Anatomy of an Art Collector

December 2104

SUBJECTING YOURSELF TO ART MAY BE HABIT FORMING, LEAD TO ACCIDENTAL COLLECTING AND A LIFELONG ADDICTION TO ORIGINAL ART APPRECIATION. “Unless you’re a billionaire, you don’t set out to start an art collection,” says Wilmington photographer, artist, and yes, art collector, Billy Cone. Cone defines the anatomy of a collector as the random series of events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. “Usually it’s an accident,” he says. “It’s not something you think you’re going to do when you grow up. anatomy Somehow you wake up one day and say, ‘Oh, I’m a collector.’” Collecting art is arguably in Cone’s DNA. His great, great aunts, Dr. Claribel Cone and Etta Cone, were legendary modern art collectors. The sisters of Moses Cone, who with their brother, Caesar Cone, established a textile mill in Greensboro, North Carolina, kept apartments in the Bolton Hill section of Baltimore, Maryland, where they schlepped around with the Steins, Gertrude and her brother Leo. The Cones and Steins became socially connected to Parisian salons in the early 20th century, rubbing elbows with the illuminati of the times. The sisters, siblings in a family of 12 children, tripped to Europe supported by the success of their brothers’ textile mill, yet their obsession for collecting art was secreted for two generations from their great grand nephew. “I found out about them in 1986 when I was 26 years old and my cousin Claribel — she was the namesake — called me and said, ‘I’m coming to DC.’ At the time I was working for Sutton Place Gourmet selling pastries wholesale, caviar from Tennessee; food’s important to me,” he says, smiling. Cousin Claribel invited him to the Baltimore Museum of Art, the repository of the internationally renowned Cone Collection — 3,000 pieces of master works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and the 500-piece Henri Matisse stash, the largest caché of his work worldwide. The BMA considers the Cone sisters’ collection its crown jewel valued today at a staggering $1 billion. Billy Cone says the discovery provoked an awakening within him. “From that moment on, I was aware. … Some creative things were going on at that time, too. I took drawing classes when I was in DC. I went to France and cleaned my mind out. I was there for one month and got clear on what I needed to do. … I realized I had to do what I wanted to do, which was my photography. I had to do it, devote all myself to it, so that’s what I did.” In a singularly unpremeditated move, he also began collecting art. Cone says he learned from his aunts: the richest part of collecting was knowing the artists. “Think about it — the fact that they knew Picasso, they knew Matisse. They invited Matisse to Baltimore — things like that, that’s the meat of it all. I’ve met 80 percent of the artists who did the work in my collection. I’m friends with them.” Ironically, Cone says art was not a part of family life when he was growing up in Greensboro. “We had art, and we had portraits of family members growing up but nobody really cared about art. My dad didn’t. My mom may have. No one in my family cared about art,” he says. With $100, Cone began a collection that now numbers more than 400 pieces. He pur-chased his first painting at a Sotheby’s auction while he was living in Washington, DC. “I’d never been to an auction before. I didn’t plan to buy anything; but when this piece came up, I thought, ‘That looks like an older David Bowie,’” Cone says. He’s describing a Lucien Roulle painting, an oil-on-canvas portrait of a man smoking a pipe. “I had to bid, which was the first time I ever did that. That was fun. I didn’t expect I’d ever win it, or buy it,” he remembers. Almost all of Cone’s collection is portraiture. “To me it’s all about the face and the emotion,” he says. By Marimar McNaughton| Photography by Allison Potter and Joshua Curry 28 WBM december 2014 of Cone defines the anatomy of a collector as the random series of events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. “Usually it’s an accident,” he says. “It’s not something you think you’re going to do when you grow up. Somehow you wake up one day and say, ‘Oh, I’m a collector.’”


December 2104
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