessee, as two of thirteen children born to German immigrants Hermann and Helen Guggenheimer Cone, who ran a prosperous grocery store. Claribel was born on November 14, 1864, and her sister Etta came along on November 30, 1870. When both girls were still young, their family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, and it was there that both girls attended an all-female high school before going on to vastly different career paths: Claribel was drawn to medicine—a super rare thing for women during this time period—whereas Etta helped manage the extended Cone household at the same time as becoming a very accomplished pianist. All this happened around the same time that their oldest brothers, Moses and Caesar, had themselves relocated to Greensboro, North Carolina, where they established an incredibly successful textile company, with the help of their father, called the Proximity Manufacturing Company—and this was the turning point for the whole family, because Moses and Caesar hit it big, and then shared their wealth with their family.  The Cone sisters were set for life.

That wealth not only provided them with comfort and security, but it also provided them with the freedom to travel and to amass one of the most astounding collections of art in the early 20th century.

It’s likely that their interest in art really began to develop in the 1890s, when Claribel, fresh from graduating with her degree from the Women's Medical College in Baltimore, established her own Saturday evening salon, where she invited a slew of artists, writers, scientists, and thinkers to enjoy Claribel’s growing antique collection and Etta’s home cooking. Two of the frequent attendees of the salon—who would  go on to have an influential salon of their own—were fellow Baltimore residents Gertrude and Leo Stein (and hint hint, we’ll be hearing more about them later on in this current season of AC). Through their association with the Steins, Claribel and Etta would eventually become renowned collectors of the avant-garde, especially French painting, but it would take a while. It started with a simple request from one of their brothers, who gifted Etta with an allowance of $300 to buy some art to, quote, “brighten up the family home,” and so she did—purchasing a few works by the American impressionist Theodore Robinson. But once Etta and Claribel began traveling extensively after 1901, things changed quickly. In those early years of the 20th century, the Steins had moved to Paris, establishing themselves with some of the era’s newest and most innovative artists. They became two of the first patrons of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, among others, setting themselves up as modern art tastemakers. Once the Cone sisters visited their friends’ home in Paris, they saw the work and were immediately impressed and beguiled. By 1905, Claribel and Etta purchased their first Picasso; the following year, they claimed their first Matisse. Art was no longer just about decorating the family home, or even about decorating the sisters’ respective Baltimore apartments. It was now the passion of a lifetime.

The sisters’ relationship with Matisse and Picasso are especially interesting. Both women met and enjoyed the artists—though it took some getting used to Matisse’s garish colors and Picasso’s playing with space— but they warmed up to Matisse rather quickly after visiting his studio and enjoying his company. Most of all, they appreciated that he was married, his home and studio were clean, and he often wore three-piece suits when he entertained them, which gave him, in their eyes, the look of a proper gentleman. The charm and engagement were mutual, too, with Matisse going on to refer to Claribel and Etta as “my two Baltimore ladies.” Etta even played a role, later in her life, as an early viewer of Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude, known as the Pink Nude, when Matisse sent studies of the work in process for her review before she purchased the final piece upon its completion in 1935. The Cone collection eventually grew to contain 500 works by Matisse and is today known as the largest and most important collection of that artist’s work in the world.

Picasso, though—that was a different relationship.  He was brusque, pointed, radical in a different way, compared to Matisse’s more old-school demeanor. Still, they knew a good thing when they saw it, and they eventually collected more than 100 works of art by the Spaniard, even if they didn’t get along with him as well as they did Matisse.

The Cones returned to Baltimore yearly with their European purchases in hand, becoming among the very first wave of American collectors who brought European modern art to the States almost a decade before the famed Armory Show of 1913, which is usually touted as the big splashy debut of Modernism in the U.S. But the Cone sisters did it first and did it at a time when women collectors of the avant-garde were rather rare.

To be fair, their finances—which grew even greater after their parents’ death and they received inheritance money—meant that the sisters could take risks with their art collecting. They could be a bit bold and experimental with what caught their eye, and over the course of three decades, they collected not only Picasso and Matisse in droves, but also added works by Marie Laurencin, Amadeo Modigliani, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard, and so many more. Photographs of their apartment showcased works hung from floor to ceiling on every single wall, as the sisters really took the concept of a salon or gallery hang to its full potential so that they could enjoy seeing as much of their artistic booty as possible, eventually rending a secondary apartment, which Claribel lovingly referred to as “the museum,” to showcase even more of it.

Eventually, their collection increased to over 3,000 individual pieces, which not only included their famed modernist paintings but also prints, drawings, textiles, books, bronzes, and furniture.

After Claribel’s death in 1929 at the age of 64, Etta continued to add to their collection of art, even opening her home up for small showings of her collection. The goal, by this time, had morphed from passion project to personal legacy, and before her death, Claribel had floated the idea of bequeathing their estate to an art museum. Specifically, they had their hometown institution, the Baltimore Museum of Art, in mind, so long as, in Claribel’s words, “the spirit of appreciation of modern art in Baltimore should improve.” And ultimately, that’s exactly what Etta did. Though she was wooed by several large museums across the country, she left the Cone collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as almost half a million dollars for the construction of a museum wing to accommodate such a major collection. After Etta Cone’s death in 1949, the BMA became the holders of the sisters’ legendary collection, with an additional segment going to the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. The Cone Wing at the Baltimore Museum of Art was completed in 1957, and its been enjoyed by legions of visitors ever since.

For more stories of the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in art history, subscribe now to the ArtCurious Podcast on the podcatcher of your choice, follow on Spotify, or download and listen in on our website, artcuriouspodcast.com. I’ll catch you back here next week for our continuing series “Women Behind the Art,” and again in two weeks for another little look at a great lady in the art world with A Little Curious.