Romaine Brooks

ALL OR NOTHING: Romaine Brooks deals with the artist as a hero of her own making. When she died in 1970 Romaine Brooks had been neglected for decades. It was only with the 1972 exhibition organized by the then National Collection of Fine Arts (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.) that a wide public once more saw her works. Romaine Brooks’s art is full of contradictions which my book explains. She  draws intensely upon her personal experience in the  portraits that are identified with her signature style including her lover, Natalie Barney (1920) and her own Self-Portrait(1923). The works are expressions of a vigorous, elegant set of values that she built around her self and a pantheon of romanticized female heroes that obstruct our understanding of her development as a person and an artist at the turn-of-the-century. Her drawings are pure genuis as Yvon Bizardel, author and former director of the City of Paris museums declared, the creative genuis, controlled by the most rigorous training, allows Romaine Brooks to attain a completely personal style of perfection.  Their integrity reveals Brooks’s interior world and in many ways appear to contradict what is presented in her “queer heroic” paintings. New paintings from private collections have emerged and appear in my book which give us deeper insights into Brooks’s subconscious and the essence of her visions; abject and heroic.

Brooks came of age in the context of two world wars and during the streamlined Art Decoera with its glittering array of cultural luminaries; George Antheil, Bernard Berenson, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Emma Calve, La Casati, Jean Chalon, Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Lucie Mardrus-Delarue, H.D., Elsie de Wolfe, Norman Douglas, Janet Flanner, Remy de Gourmont, Elizabeth Gramont, Radclyffe Hall, Una Lady Troubridge, Max Jacob, Marie Laurencin, Pierre Louys, Mina Loy, Robert de Montesquiou, Charles Freer, Someset Maugham, Robert McAlmon, Paul Poiret, Liane de Pougy, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Ida Rubenstein,Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Paul Valery, EdithWharton, and Dolly Wilde. The question her art and life raises is how do you make meaningful art in a time of catastrophic change? When you set out to analyze Romaine Brooks and her art, you feel she would not have liked what your are doing or you. Reading her letters,memories and thoughts on life only brings you up against her deprecating repudiations of modern art and the modern world. Her dislike is palpable. For Brooks, the shock of modernism was the realization that culture was no longer the provenance of an elite, but accessible to the masses.These monumental changes left her adrift in a world she did not understand or wish to be a part of. Yet Brooks was a modern woman and a modern artist in a time when both concepts were new. Regrettably she has been examined primarily in the context of her lesbian portraits which now enjoy cult status. But happily works of art are received and valued on different planes at different times.

In All OR NOTHING I take a revisionist approach examining her art within the framework of varying modernisms–left and right–, sexual binaries, aesthetic moments and Brooks’s “severe” art, trauma and the difficulties of women becoming themselves. Romaine’s circle included Natalie Barney who dressed up as Oscar Wilde’s Happy Princein a pearl encrusted costume to court Liane di Pougy, the Sultana of sex. Barney was the ultimate seducer. She engaged an opera singer to masquerade as a busker and serenade poet Rene Vivien with an aria from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice – I have lost Euridice, there is no pain like mine.Or take Lily de Gramont’s husband who locked her up in his 18th century chateau. She escaped to Paris and into Barney’s arms. Then there was Luisa Casati (1881-1957) who was painted by almost every famous artist. She was dubbed, the patron Saint of Exhibitionism. She died in London penniless and is buried with her stuffed pekinese dog in Brompton Cemetary.