Romaine Brooks

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.