Romaine Brooks

This selection constitutes the best reading overview relating to Romaine Brooks and her work. But in order to really get any kind of insight into her work you have to read all about her circle and the people who wrote about her work during her lifetime. This makes for fascinating detective work. Meryle Secrest’s book despite its rather gloomy portrayal of Romaine remains the best source for getting a sense of her life if not her art. From my point of view what she left out is even more fascinating than what she included in her book. Both Secrest and Mrs. Breeskin depend a great deal on Romaine’s unpublished memoire–No Pleasant Memories. The truth is this document is an exercise in writing as well as a setting down of “facts.” Romaine revised this ms. according to the criticisms and suggestions of various friends and editors some of who were not very happy with her politics in relation to World War II. So we have to take what she wrote with a big grain of salt and search elsewhere for evidence. To Secrest’s credit she tries to give a more balanced picture of Romaine’s mother, Ella. Despite this what comes across in Romaine’s account is how her mother’s disturbed behavior impacted on her during her formative years and into her teens. The portrait she paints of family life is truly horrifying. One wonders how she survived it and how she was able to achieve what she did as a creative person.

Over the years several art historians have written about Brooks’s art and sexual orientation, myself included. Portrayals of her have been mixed. In her first writings on Brooks, Whitney Chadwick tended to go along with the portraits sketched by Breeskin and Secrest but when she published her most recent essay in 2000 she reversed herself and presented Brooks’s heroic side, a welcome change from the “lesbian as pathology” formula previously underscored by largely heterosexual writers. There are other resources, including primary references which I will add to this page as it develops.