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.

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

Sylvia Plath

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!

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!

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.

I want to make it clear from the on set that I am not now speaking of the synesthesia. Romaine was by no means delusional and her tonality allows for a complex range of interpretations regarding formal structures, meanings and relationships all of which I go into in dealing with how she interpreted Bernard Berenson’s theory regarding what he called the aesthetic moment.

Some artist friends on Facebook have begun a discussion of synesthesia within the context of speaking about music and art. I think that this is a digression off the major relationship of art and music.  Artist’s perceptions in no way constitute physical or mental states that partake of hypopompic or other sleeping/waking states. Their sensibilities are stimulated by fancies that arise on the borderlands of sensory experiences that cannot be classified as mental or nervous disorders. Rather I would say that such individuals are attuned to sensory experiences that allow them like tunning forks to catch auditory and visual virations at intervals in a way that alludes most of us.

I’ll be adding more as I move along toward the conclusion of my book on Romaine and her art. It continues to be a fascinating and rewarding journey.

Nonetheless, what remains is her legacy; her pantheon of queer heroic portraits that writer Truman immortalized in his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers. He describes Natalie inviting him to visit Romaine’s studio in Paris, where  ”There were perhaps seventy [paintings], all portraits of a flat and ultra realism, the subjects were women…You know how you know you are not going to forget something? I wasn’t going to forget this moment,  in this room, this array of butch babes, all of whom to judge from their coifs and cosmetics, were painted between 1917 and 1930. He goes on to tell a fellow writer, “The paintings were wonderful, they really were.”   After spending over three decades of my life–my longest love affair–with Romaine I couldn’t agree more. The work is really, really wonderful if you know how to read it. My book is perhaps the first that attempts to demonstrate to readers how Romaine might have wanted her work interpreted. The part that music plays in her expression is central to her technique and makes her approach truly unique.

Her last great and unfinished portrait of her friend, Uberto Strozzi is the culmination of her artistic output. Painted when she was 86 and after a hiatus of 16 years it represents the alpha and omega of her artistic talent. She began it in 1961 and spent months preparing her studio. She torn the roof off and had it replaced with glass. Then she installed an elaborate system of black curtains and pulleys so she could control the shadows and lights. As she had become short-sighted and nearly blind in one eye she had to walk back and forth between her canvas and her subject to get her impressions down on the canvas. She did this for many hours for weeks at a time. In typical Brooksian fashion she expected her sitters to endure imposible conditions when they posed for her. In Strozzi’s case he was instructed not to say a word, to sit in exactly the position she place him in and not move a muscle. Moreover, he had to remain perfectly frozen in a stiffling, airless room for endless hours while Brooks fussed over the smallest details of her canvas. In spite of these inhuman conditions the unfished product is a masterpiece. And, miracle of miracle they still remained friends.

In the meantime Brooks’s relationship with her lover of half a century took an unexpected turn. She had hoped to finally have Natalie Barney all to herself, even if she would not allow them to live together as Barney wished. In 1955 or 56 while visiting Romaine in Nice, Natalie met Janine Lahovary. Janine was some 50 years younger than Natalie and Straight. She fell madly in love with Natalie who was then in her 80s.  When Lahovary’s husband died in 1963, she moved to Paris to live with Natalie becoming her secretary, caregiver, nurse and lover. Romaine accepted the new arrangement because she knew Natalie needed someone to care for her in her old age. Romaine was fighting off old age herself but was too independent to accept Janine’s care. However, as the years marched on she found she could not abide Lahovary. She thought the woman was beyond contempt and was using Natalie’s dependency to take advantage of her. The two women fought over their individual claims on Natalie’s affections. This, even though Natalie made it clear that Romaine was her soul mate and that she loved her unconditionally. No matter, a year and a half before she died Romaine severed ties with Natalie over several incidents that she simply could not accept. She refused to open Natalie’s letters, writing on them Miss Barney, Paris. She resisted all pleas for Natalie to see her and ended her days in a black curtained room totally isolated except for her two faithful servants. Natalie died two years later and was buried clutching a photograph of Romaine to her breast.

Romaine’s Lagacy has yet to be fully evaluated despite the birth of a Romaine Brooks cult among art historians, queer theorists and art lovers following her 1971 exhibition.  As the 21st Century marches on it becomes increasingly clear that we have much to learn from her life and art. In a time of chaos, in a time of war, her life begs the questions how does one make sense of life, how does one make art? All of these questions are raised by All or Nothing: Romaine Brooks a Critical Study.  I hope to answer a few of them in chapter 10 of this book.                                                                                                  

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.

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.