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.