The story of how two spinster sisters from Baltimore acquired a remarkable collection of the sensual, avant-garde paintings of early 20th-century artists: Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, and others. Their biographer, a former Reuters reporter and editor, is also the author of a life of Victoria Woodhull (1998). The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Cone collection and the wing that houses it is the legacy of Dr. Claribel and Etta Cone, among the heirs to a family fortune based in part on textile manufacture. Etta was dedicated to caring for her extended family; Claribel was the more adventurous, graduating first in her class from medical school in 1890. The sisters came to know Leo and Gertrude Stein during the Steins’ early sojourn in Baltimore; intrigued by the Steins’ reports of their hedonistic summers in Europe, Etta set sail for Italy in the spring of 1901 and alternated between Baltimore and Europe for the rest of her life; her friendships with and support of artists, particularly Matisse, were to continue as long. Claribel too turned from science to art, after sticking it out as a medical researcher in Germany through the beginning of Hitler’s rise. The sisters’ separate apartments in Baltimore were filled not only with paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures but also with fabrics, jewels, and artifacts collected from around the world. After Claribel’s death in 1929, Etta set out to fill the gaps in the collection and published an illustrated book of works that she owned, by then including CÇzanne, Renoir, and Degas, among many others. Etta died in 1949, following the purchase of yet another Picasso. A pleasant addition to the Baltimore Museum’s gift-shop offerings, perhaps, but this slight romance of two sisters in Paris when artistic ferment was at its height offers little real insight into collecting or the collectors. (16 pages b&w, 16 pages color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-890862-06-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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