Romaine Brooks

Looking at art and Seeing art are two different things. Most people only look at pictures but rarely see what they are actually looking at. People will tell you they know what they like and what they hate. All or Nothing: The Life and Times of Romaine Brooks is a book about seeing–really seeing an artist. In order to do that you have to fall in love. Falling in love means reallying wanting to know the person you love. Art is the same way. My love affair with Beatrice Romaine Goddard Brooks started one rainy afternoon at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. I was on a class assignment from Irving Sandler to see the Information show on the third floor. Unexpectedly, the elevator doors opened to the second floor. That’s when she hit on me, drawing me out and across the room–a stunning gray elegance. Mesmerized, I forgot everything moving closer until our eyes met. Dangerous and attractive, she seemed to flirt with me. Absolute and mysterious, she commanded the room. For a split second I traveled through time, glossed over the class differences between us and entered into a fantasy of free flowing lesbian desire. Such was the graphic force of Romaine Brooks’s Self-Portrait of 1923 on me. It changed my life.That day at the Whitney without knowing anything about Romaine Brooks, I knew intuitively how to read what was encoded in her self-portrait. In that instance I fell passionately in love and began a whirlwind courtship. But as a lesbian and art historian/critic my need to know more flooded me with a somewhat different set of questions than an ordinary lover. What did it mean for a work of art to have a lesbian context in the 1920s and 1930s? How did the medical and social frameworks of her era influence her? More importantly, how in the hell did Brooks’s art resist the pressures exerted by a heterosexist society against lesbian desire? Since a lesbian message is a distinctive feature of Romaine’s art I wondered  who her audience was? But the biggest puzzle of all remained why did she find it necessary to produce this subject matter?What I subsequently discovered, and it has taken me nearly thirty-five years to decode the mystery of Romaine Brooks’s art, is that there are many ways of reading her work. There are those who like her biographer, Meryle Secrest look at Brooks as they would read a Proust novel. Too far separated from Romaine and the zeitgeist of her era to feel any direct sense of communication, they nevertheless are capable of piercing this veil of time, of drawing from her upper crust aristocratic sensibilities some understanding of who she was and what she brought to early modern art.There are those who can look at Romaine more subjectively, as part of a homosexual and bohemian world that is their legacy, a unique segment of cultural history, one that returns fleetingly to life through the record of her life and art.There are those who have attempted to look at Brooks’s art and her art alone defining her as one of those artists who never received anything like the amount of attention that has been lavished on the avant-garde i.e. Matisse, Picasso, etc., because she supposedly lacked imagination.To me Romaine Brooks is La Signora di Tutti. Like Marlene Dietrich she is everyone’s woman because she is a kind of trickster who can be seen outside of conventional gender definitions, not as a man but as a different kind of woman. Consequently, looking at her work in the same fashion as enjoying HBO’s L Word conjures up images that allow heterosexuals to project their homosexual desires without any social stigma. In short, same sex desire which has been kept hidden and out of bounds until our own era in the work of Romaine Brooks threatens to explode the myth of heterosexism by generating an authority, energy and strength that cannot be contained within such narrow definitions of sexual appetites.But back to my story: In the summer of 1972, I arranged to go to the National Collection of American Art in Washington, D.C. determined to satisfy my curiosity. It wasn’t easy, Brooks’s papers were restricted and required special clearance. Nor could you imagine a more unlikely looking or unconventional scholar than myself. My lover and I had just returned from tent camping in North Carolina and the only clothes I had were a weathered pair of jeans, a tee shirt, leather jacket and ratty sneakers. At this time Mrs. Adelyn Breeskin, the primary gatekeeper for the Brooks collection was out of town. So I was directed to Lois Marie Fink. I must have made quite a sight from the surprised look on her face which she politely veiled. I’m sure my appearance didn’t inspire confidence. Nonetheless, Dr. Fink listened to what I had to say, passed judgment and gave the needed permission. I spent the next few weeks happily absorbed in reading papers and studying paintings and drawings. By the time Mrs. Breeskin returned and discovered that I, a mere graduate student, was using the restricted materials, it was too late to stop me. That being so I was instructed to go to her office. Despite being scared out of my wits at the thought of meeting this formidable woman–she was a renowned Mary Cassatt scholar and a mature beauty. I was so carried away that I bombarded her with hundreds of questions. She smiled indulgently describing in vivid detail her meeting with Romaine in Nice. I was charmed and she even volunteered to read my paper when it was ready. Naturally, I was thrilled and left walking on clouds, never thinking that she would attempt to control my interpretation of Brooks’s art.What we hope to do with this book is to treat Romaine Brooks as the incredibly interesting, complex and extraordinary artist and person she was. We are not particularly interested in her cult status within the GLBT community but rather how she embodied her generation of artists and how she dealt with the emerging modernism of her era, as well as her position as a new woman at a time when being independent was not common. This is a book about how one woman came to terms with living between two world wars and beyond and how she coped with the traumas of her life and her times. It is a book about history, fashion, aesthetics, trauma and learning how to be your own person.