Could serious artists survive without the National Endowment for the Arts? Could Americans tell what constitutes worth-while art? There are enough American club rooms hung with pictures of poker-playing puppies and doe-eyed waifs to suggest that the answer is no.
But there’s a collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art that tells a different story. It’s a lively gathering of early twentieth-century work that includes a good number of Matisses and Picassos as well as a Gauguin. And it was assembled, long before the NEA, by an eccentric pair of Baltimore spinsters named Etta and Claribel Cone. The Cone sisters prove that an American of means can — without the help of the professional connoisseurs and a government-financed art establishment — identify and support the first-rate art of their own time.
