The Steins, and the rivalry on one wall
Straight off the scandal, the picture found the best possible owners. Leo and Gertrude Stein, the American brother-and-sister collectors living in Paris at 27 rue de Fleurus, bought it. The Steins were Matisse’s earliest serious patrons, and they were also Picasso’s, and they hung the two men in the same rooms, which means the rivalry that ran through twentieth-century painting was, for a while, literally on one wall of one Paris apartment.
That matters here because of a date. Blue Nude is from 1907. So is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the savage, faceted brothel scene Picasso was making across town, the picture usually called the doorway to Cubism. Both are nudes pushed through deliberate distortion and the same new pressure of African and other non-European sculpture then entering Paris through colonial channels (a turn art historians call primitivism, Western modernists borrowing the forms of non-European art whose makers they rarely named or understood). Picasso saw the Blue Nude; it is commonly said to have fed into the Demoiselles. Be careful with the chain of cause, because Picasso’s picture was largely worked out that same year and you cannot cleanly say one made the other. The fairer read is a rivalry: two men, the same year, the same city, the same dealers and patrons, each watching the other shove the human body further than anyone thought a painting could take it.
The copies that were burned
Now the famous part, which gets garbled almost every time it is told, so we will tell it precisely. In 1913, the Steins lent Blue Nude to the Armory Show (the International Exhibition of Modern Art), the giant exhibition that opened in New York in February and detonated American modern art. (Note the lender: in 1913 the painting was still the Steins’. John Quinn, whom we will meet in a moment, did not own it yet.) From New York the show traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, where the students were, to put it mildly, not persuaded.
On April 16, 1913, the show’s last day in Chicago, Art Institute students staged a protest, and this is the fact to get exactly right. They burned cheap copies, reproductions, of three Matisse paintings, the Blue Nude among them. They did not burn the painting. The original canvas, the actual oil the Steins had lent, hung untouched; what went up in flames were photographic copies. They also held a mock trial of the painter, whom they nicknamed “Henri Hairmattress,” indicting him for a long string of joke crimes (artistic murder, pictorial arson, criminal misuse of line, total degeneracy of color), a student jury “condemned” him, and a student “chaplain” intoned that they regretted he had only one life to give for his principles. There was also an attempt to burn Matisse himself in effigy, a stuffed figure of the man, but by the local reports that effigy was stopped before it was lit. So the accurate sentence, the one to hold onto past every breathless retelling, is this: copies of the paintings were burned; the burning of the artist in effigy was attempted and reportedly halted; and the original Blue Nude was never harmed. It is alive and well, which is the whole reason you can go look at it today.
From a New York lawyer to a Paris auction
After the Armory Show, the painting changed hands. In 1920, Leo Stein sold it to John Quinn, the New York lawyer who had been the single most important American backer of the 1913 show. Quinn died in 1924, and his enormous modern collection was broken up and sold. Blue Nude came up at the Quinn estate sale in Paris, at the Hôtel Drouot auction house, on 28 October 1926.
Two women from Baltimore
And the buyer at that Paris sale is how the painting ends up where it is: a city not many people would guess, Baltimore. The buyer was Dr. Claribel Cone (1864–1929), and her story is worth a paragraph, because she is not a footnote. Claribel was a Johns Hopkins-trained pathologist, a practicing scientist at a time when that was almost unheard of for a woman, and she and her younger sister Etta Cone (1870–1949) had been friends of Gertrude Stein back in their shared Baltimore-and-Hopkins days. Through the Steins, the Cone sisters had started buying Matisse early, and they kept at it for decades, with a seriousness and a checkbook that most museums of the time could not match. At the Quinn sale, Claribel bought the Blue Nude for a reported 120,760 francs (about $4,830; that figure comes from secondary accounts, so hold it loosely). Claribel died in 1929, her holdings passed to Etta, and Etta spent the rest of her life consolidating what the two of them had built into one of the great private collections of modern art in the world.
When Etta died in 1949, she left the whole thing, the Cone Collection, to her hometown museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, which accessioned it the next year. That bequest is the reason a mid-sized American city holds one of the largest Matisse collections on Earth, and the reason the Blue Nude, the picture a Paris Salon called gratuitously ugly and a Chicago crowd burned in cheap copy, hangs today in Baltimore, the original paint intact, gathered up and saved by two sisters who saw, long before the crowds did, exactly what it was.