Romaine Brooks

Talk about social media! Romaine’s cast of characters is extensive.  Her biographer presented her as a hermit but this is far from true. It appears that anyone who was anyone to be cultivated was on her agenda when she arrived in Paris in 1905.  There she began to live the life of the rich, cultured and well connected. She did not, however, have her first exhibition until 5 years later when the Galeries Durand-Ruel gave her a solo from May 10 -18  in 1910. The exhibition was a success and established her as an artist of the first rank. All of the works were studies of women and young girls. She also showed her first nude, Azaleas Blanches.

Hilton Kramer the art critic of the New York Times (1971) noted that Brooks is “ … a painter of remarkable powers. There is nothing improvised or spontaneous in this style; there are few easy delights for the eye. But there is a force in this pictorial style that an earlier epoch than our own would have had no hesitation calling masculine.”

Of course, Kramer is old fashioned in his notions of gender identity so we have to forgive him his limitations in defining Brooks in this way. Rather she is a different kind of woman. In her day the only way to compete was by using a style of painting that would gain attention and that way of painting, bold, direct and to the point would have been defined as male gendered.  Rather let us say she painted in a gendered style that was once defined as masculine. As a lesbian and a “new” woman as well as a feminist, Brooks had no choice if she wished to be taken seriously other than to strike out on her own and forge a new and distinctive style of painting.

For those of you who have never seen a Romaine Brooks painting except in reproduction I can only say you have never seen a Brooks at all. I know this may sound extreme but until you understand what her “severe” aesthetic aspired to–the condition of music–you are simply missing her point. In trying to frame Romaine Brooks’s “legacy” in Chapter 10 of my book I found myself smack up against the challenge of how to explain how she did what she did as a painter. Her artistry, its modernity resides in her ambiguity. The complex set of relationships she created in her canvases, especially her more ambitious works, for instance, The White Bird are similar to Debussy’s hyperromantic and post-impressionist musical compositions. It should be noted that Brooks knew Debussy’s music well, sang it, played it on the piano and had been trained as a singer and musician before turning to painting. Continue Reading »

Chapter 9 has finally begun to shape up.  As I come to the end of this research I find myself thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Romaine Brooks appears to me to be a perfect female version with her extreme fluxuations of emotion and her ability to sever even her closest ties. Her actions are based on her own set of rules of conduct that were largely inflexable. One of the reasons for her inflexability had to do with her horrendous childhood; a trauma that she never was able to recover from. Despite her best efforts and they were heroic at the end of her life she reverted to patterns that left her dying alone in a black curtained room at the age of 96. Continue Reading »

All or Nothing A critical Study of Romaine Brooks moves along. I am 3/4  finished with  chapter 9. Brooks’s slow deterioration and withdrawal from the world culminates in the late 1960s. By 1967 she is in poor health, dealing with losing her eye sight and insanely jealous of Barney’s lover Janine Lahovary who she considered inferior and could not abide.  At first Janine realizing how much Natalie loved and needed Romaine tried to win her over. Failing in this she began to feel that Romaine taxed Natalie’s energies and wasn’t good for her health. Regardless, Nat Nat loved Romaine to distraction–even when Romaine was being a peevish bitch, throwing tanrums and acting like a brat. She would sulk over something she experienced as a slight and then ask Berthe (Natalie’s long time housekeeper) for chicken sandwiches like a small child. After the fits had passed the two old lovers, both in their 90s would speak in English and laugh together. But Romaine was not well and Natalie certainly was not after two heart attacks, ulcers which refused to heal on her legs, a bad hip and problems with her eyes that required wear dark blue glasses. Nonetheless, Natalie felt as long as her mind remained active she could tolerate anything and still love life. Romaine on the other hand hated the humiliations of old age and deteriorating health. She felt she had reached the end of the road and that it was all becoming futile. More and more she retreated seeing no one until in May of 1969 she refused to see Natalie or answer her letters. Natalie sent Berthe to speak with Romaine and Romaine told her in no uncertain terms that she and Natalie were quits and she did not want to see or hear from her. This was very hurtful to Natalie who only wanted to love and cherish Romaine which she did until her own death and beyond. Despite Janine’s jealousy she always obeyed Natalie’s smallest desire. So Natalie was buried with a picture of Romaine clutched to her breast.  She had come to believe if there was eternity that she would be reunited with her Romaine.

Romaine Brooks’s life is extraordinary as is her artistry. She was a tragic figure in that she could not rise above her childhood which was horrendous. The damage that she suffered at the hands of her mother, the ambivalent relationship with her crazy brother and the estrangement from her sister Maya all served to make her feel isolated, helpless and unprotected in the world as a child. It is along these emotional fault lines that we must view her life and her art. As a consequece her choices start to make sense once we enter her universe, however paranoid it may seem. She thought of herself as a martyr–but if we examine the Christian concept–Christ martyr, Saint Joan martyr, Saint Sabastian martyr what is she really sayiing? What sacrifices did she make for anyone? Rather her lapide-one who is stoned–is about the victim not the martyr, it is about suffering but not for the world or redemption as Jesus supposedly did. Rather her suffering is that of the outsider who is never acceptable and always suffers at the hands of the herd. As a consequence I would have to say that Brooks like many of her class and right wing conservatives in both Europe and America tended to look for scapegoats to project their own discomforts on. When I say this I am thinking of her identification with Italian Fascism with its faux science of race that claimed in 1937 that Italians were pure Aryans. It was during this period that they expelled foreign residents and blamed all their social ills on the Jews. Although Brooks’s writings are pretty much purged of blatant support for racial clensing these sentiments are evident between the lines and in her heroic portraits.

