The Cone Sisters of Baltimore
This post is a bit belated, from the backlog:
The last time I was in Baltimore was my freshman year at Emory when we played Johns Hopkins and if I remember correctly they blew us out and it was embarrassing, as most of my relatives came down from Philadelphia to watch the game. To be honest, I don’t have any immediate plans to return, although I recently saw my friend Tom who lives there with his wife, and also my friend, Heather, and it would be nice to visit them and their neighborhood as he explained it is something to see in concern of young people leading interesting urban lives.
Anyway, on Monday, because the building I was supposed to go to all the way downtown was closed due to damage from Hurricane Irene (this dates this post), I instead decided to walk up the block for a change and passed the Cooper Hewitt, which had this funny sign on Mr. Carnegie’s gate.
I was hoping to get one last look at the museum store but oh no, the door was locked.
Instead, I kept on walking up along the park another block and stopped at the Jewish Museum which I later learned once belonged to and was bequeathed by a Mr. Warburg and is stunning, and warrants a visit in architectural admiration alone.
At the entrance, I waited behind a funny old man that had an incredibly difficult time with the metal detector and then his wife. He and I shared a laugh as she nagged him about this and that. It was crowded and like most of my favorite outlets of entertainment, the average age was somewhere between 72 and 82. The majority of the people seemed to live in our neighborhood and the hurricane and whatever else kept people close to home and in the museums. Anyway, right on the first floor, as soon as you walk in, is the exhibition of the Cone sisters collection. Do you know anything about the Cone sisters, Claribel (which is what I think I want to name my daughter) and Etta? I didn’t know anything about them and felt sort of ridiculous and upset that I wasn’t introduced to them sooner, or perhaps I was and just never paid close enough attention. Did Marshall P. Duke mention them in my freshmen seminar at Emory entitled, “People in Paintings.” Did the Cone name come up at all in all those books about Somerset Maugham and Van Gogh and Gaugin and the inspiration behind “The Moon and Sixpence.” Must have, right? Did Woody Allen think to pop them in a quick scene of Midnight in Paris while I was stuffing my face with popcorn? Maybe I missed them. Maybe I never thought to pay attention to the periphery, to the collectors, to the capital behind the moment in France way back when. Well, regardless, it is too bad that I wasn’t introduced to them sooner, but well enough that I learned who they were at all. And like anything else in the world these days, you can just as easily catch a glimpse via wikipedia into where they were born, what Gertrude Stein had to say about them, when they died, what company their family built, etc, etc. But if you really want to get close, really want to fall in love, you have to go follow the show to Baltimore where it lives permanently, where they lived permanently.
Henry James, I think, said something to the affect that everything from the socks we choose in the morning, to the pajamas we put on at night is an outward reflection of our inward self, and to walk amongst the paintings and sculptures and textiles and letters of the Cone sisters is to see the outward reflection of two magnificent women’s inward beauty.
Alla prossima,
Anthony
