The exhibit begins in an oddly darkened blood-red room, where we are introduced to the Cones’ early family history. Emigrating from Germany in 1846, the sisters’ father catapulted a humble grocery business into a textile empire and raised his daughters in luxury. Photographs of the two women as girls suggest little of the life they’re about to lead, a life of art and bohemia: We see photographs of Claribel and Etta as portly, plain-faced, conservatively dressed young women, and learn that Claribel, the older sister, earned a degree in medicine while Etta mostly stayed at home.

Their lives, however, would soon change: In 1898, given $300 to spruce up the family’s home, Etta shocked the Cones by buying five paintings of the relatively unknown American Impressionist painter Theodore Robinson. The lush and colorful landscapes must have awoken something in Etta: Soon, she and her sister were on a modern-art shopping spree. Which, naturally, led them to Gertrude and Leo Stein, the American émigrés at the heart of the burgeoning Paris art scene. The relationship with the Steins, the exhibit suggests, might have been slightly more about pleasure than business, as Etta and Gertrude are rumored to have been lovers. But amorous affairs aside, the Cone sisters were soon traveling across Europe and digging for worthy art. In 1905, they were introduced to an unknown Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso. On their first visit to his studio, Picasso was missing, but he’d left a note in the form of a picture of him with his pants down. Etta, though startled by the vulgarity, still saw it fit to do business with the young painter. A year later, Gertrude Stein’s sister in-law introduced Etta to another promising painter, Henri Matisse. From there on, the collecting never ceased.

The sisters collected paintings, drawings, clothes, and other exotic objects. Not even World War I dampened their enthusiasm—throughout the war, Claribel chose to stay in Germany and continued to buy art. Concerned, her family attempted to provide her with a safe passage home, but no one could find a mode of transportation that would comfortably fit Claribel’s 13 immense pieces of luggage. Baggage was also an issue in the sisters’ daily lives: They would often reserve three opera seats, for example, one for each of them and one for the stuff they’d bought during the day’s excursions. Claribel passed away in 1929, but Etta continued her collecting work, even commissioning Matisse to paint a portrait of her sister.

Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait (Bonjour Mlle Cone), 1907.
The Baltimore Museum of Art; © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York.

Looking back on Etta and Claribel Cone’s lives, the question arises as to what motivated this obsession. The clues are largely strewn throughout the exhibit. Overall, the impression created is one of an interest that turns into an obsession, which in turn morphs into a calling. This is shown elegantly: We see a quote from Claribel saying that ever since she was a young girl collecting seashells, she loved to hold beautiful objects in her possession. Then, another quote from Claribel, now an adult, confiding to her sister that she prefers art to people because with people; people’s personalities get in the way, while art just comforts. Finally, in a letter written just before her death, Claribel tells Etta to donate all of their art to the Baltimore Museum, on the condition that “the spirit of appreciation of modern art in Baltimore becomes improved.” These, then, are the three stages of the development of a serious art collection: first as childhood preoccupation, then as an adult defense mechanism, and finally as a posthumous contribution for the benefit of the community, the private urges sublimated into a collective good.

But the exhibition does well to remain close to the Cones’ actual lives, offering an impressive interactive touch-screen program that allows the viewer to virtually tour their apartment and marvel at the various masterpieces hung closely together as if they were wallpaper. Though the exhibit offers only samples from the Cones’ actual collection, a few gems stick out: A blue-period Picasso, “Woman With Bangs,” hangs in one of the last rooms, for example, entrancing with its depiction of a world-weary woman and leaving one haunted by her downcast eyes. Of all the Matisses on display, his “Large Reclining Nude” is the most engrossing, flattening the body of a nude woman and allowing the viewer to focus on the human form in relationship to space. Matisse sent the sisters 22 photographs of the work-in-progress, demonstrating just how crucial the Cones had been for the development of one of modernism’s most important painters.

The exhibit’s curator, Karen Levitov, chose to display the paintings in the order they were purchased, not in the order of their creation. This creates some odd juxtapositions, such as wading through a sea of Matisses only to meet a Delacroix as the exhibit’s last painting. But the anachronism conveys a strong sense of the sisters’ developing tastes and relationships with the artists they supported. It also affords a peek at the sisters’ relationship with their Judaism: Seeing a beautiful scroll of Esther piled next to a silver Buddha, one gets the sense that forms, much more than the spirit, were the Cones’ true passion.

It is tempting, walking through the opulence that surrounded Etta and Claribel throughout their lives, to write the two off as wealthy dilettantes who just happened to have good taste. But the exhibit makes a strong point for the sisters as visionaries: With no social media or other platforms for self-publicity in existence, the artists who gave birth to modernism depended heavily on the recognition and support of collectors who were willing to take risks and nurture Europe’s burgeoning avant-garde. Seen in this light, the Cones didn’t collect as much as redeem; without them, one doubts that Matisse, Picasso, and the other young unknowns who benefited so greatly from their dollars would have risen in prominence, and that the artistic and cultural revolution these painters helped usher in would have been possible.

“Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: the Cone Sisters of Baltimore” will be on view at the Jewish Museum through September 25, 2011.

Joseph Winkler is a writer living in New York.

Alberto Giacometti sketched her with her hands either clasped in a saintly pose, or clenched out of neurosis. In one drawing, her shoulders are hunched, her neck inquisitively thrust forward, and her face open, as if nervously searching out viewers for their thoughts. The setting is a Paris atelier, 1958. In Vallauris in 1954, Pablo Picasso rendered the same woman, a painter known as Soshana, in darker strokes, with her hair exotically styled, and wearing a jacket deliriously striped. Here, her pose is reminiscent of Picasso’s famous portrayal of another tough female artist—Gertrude Stein. The gazes in both Picasso portraits are oblique, off to the side, as if women as strong as Stein and Soshana were not comfortable being made the objects of another’s appreciation. No mistress and no muse, Soshana never hoped to be known as a subject, but as a master in her own right.

One of the most diffuse, enthusiastic artists of the twentieth century, Soshana was born Susanne Schüller in Vienna in 1927, a daughter of the Jewish bourgeoisie. She received her earliest formal education amid the most rarefied of that milieu, attending Vienna’s Schwarzwaldschule, the first of the progressive girls’ schools founded by philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald (who was the inspiration for Ermelinda Tuzzi, heroine of Robert Musil’s epic novel of the period, The Man Without Qualities). Such a nontraditional institution needed to staff itself with nontraditional faculty, and its roster reads like a roll call of the Austro-Hungarian avant-garde: Schoenberg taught music, Adolf Loos taught architecture, and Oskar Kokoschka led a class in drawing. This school was where Schüller learned that being a woman didn’t preclude a painting career launched with the most liberal of ideals.

No idealism could curb the Anschluss, however, and the Schüller family escaped Austria for Switzerland, arriving in London just in time to witness the destruction of the Blitz. Finally, in 1941 the Schüllers arrived in the United States, where their only daughter met her husband, the painter Beys Afroyim (the Zionist cognomen of the Polish-born Ephraim Bernstein). Together with their son Amos, born in 1946, the Afroyims spent the latter 1940s traveling the country, sustaining a poor, boardinghouse existence by selling Schüller’s portraits of America’s Mitteleuropean refugees: Portraits by “Soshana” exist of composers Schoenberg and Hans Eisler, conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, authors Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel on his Los Angeles deathbed.

In America, Schüller’s identity was split. She became a dutiful wife and mother, even while experimenting with the persona of “Soshana,” the moniker she first used, on her husband’s recommendation, in conjunction with her first solo show in Havana in 1948 (that name, the Yiddish for Hebrew’s Shoshana, means “lily-of-the-valley”). Her self-portraits reify this divergence. Soshana painted herself in the manner in which all Modernist men painted themselves—flattering their vanity with unflattering strokes, heroic in their ordinariness and exhaustion. In 1945, she stares seriously, her eyes intense, exophthalmic, while her mouth makes a petulant, desexualized mockery out of Modigliani’s sensuous Jewish puckers. Her brows, which even in photographs are her most memorable feature, are ostentatious, firm and furry, reflecting the severe central part of her hair. In a 1951 portrayal, her eyes are even more swollen than before, angrier, and she is holding flowers as if they were soured, disgusting objects, the decorations of a domesticity she was about to cast off. In Paris in 1955—having abandoned her husband and son in the United States in order to pursue her independence as an artist—Soshana paints herself again, now a liberated, and libertine, member of a creative community: In Artists in Paris she stands off to the side—a peer of the surrounding characters, struggling unknowns including the Indian painter Krishna Reddi, and the Japanese Tomoko Nakano (asked to label the painting’s other subjects later in life, Soshana had forgotten their names).

Taking over André Derain’s former studio, which she’d later abandon for Paul Gauguin’s old digs in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, Soshana also set about befriending the stars of the art world, networking her way to the top: She flitted, and flirted, amid the likes of Brancusi, Bazaine, Calder, Chagall, Ernst, Klein, Kupka, Sartre, and Zadkine. Picasso, who admired the severity of her beauty, is said to have remarked: Je trouve qu’elle a du talent. “I think she has talent.” Giacometti was more effusive, and sincere, in his affection for “Mademoiselle Soshana.”