In chapter nine I will be discussing her life after the war as she traveled and tried to figure out how to live and how to rediscover her artist self. Astonishingly after a 16 year stint of not painting at the age of 87 she took up her brush again for one last great portrait. I will try to give readers insights into what this last incredible unfinished portrait attempted to do and how it relates to her work of 1905-1906. I will also address her two manuscripts attempting to decode her politics which she claimed no artist is interested in. Yet the personal is the political and her choices make that abundantly clear. Her failure to meet her own perfectionist standards finished her as an artist. However, she ws concerned about her legacy and with the help of Natalie and Laura Barney she set about placing her portraits in various collections in America, Italy and France. The bulk of her works went to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 1971 she had a major retrospective exhibition and another one in 2000 at the Woman’s Museum in Wshington, D.C. neither exhibit really dealt with what she called her “severe” art in s way that paid her justice. In All or Nothing  A critical study of Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) I have attempted to do justice to the complexity of boht her life and her art. In the United States she has reached clut status because of her lesbianism rather than her art. I feel this is  reduces her to her sexual orientation and I hope my book will correct this oversight. Many of the works that are illustrated have not been widely reproduced or seen in either France or the United States.

At this point I am working with a wonderful agent and will be able to update you on chapter 10 which discussed Brooks’s legacy and what it means now at a time of crisis when we are involved on at least 3 war fronts. I think we have much to learn from Romaine Brooks and her times.

Chapter nine is coming along, albeit slowly. While everyone else was celebrating the end of the war, Romaine and Natalie were keeping a low profile due to their initial support for Mussolini. Ezra Pound whose first broadcasts were supported by Natalie, she paid for his first radio was being taken into custody as a traitor. Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s wife and a reporter on the Italian front intervened for the two elderly lesbians saving them the humiliation of being hauled in as supporting the failed government. Natalie returned to France sans Romaine who remained behind to try to rediscover her artist self. This was a journey that failed for a number of reasons I go into in the book. In 1961 Romaine did attempt a portrait of her good friend Uberto Strozzi. She failed to finish it and her perfectionism would not allow her to hazard the experiment again. So that was the end of Romaine as a painter. In 1968, the French academician E. MacAvoy who had always admired her work devoted an entire issue of Bizarre to her drawings. Shortly after that Laura and Natalie Barney arranged for the Smithsonian Museum of American Art to acquire her works. So Romaine despite poor health and growing self isolation marshaled the energy to inventory and make sure her paintings found a safe home in the United States in Washington, D.C. Others of her works were in French museums including her most famous painting, The Weeping Venus. Romaine Brooks died in 1970, shortly before her retrospective show debuted in 1971 and traveled to New York where it was favorably review by several important critics and where I began my 38 year relationship with the artist and her work.

In Chapter 10 I will try and sum up Romaine’s legacy and her life. I expect to finish the entire ms. by the end of August. Meanwhile, 8 chapters are in the hands of a potential agent. In this perilous publishing climate one can only keep one’s fingers and toes crossed. More later

I would also like to recommend the Patricia Cronin show now on at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It is a homage to the 19th century lesbian sculptor, Harriet Hosmer. Cronin’s water colors, all in black and white pay tribute to Hosmer’s sculptures. There is an excellent book with an essay by William Gerdts among others. It is well worth the $32.00 and a collector’s item.

Fractured my ankle and it is coming along slowly. Was able to get to the Francis Bacon show despite all. I recommend it highly.  For those of you who are interested in Romaine Brooks’ s world I recommend reading Carolyn Burke’s book on Mina Loy called Becoming Modern. It’s a really interesting read and well written. I will be reviewing both Bacon show and catalogue for the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review-(check my links for some interesting reads). 

Finally formulating an approach to chapter 9. Romaine Brooks’ s inability to admit that she was wrong about fascism probably led to her semi-self exile after Italy lost the war. Her whole brand of politics was proven wrong and she was now left to try and rediscover her artist self in exile so to speak. The only time that she and Natalie Barney had lived together continuously was during the Second World War. After Natalie returned to Paris to pick up the pieces of her former life and Romaine remained behind in Florence to try and find her own way into a new life. During this period she was beset with a number of health related problems including problems with her eyesight. During this period she lived a relatively uneventful life traveling, enjoying her villa and what friends she still had that were alive and hadn’t written her off because of her rigidly held convictions concerning superior people and people who were special. She sold her villa and took an apartment in Nice where she continued to self-isolate. The reasons for these choices remain somewhat unclear. In the closing years of her life, Brooks was very aware of posterity. In service of her legacy she spent a great deal of energy making sure that she would not be forgotten though I doubt she would have been thrilled to learn that she has become the icon of women’s, gay and queer studies as well as a marginal footnote in the history of art. 

