Romaine Brooks

I think that in looking at Brooks’ studio it has become clear that she was a woman of many parts. It is an endless horizon of her complexity and sensing how she has entered the horizon of modernism during a period when non-objective art dominated the scene and abstraction was coming into its own

Black Swan

This is a term Romaine Brooks used to describe several women in her circle of friends. Women of the world. It’s a term to ponder. Most of my friends are women of the world. They travel widely, have had exciting and full lives. Some with family and some with a family of extended friends and community. All of them have a zest for life and sane living that defies the general media negativity that rains down on us from newspapers, magazines, blogs and the like.  The key is to be surprised by life and not to let

Black Swan

familiarity breed contempt. Taking a step back from one’s life as Romaine in her more sane moments did brings a new freshness to the life one is living.

Recently got a post on Romaine’s “The Crossing” interesting association with a Plath poem. A little more morbid in implication than the painting itself which is really about what some have called “lesbian space” and implied, including myself  is an orgasmic transport in symbolist form. Actually Ida Rubinstein was the model and she was Romaine’s lover and muse. The reverse of this poem is true of Ida as it was Romaine who dropped her.

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”

Sylvia Plath

Well just as you are getting to the end there is always something. Nonetheless, it is only a matter of time. Unfortunately, my polishing editor has a family emergency so we will be delayed for a couple of weeks before this gets on disk and a hard copy printed out for the agent to take to market. After that I will keep you informed.

I am sure it would have been a red letter day for Romaine and her circle with the Prop 8 decision. I am not sure she would hae jumped on the marriage band wagon because both she and Natalie believed in open relationships without government strings attached. However, this being said stable long term relationships deserve the same rights and responsibilities as all marriages are accorded as well as all the perks. Anyone who has seen The Kids Are O.K., regardless of its flaws, knows what I am talking about. Families are made over time with a lot of joy and heartbreak along the way. They don’t just happen. The process should be respected and applauded when it works and fixed when it doesn’t. Our society needs to grown up and get with the program instead of supporting the hate mongers. It’s about time!

The end is finally here. It’s been a long time coming. Like most biographers when I began my research I had a somewhat different picture in mind of Romaine Brooks as a person and an artist. What I have learned about life between the wars has opened my eyes to unexpected insights that have allowed me to really understand how extraordinary Romaine Brooks was as a personality born in the tail end of the Victorian era and living through the era of the bright young things and surviving the Second World War only to retire unwilling to engage with what she was unprepared to endure as the new society emerged.

Although politics played a major part in her story, Brooks tried not to pay it any mind or at least that is what she would like us to believe. In truth, like many of her generation she turned a blind eye to much of what she did not want to see. My book tries to explore the richness of the personalities of this era and it is not my place to judge them. Readers will have to draw their own conclusions regarding Romaine Brooks and her art.

I will keep you informed of this work in progress which has now reached the stage of a finished ms. There only a final read through and minor corrections before I turn the completed ms. over to my agent. Meanwhile I watch the arc of GLBT politics in my own era and I cannot but help and see the similarities between Brooks’ era and our own. The incipient Fascism of our times and the threats it poses. Always I ask myself why the human race does not learn from history and seems doomed to repeat the lessons of the past no wiser for the knowing!

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.