Though superficially something of a bonne vivante, Soshana suffered in her studio. There her life became a sort of feeling, functioning canvas for the sufferings of others. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who also made the mid-century journey from figurative art to abstraction, Soshana was guided not by any painterly hand or eye but by ideas, by politics, and by moral conscience. This condition gives her art a disembodied quality; making her portraits—even her self-portraits— seem somehow incorporeal. Soshana’s best paintings, then, are of decimated, depopulated landscapes, and their literary or programmatic moods can be inferred from a recounting of her titles: Fury of the Marshes, Chrysanthemum and the Spider, Dead City, Sad Flowers, Pain, Solitude, Disintegration, Bombed-Out Church, and The Wandering Jew.

This “Cassandra of the canvas,” as the Parisian press called her, soon tired of the French capital’s competitiveness, and, turning tourist, took her horrors on the road. Traveling Asia and Africa, Soshana exhibited her artwork—which decried poverty and war amid landscapes more poor and war-torn than any she had previously seen—to the terror and delight of Anglo-American and French expatriate communities. India’s Statesman called her “a prophet of doom—atomic warfare, loneliness and unemployment are her themes.” The Ethiopian Herald noted her “scenes from death, pain, doom, destruction, anxiety and loneliness.” In 1957 Soshana was invited by the Chinese Cultural Ministry for an unprecedented show at the Imperial Palace in Peking. In 1959 she visited with and painted Albert Schweitzer in a leprosy lazarette in Lambaréné, Gabon. Strange attractors, Surrealist connections, abound: Soshana once met the painter Francesco Clemente at a school for yogis in Madras, and chatted up the writer Graham Greene on a flight to Soviet Russia.

In 1959 Soshana resettled in Paris, where she collaborated on mock cave paintings with Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, while involving herself with the Danish-Belgian-Dutch art collective CoBrA. That movement’s neo-Lascaux motifs and hermetically significant glyphs would be integrated with Soshana’s emerging interest in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, resulting in an art of grids and mildewed textures, overlaid with an alphabet indecipherable in its violence: jagged scribbles signified as wounds, ripped by clusterbombs of color, symbolic of primal pain as well as of the revolutionary struggles of the mid-1960s. After time spent in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Soshana embarked on a third world tour, visiting the South Seas, the Caribbean, Thailand, Bali, Australia, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Iraq, partially paying her way by painting portraits, including a rendering of the king and queen of Sikkim. In 1972, slowing down, Soshana moved to Israel, and the following year her Israeli debut exhibition was scheduled to open on the day of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. In 1974, Soshana returned to New York, where her style, or styles, changed yet again, accommodating both Pop cartooning and a renewed darkness, this time representing urban grit, specifically the neglect of downtown New York.

Soshana’s art and life were so varied not out of any appetite for change or intellectual restlessness, but out of a profound dislocation and social anxiety. She did not know whether she was a weakened victim of Nazism, or an iron survivor set out to master the masculine world. In Paris she painted like a Parisian, and in New York she painted like her favorite New Yorkers—first generation Abstract Expressionists such as old friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom had died by the time of her Manhattan arrival. In her very itinerancy Soshana became the prototypical Jewish painter, a painter who—more than Chagall and Chaim Soutine, more than Rothko and, later, even more than Philip Guston and R.B. Kitaj—adapts her mind and styles to those of the cultures that host her wandering.

In the 1980s, Soshana returned to Vienna, where she still lives and paints, her career promoted by her son Amos, with whom she was reconciled after the death of his father in 1984. In March 2008 Austria released the 55-cent Soshana stamp, featuring her 1981 New York painting Rainbow. Her best recent paintings have been political, in series entitled Kosovo, and Middle East. Two newer canvases, currently on view in a Soshana retrospective at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York through February 2009, are called N.Y.C. I 2001, WTC and Chorramshar—Irak 1992; both paintings are bold and confrontational, tempting iconoclasm by directly representing the tragedies of their titles. A 1991 self-portrait is called The Way I See Myself, and while it’s not yet an epitaph, the stark presence of death overwhelms. Here she presents herself as a hysterical skeleton, a ravaged black figure boxed in by bars of black paint shot through with red and blue bristles. The canvas is entirely naked beneath, as if imprisoned by these lines, by Soshana’s figure. One of Soshana’s eyes is left open to this surface—the outline of a hole giving way to bare canvas, a grainy, pixilated ground like the Polish snow that would have been her fate.

Soshana’s career can be seen as a model for the last aesthetic that might still be called Jewish: empathy, or compassion. She absorbed, and as an octogenarian continues to absorb, the sorrows of others and, by way of interpretation, offers them out again as uniquely, biographically, hers. Soshana’s highest desire is to be modern, or new, which is to say, to be fashionable, and necessary. She wants, like many people want, to always be young. This makes for an art of insecurity—an art that is occasionally, if glimpsed between poses, beautiful in its desperation for the beauty it lacks.