Chapter 8 The end is in sight.  Italian fascism (fascismo) ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. Brooks and Barney spent the war (1940-1945-6) at Romaine’s villa outside Florence. People have asked why two aging lesbians, one tainted by Jewish blood on her mother’s side, would have chosen to sit the war out in fascist Italy? In this chapter I attempt to sketch the framework of Romaine’s thinking explaining her point of view, how it reflected the values of a number of artist including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Hall and others. The appeal of fascism was its emphasis on the importance of the arts in society.  How this played out in relation to Brooks is fascinating. Brooks wrote her war memoir which remained unpublished despite several revisions in which she attempted to erase her admiration for the Aryans and her identification with a conservative point of view. The turning point for both Barney and Brooks came when the exiting Germans blew up the famed bridges of Florence. Neither of them were very savvy when it came to politics and were shocked to find out that the blond Aryans they so admired were more barbaric than the communists they so feared. Despite these violations Brooks still held Aryan notions regarding people who were not of her class or different from herself well into the 1960s and beyond. Romaine maintained her right wing leanings and this perhaps explains why she kept such a low profile after the war . Natalie returned to France as soon as she could and went on to reinvent herself in a new world that she really didn’t fully understand.  Romaine seems to have stopped painting until she attempted one last portrait in 1961. This portrait is surprisingly strong and is as much a self portrait as it is a painting of her Italian friend. His opinion of Romaine was that she was “a rock” but “a nice rock.” Chapter 9 will attempt to bring together the strands I have developed in previous chapters to examine her art and detail how her art reflects her Italian fascist values. Her notions of the “heroic” and her “heroic” portraits of women embody Romaine’s queer aesthetics. They are her manifesto in an era of manifestos. It is her innovations in dealing with issues of gender ambiguity that make her unique and both modern and postmodern. I hope to finish up with Chapter 10 by July/August.

“The artist is an active dreamer; his dreams are ever seeking their affinity to the outer world…. It is quite evident that I belong to this artist order of human beings, for in the course of my life I have never done what is commonly called a wise thing.”—Romaine Brooks

 I am working on an essay that goes into Romaine’s concept of her queer heroic portraits which will be published in 2010 in an anthology of writings dealing with queers and art in The Journal of Lesbian Studies. For those of you interested in other artists that I write about please go to the links listed on the site for updates. Have recently finished a review of the Demuth exhibition at Whitney and writings on Bacon, Hart Crane, Balthus, George Tooker and an interview with internationally known photographer Allen Frame (see his illustration covers for Robert Bolono’s books), up coming in the next few months. Then for fun a review of a new Lana Turner book written by her daughter and packed with wonderful photographs.

For other creative endeavors keep tuned my cassandralanger.com author’s site. Also have signed up to Facebook and Twitter for on-going updates and random thoughts.

Themes of art and music are profoundly emotional

The American expatriate painter, Romaine Goddard Brooks (1874-1970) invented lesbian chic; her Self-Portrait (1923) is the epitome of elegance. Her silhouette suggests the streamlined angularity of the Art Deco era. Standing thin, erect and cool she is the ageless fashion statement. There is no contradiction between Romaine’s lesbian dandy and her patrician art. Long before HBO’s L Word and lesbian chic there was Romaine Brooks and her circle.Brooks lived as exquisitely and marvelously as she painted. Her life and art both validate the existence of the lesbian and gay communities at the time and perserved a stunning record for the future.The writer, Truman Capote claimed her success was in creating “the all time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts,” but he saw only what he wanted to see.

Cassandra Langer’s  All or Nothing: The Life and Times of Romaine Brooks shows how the artist was a hero of her own making living on a psychic St.Andreas fault line that she struggled to overcome. In this book Langer and Javors peel back the layers of this extraordinary artist’s purposefully created facade and reveals the truths about her relationship to the female hero, and her triumph in becoming herself.Cassandra Langer is an art historian and critic. She has co-authored two anthologies on Feminist Art Criticism and authored a Selected Bibliography of Feminist Art Criticism as well as a book on Mother and Child in Art. Her What’s Right With Feminism is available in paperback form at I-Universe.com. Langer has published nationally and internationally and has written many catalogues, critiques and reviews of American and contemporary art for such journals as Art Journal, Art Criticism, Art Papers, Arts magazine, G & L Review, Ms magazine, New Directions for Women, Woman’s Art Journal and others. Her op-ed pieces have appeared in New York Newsday and she is a frequent contributor to Midwest book reviews.com and Allaboutjazz.com.

She is also working on a psychobiographical analysis of Romaine Brooks in conjunction with Irene Javors, M.ED. Diplomate APA, who is a psychotherapist in Private Practice in NYC and the author of many articles and publications. She is an adjunct professor at Yeshiva University, NYC. She is working on Susan Sontag