GRAND COLLECTORS

...Claribel, whose taste is said to have been the more advanced, comes across as a more kindly person...

...The effect of such experiences on the behavior of artists when they subsequently become successful is immeasurable...

...I'll bet...

...Rarely does it seem to be pure appreciation of "the gleams of divinity...

...While it is clearly Matisse's show, mention must be made of the Degas bronze dancers...

...But on to the patron-creators, of whom there are portraits both verbal and visual...

...Seurat, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Braque, and Picasso—who is the second best represented figure with 32 items, most of them drawings from his early romantic period...

...and a fine Gauguin, Woman with Mango, in deep mauve on a chrome ground...

...There is also an Odilon Re-don bunch of flowers in an exquisite Japanese vase that is quite straightforwardiy painted except for the presurrealist space it floats in...

...a small Cezanne Bathers and a Monte Ste...

...Presumably the fabric of Baltimore society would crumble if we were to know something of their background and the sources of their income (to which Boas refers charmingly as their "allowances...

...The fact that the public is seldom bequeathed anything really worthwhile makes it all the more fatuous to surround donors with the trembling kind of deference normally reserved for the merely rich...

...Bree-skin illuminates the sisters' approach to art, and it turns out to be rather a familiar one...

...He seems to have brought this discovery to bear on all nature—the difference between one piece of foliage and another and the minute variations of subtropical light— and on inanimate objects too...

...She says they used to furnish Picasso, then about 25, with copies of the Sunday Sun so he could indulge his liking for the comics...

...Outlined quite brutally in ultramarine, its forms are suggested, corrected and resuggested in an uncharacteristically violent way...

...They are also a reminder of the curious kind of heyday the 19th and early 20th centuries were for women, particularly unmarried ones of means...

...Besides being superb, these three drawings restore the perspective on the sisters, and give them a believable human interest and grace...

...One guesses that, for some, it is a way of building a social life their own personalities fail to attract, rather like owning a pedigreed dog...

...Every face has its individual rhythm and it is this rhythm that creates the likeness...

...The vignette is innocuous enough, conforming to the mythology of sensitive patron indulging the genius-as-wayward-child, except for the punch line: "They actually paid only a few dollars apiece for . . . [the drawings], which in those beginning years seemed to the young painter most generous...

...Perhaps inadvertently, Ms...

...landscapes from the '20s...

...Indeed, one senses the existence of Cone and Stein factions even now, if only because Boas lapses briefly into waspishness by observing that at least Claribel did not drop out of medical school like Gertrude...

...A prefiguration of later developments, the painting seems in this context like an overt stressing of what usually was only implied in his art...

...Since it is hardly possible to make a poor choice of Matisses, the sisters are more to be envied than congratulated for their selection, which is fairly indicative of his creative life up until 1947...

...There are 116 pieces here, about two-thirds of the Cones' "life work," and half of them are paintings, drawings and sculptures by the master...

...Strangely enough Picasso's full-length pencil study of her shows a middle-aged and motherly person, though it was done 10 years earlier, in 1922...

...For others it is obviously a bargain-hunting mania that could as easily be directed at stamps, and for still others it is either an attempt at the purchase of aristocracy or an expiation for commercial sins...

...examples of the fauve and odalisque periods...

...In choosing from his paintings, the Cones fared less well with three quite undistinguished portraits from the early period, among them two gouaches of, respectively, Allan and Leo Stein...

...Related to the bronze Reclining Nude—one of his most important sculptures, also included here—its squirming pose is almost shocking...

...Victoire...

...One hopes it will survive the machinations of the contemporary gallery and museum worlds...

...That the Cones' friendship with Matisse was "much closer and more lasting" could be attributable to their being on more equal terms, for art preferences are not unconnected with an appreciation of the artist's presence...

...That the Cones bought magnificent art (for whatever reasons), lived with it and then turned it over to their city along with $400,000 is an inspiring gesture...

...He drew her eyes glaring upward as if she were in the act of seeing through somebody standing offstage...

...Both reveal an impressive woman with an aquiline nose, but Matisse saw an amazing intensity...

...There are small impastoed still fifes from the 1890s...

