Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) Major Catalogs about the Collection

This exhibition explores the 43-year friendship between artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Baltimore collector Etta Cone (1870-1949). More than 160 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and illustrated books provide new insights into the formation of the renowned Cone Collection, one of the greatest collections of modern art in the United States. Etta, with her older sister Claribel (1864-1929), acquired more than 700 works by Matisse between 1906 and 1949 and bequeathed the majority of them to the BMA as part of a gift of 3,000 objects. Etta's dedication and curiosity ultimately lent the Cone collection its characteristic depth and breadth. After accepting Etta's invitation to visit her in Baltimore in 1930, Matisse realized he could have a major U.S. presence, and began creating and offering Etta specific works of art with the Cone collection in mind." Among these works are masterpieces such as The Yellow Dress (1929-31) and Large Reclining Nude (1935), rarely shown drawings, and the preliminary studies for his first illustrated book, Poems by Stéphane Mallarmé (1932). The works in the exhibition are generally arranged by acquisition date, demonstrating Cone's increasingly discerning eye for Matisse's work throughout their long partnership. A fully illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition contains new scholarship on the formal, technical, and social aspects of the decades-long working partnership between artist and patron.

The Cone Collection came to The Baltimore Museum of Art by bequest of Etta Cone in 1950, and was dedicated in its Cone-endowed new wing on February 23, 1957. In the succeeding years The Cone Collection, with its incomparable holdings of works by Henri Matisse and major examples by Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Renoir, and other masters of early twentieth-century French art, has drawn admiring visitors from around the world. The Baltimore Museum of Art, known as a 'collection of collections' for the grandeur of its inheritance from early Baltimore collector-patrons, was immeasurably enriched by this bequest of approximately 3,000 items acquired over a fifty-year period by Dr. Claribel and Etta Cone.

Matisse in The Cone Collection: The Poetics of Vision is an exploration of the artist's work through the rich holdings of The Baltimore Museum of Art - one of the most comprehensive collections of Matisse's art in the world. The Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, acquired their first works by Henri Matisse in 1906 and, over the next four decades, went on to collect major examples from almost every phase of his long career. Although best known for his vibrant paintings of exotically dressed young models and lush interiors, Matisse also worked in sculpture and drawing, often using these mediums to explore a single artistic idea in various ways. As revealed in The Cone Collection, Matisse expressed his love of color, texture, and pattern throughout a career that spanned many styles, from Impressionism to near abstraction

The catalogue presented here constitutes a second and revised edition of the 'Handbook of the Cone Collection' which first appeared in 1955. The articles it contained are reprinted here, but the comments on the paintings, sculpture, and drawings throughout have been revised by Dr. Gertrude Rosenthal for this edition.

At head of cover: "Cone Bequest Number"

With biographical sketches of some of the collectors.

In the steady flow of correspondence between Dr.Claribel Cone and Etta Cone of Baltimore, the reader learns of the thought processes that led these dynamic sisters toward the formation of an extraordinary collection of art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They displayed courageous disregard for the public's lack of understanding of their taste in exotic or avant-garde art, and acquired what they liked, even though it seemed too modern to the society in which they lived. In their letters, the sisters reveal details of their relationships with Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, and various European art dealers, as well as the intricacies of their collecting habits. The authors, relatives of the Cones, base their research on primary sources, many never used before, as well as on direct memories of a close friendship with the collectors themselves.

Recounts the lives of the Cone sisters, their travels, and their collection of Modern art from such artists as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

"In celebration of Maryland's 350th Anniversary and The Walters Art Gallery Golden Jubilee, marking the 50th Anniversary of its opening as a public museum, The Walters Art Gallery presents ... An exhibtion at The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, 18 May - 19 August, 1984... Collectors: Mendes Israel Cohen, The Cone Sisters, William H. Crim, James Teackle Dennis, Charles James Madison Eaton, Thomas Edmondson, Abram Eisenberg, Jacob Epstein, Thomas Footer, The Garrett Family, Robert Gilmor, Jr., John Franklin Goucher, Robert C. Hall, Johns Hopkins, Mary Frick Jacobs, J. Stricker Jenkins, The Lee Collection of "Needwood", Sadie A. May, John W. McCoy, James Howard McHenry, Henry Walters, William Thompson Walters.

"...Dr. Claribel died in 1929, Miss Etta in 1949. In the years from 1905 until their deaths, the sisters traveled numberless times to Europe. Without the borrowed judgement of a critic like Bernard Bernenson they amassed one of the great collections of modern art in America. Their collection of the work of Henri Matisse, their special friend, is one of international importance. Only the privately-shown Barnes collection in Merion, Pennsylvania can rival their possession of forty-four oil paintings, some twenty bronzes, and numberless drawings. They also acquired important work by Cezanne, Modigliani, Rouault, Vuillard, Bonnard, Chagall, Braque, Degas, Mary Cassatt, Gauguin, Van Gogh. They also collected heavily in the decarative arts -- laces, fine fabrics, jewelry... The paintings are beautifully housed in their own wing at the Baltimore Museum. How they came there is the subject of this joint biography: the story of two extraordinary women possessed of a true genius. Theirs was the genius of appreciation. Far ahead of their time, out of context with their family milieu and their native city, they knew great art when they saw it. With the authority of genius they bought and kept buying and dreamed of the day when their indifferent fellow Baltimoreans might share in their pleasures of appreciation..."--Jacket