Romaine Brooks

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