...Whether the Cones were competing with their more colorful friends, the Steins, is not made clear here, but by all accounts they were certainly influenced by their example...

...Despising our "national appetite for laughable anecdotes, for gossip, for what the newspapers call the human touch," he withholds all but the most obsequious banalities...

...Matisse is, among other things, a painter whose work is never enhanced by reproduction...

...Picasso's early work reeks of the poverty he lived in, and even if the tales about his eventually having dealers bid for canvases turned face to the wall are apocryphal, they most probably are based on some truth about his general attitude...

...While he was thus absorbed, they would tour the studio making their decisions...

...In photographs taken during the Edwardian era, the ladies appear formidable, strong-featured and interesting rather than handsome...

...On Art GRAND COLLECTORS BY VIVIEN RAYNOR A Am ssessing a private collection is usually a disconcerting experience, for one can never be sure whether it is the works we are being asked to admire, or their buyer...

...Of course, it may be too much to hope that one day we will be offered insights into the possible motivations of collectors...

...But in the case of the Cone Collection (Wildenstein, through May 4), we are given guidance...

...No process can duplicate the physical impact of such canvases as The Purple Robe, an exercise in holding every conceivable bright color in equilibrium...

...Enter Clari-bel and Etta Cone, who from 1905 to the 1940s devoted themselves to acquiring art, most particularly that of Matisse...

...Similarly untranslatable is his way with, as it were, no color at all, exemplified here in a couple of small gray seascapes...

...Matisse may have found the disk shape of her face with its large eyes, long nose and thin lips more his formal "type...

...Dating from his period of such portrait drawings— the Stravinsky study is a famous example—it is a beautiful work...

...and a survey of portraits, figure studies and interiors...

...Adelyn Breeskin, Director Emeritus of the Baltimore Museum of Art, whence the collection comes, advances a theory popular in academic circles though rarely spelled out so explicitly...

...Claribel was qualified as a doctor and Etta was an amateur musician: They went to concerts and lectures, gave dinners in their apartment where the conversation was elevating, and showed a proper distaste for publicity...

...Linear and occasionally quite tentative in spirit, they form a lovely memorandum of how sweet were this artist's beginnings, compared with the robustness of his maturity...

...Donors, after all, are always going to be dwarfed by their gifts, however assiduous the puffery...

...The remainder includes 23 other luminaries of 19th- and 20th-century French art, such as Courbet...

...Intimate and domestic as Matisse's pictures are, their emotional, near-expressionistic undertow is very noticeable, though one supposes a great colorist, even a French one, could never be classical...

...In those years, moreover, the acquisitiveness of the upper-middle classes was leavened by the now maligned Victorian public-spiritedness without which, as is becoming increasingly noticeable today, the tyranny of the well-to-do is unbearable...

...All the same, The Blue Nude, commonly regarded as his Demoiselles d'Avignon and done in that same vintage year, 1907, does appear out of place and not only because the Cones tended to steer clear of extremism...

...George Boas of Johns Hopkins, is disappointing...

...Matisse, who was much older than Picasso, presumably was past the struggling stage, and he may also have been more astute in his personal dealings...

...Quoting a professor of philosophy, she contends in her foreword to the exhibition catalogue that the "truly elite among us" are not, as might be supposed, those who create the "gleams of divinity," but those who can discern them in the creations of others...

...the distance between the kneeling circus horse of 1905, for instance, and the studio model seated beside the head of a satyr (1933) is not just one of time...

...Doubtless there are and have been mutually stimulating partnerships on both the business and intellectual levels, yet the entente is necessarily a delicate one...

...In any event, he sent Etta Cone Christmas and birthday greetings for many years, and his drawing of her is very penetrating indeed—even more so when compared (unfairly) in the show with a portrait head by Zorach...

...Of his portraiture Matisse once wrote that the likeness "comes from the contrast existing between the face of the model and all other faces, in a word from the special asymmetry...

...A contribution to the catalogue by an eyewitness, Dr...

...he made her look youthful, Gallic and quite attractive...

...M - ™. — on warm relationships between artists and their angels has come from collectors and dealers...