Romaine Brooks

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.

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.