The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone Read Online Free Page B

skirts swaying as they walked.
    It was during one of these walks that Claribel asked Gertrude to address a Baltimore women's group. Gertrude philosophized often on the role of women in society, based partly on her scrutiny of classmates at Harvard, and partly on the women she saw at a Hopkins clinic for poor patients, where she put in time. Seeing the socio-economic gap between the two groups, Gertrude came up with a theory that Claribel asked her to lecture on. The result was the first public piece by Gertrude Stein: “The Value of a College Education for Women.”
    Anyone who knew Gertrude wouldn't have expected her to mince her words. Her years in school hadn't tamed her. In fact, she had recently begun sparring with a welter-weight boxer to improve her health. But those at Claribel's lectures unacquainted with Miss Stein were in for a surprise. Women's rights were a favorite subject among the enlightened group assembled before her. What was not common ground was an open discussion of sexuality.
    Gertrude's thesis was that women used sex to pay for their keep. She explained that as women spent less time with household duties—such as making clothes, growing vegetables, caring for children—in the maintenance of their homes and households, they would become more like sex objects than their husbands’ equal partners. If women did not use their freedomfrom household responsibilities to go to college, Gertrude concluded, they would become mere “peacocks,” spending useless years “learning the mysteries of self-adornment.”
    Claribel must have seen something of herself in her young friend—a disinterest in the approval of her peers and an unshakable self-confidence. And intellectually, Claribel's and Gertrude's time had come. The “new woman” or “bachelor girl” debunked Victorian myths of womanhood. She was mentally assertive and physically vigorous. Exercise was the rage and the tall, thin, and athletic Gibson girl was the image of the age.
    Even Lillian Russell, the former standard bearer of beauty, got in on the craze. In the second half of the 1890s, the American press ran columns of copy on Russell's struggle to drop pounds from the voluptuous figure that had made her famous.
    Etta, however, was not a new woman, intellectually or physically. Her immediate fate was to live retiringly among her family in the home where she was raised, caring for her nearest relations while their lives changed and expanded. In fact, by age 30, the only real mark she had made were the five Robinson paintings she purchased and hung on the parlor walls.
    But those paintings did not just represent the past for Etta—they represented the future. They were evidence of a world beyond her family—windows into a world of light made from swift brush strokes and rich earth oozing from ochre. They represented a world where a child's delicate movement was forever frozen in a mesh of thinly applied blues and yellows and pinks—where a mother's love was conveyed by a barely discernible thread of paint.
    The Robinson artwork transformed the dark, formal rooms of the Cone home in the same way a brilliant newcomer enlivens a dull family gathering. For Etta, the five paintings would turn out to be the first of hundreds of new and welcome friends.

Florence, 1901
There was an open door in her prison wall! If she chose to slip through it, who could follow? The voice of scandal was loud and bitter, but it would be lost in the great breadth of the Atlantic.
—Sidney Nyburg, The Buried Rose: Legends of Old Baltimore, 1942
    D uring the years Gertrude attended medical school at Hopkins, she summered with Leo in Europe and brought back to Baltimore numerous stories of their wild escapades abroad, including nude bathing and drunken revelries. But, thanks to Leo, summer vacations also involved an immersion in art. Etta's fantasy of life on the other side of the ocean must have been fueled by the Steins’ tales, but it was not until 1901 that she