They were friends with Picasso and Matisse. They ran in the same circles as Gertrude and Leo Stein. They avidly purchased works by Manet, Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat, and Degas at a time when other Americans didn't. They were two Victorian women from Baltimore buying avant-garde art in Paris, attending salons with friends, and building a collection that would initially puzzle and eventually awe the art world. Over a period of fifty years, sisters Caribel and Etta Cone amassed one of the most acclaimed collections of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century art in America. Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta were two halves of an idiosyncratic team who used the fortures of their German Jewish immigrant family to seek out works that imspired and pleased them, regardless of public opinion. This richly illustrated biography documents their lives from a unique perspective: that of their great-niece and their great-great-niece. Ellen B. Hirschland and her daughter Nancy Hirschland Ramage delve into Claribel's and Etta's world, following the sisters through letters and personal stories as they travel to meet the artists whose work would turn their adjoining apartments into a virtual museum. The sisters' experiences in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s provide an exceptional view of the bright artistic ferment in the city at that time. Only time would vindicate their keen vision and unwavering taste.

"This book takes you through the collection gallery by gallery, illuminating the art and installations in each room"--From preface.

The ninth poetry collection from the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize-winner.

A tribute to the museum and the woman---equal parts biography, memoir, philosophy, and detective story.

Ruminates on ancient remains and antiquities, illuminating an important element of contemporary cultural life: the dynamic between loss and delight.

Possibility: Essays Against Despair attempts to translate some of life's disordered events into the orderly happiness of art. The book includes encounters with manatees, children, and snakes; with Henry Adams, Marcel Proust, and W.G. Sebald ; with Texas landscape, Vertigo, and Vermeer. Adams, in Japan after his wife's death, found in the elaborate ritual of the tea ceremony and in the discomforts of a rural inn, occasions for the wit to face down grief. His letters to friends coax laughter from strangeness and loss. LikeAdams, Vigderman has a stylist's passion for revelatory detail, and for the pleasure of immersion in a world. Smart, generous, and probing, her discoveries play with direct experience, exploring the interaction of life and art as "magic you can walk in and out of." "Vigderman specializes in elliptical, epigrammatic insight that makes connectiosn that readers might not otherwise perceive.... Perhaps the most provocative essay and the emotional centerpiece is "My Depressed Person (A Monologue)," which interweaves a critical assessment of David Foster Wallace's short story "The Depressed Person" with Vigderman's own experience dealing with the depression of someone close to her, and perhaps her own as well." --Kirkus Reviews