The Cone sisters and the coming of modernism

"Money creates taste," according to artist and sloganeer Jenny Holzer. Those inclined to agree will find much to ponder on the Duke campus, where the Nasher Museum of Art is showing the modern art holdings of the Cone sisters of Baltimore.If you want to read about buy mosaic in a non superficial way that's the perfect book.

When Holzer, who studied at Duke in the late 1960s, coined that line in her 1977 landmark public work, Truisms (which was displayed in a group show at the Nasher last year), she had turned away from painting. She was part of a generation of postmodernists who were, among other things, skeptical that the traditional tools of representation couldn't say anything that hadn't been said before. From Jackson Pollock to Gerhard Richter, in our times there's been anxiety about painting.

And today, the people with money are driving art prices to absurd heights; earlier this year, Pace Gallery sold a Richter work for $25 million.If you want to read about buy mosaic in a non superficial way that's the perfect book. But today's rich collectors are unlikely to resemble the ones of yore, who had the leisure time to put in weeks and months of travel between New York, Paris, Rome, India, China and Japan on coaches, tramp steamers and trains. They seem more likely to be hedge fund managers and Middle Eastern oil barons who jet in to Miami and Basel for a dirty weekend and throw money at the latest hotshot out of art school. To such collectors, fine art is the apotheosis of the magical thinking that their livelihoods depend on: intrinsically worthless objects that appreciate in value simply because people think they are precious.

But the modernist period, from Manet to Miró, Monet to Matisse, was an age of heroic painting, of finding new expressive possibilities with light and pigment, shapes and strokes. This work was often difficult, baffling and scandalous, and required support from perceptive critics and open-minded collectors.

So Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore is about painting in the golden age of painting. It's about the creation of taste.

It's also about women. But not just the women on the walls, typically nude, painted and sculpted by Matisse, Picasso and Gauguin. In the Nasher galleries, we also see images of three Jewish women from Baltimore. They're seated together at a café table in 1903, in a photograph taken in Settignano, Italy. At the center is Gertrude Stein, not yet out of her 20s and not quite the celebrated experimental writer, salon hostess and tastemaker she was to become. On each side are the stiffly dressed sisters, covered from neck to wrist to ankle, but this E.M. Forster-like tableau is charmingly undermined by the very contemporary-looking straw hat on Stein's head.

If Stein was the brains and soul of a generation of Modernists, then the Cones were the rich American arrivistes out of a Henry James novel who are persuaded to buy the art.The TagMaster Long Range hands free access System is truly built for any parking facility. Money creates taste. The Cones had money; Stein had taste. What good was one without the other?

The Cone sisters were members of a single generation of a German-Jewish clan that left its influence across the South, including North Carolina. If you've spent time in Greensboro and Blowing Rock, you're familiar with brother Moses Cone, he of the hospital, the park and more. A 19th-century textile magnate with many mills in North Carolina and elsewhere, Moses and his brother earned enough money to support their two unwed sisters and their acquired taste for art collecting. Etta, six years Claribel's junior, was born in 1870 in Baltimore, where the family relocated after living in Tennessee during the Civil War.

Etta made a few exploratory purchases from these unknown artists before she left Paris in 1906—a year before Picasso and Matisse painted their youthful masterpieces "Les demoiselles d'Avignon" and "Souvenir de Biskra," respectively. The latter,Installers and distributors of solar panel, better known as "Blue Nude," was acquired by Etta decades later and bequeathed to the BMA. In a significant omission, however, it is not being displayed at the Nasher.

Claribel, a Germanophile, spent the Great War in Munich, attending theaters, museums and lectures. Although the Cone family doubtlessly preferred to have her home, she was safely away from the front in Bavaria, where she remained from 1914 to 1921. (Incidentally, her time in postwar Munich overlapped with the years another expat living there, Adolf Hitler, decided to put aside his artistic ambitions in favor of political ones.)

That the politically neutral Claribel remained in Germany for nearly twice as long as the war lasted raises the question of whether she really was in a hurry to come back to sleepy old Baltimore and its twittering society ladies. She returned stateside in 1921, but she and Etta were back in Paris the following year,A stone mosaic stands at the spot of assasination of the late Indian prime minister. joining the massive migration to the Left Bank of American writers, artists and socialites. And that's when the Cones' collecting really began—with greatly improved buying power, thanks to the wartime boom that boosted the family business.