American Painter
Romaine Brooks was part of the first generation of revolutionary and openly bohemian female artists. As a practicing artist pre-first World War, this was a moment in history when women did not have the right to vote and as such did not have the due respect or the same opportunities as men. The way to succeed at the time, or perhaps simply to be noticed was to mimic masculine appearance and to renounce femininity for all of its restriction and expectation. Thus many of Brook's notable paintings depict androgynous figures, out in the world infused with heroism and purpose rather than bound and hidden by domesticity. In this respect Brooks' struggle to be free has much in common with her English contemporary, the writer, Virginia Woolf. Both women resolutely fought for independence in mind and finance, and understood that their dedicated artistic pursuit came at great price; Woolf famously committed suicide and although Brooks lived to the glorious age of 96, she tragically titled her lifetime memoirs No Pleasant Memories.
Romaine Brooks was born Beatrice Romaine Goddard to an affluent American family whose wealth was derived from her mother, Ella Waterman's family mining fortune. Sadly, this financial security did nothing to prevent a miserable childhood. The youngest of three children, Brooks' father left shortly after she was born and her mother focused all her love and attention on the artist's brother, St. Mar. Mental illness was prevalent in the family and greatly affected her mother and her brother, both of whom were tormented by imaginary voices. When her cousin committed suicide, her mother told her young daughter that she had seen the cousin's ghost. This traumatized Brooks to the extent that she started to create disturbing drawings that featured spirits. Of her childhood, she stated, "My earliest recollection...is an immense impression of fear."
Painted primarily in a palette of muted brown, grey, and cream, Brooks' painting features a slight nude young woman reclining on a large sofa. Reviews of the work written at the time compared the work to Francisco de Goya's La maja desnuda and Édouard Manet's Olympia, but whilst the sitters in these paintings look directly at the viewer, the woman here gazes out into the distance. The crucial difference is that this woman is seen and painted by another woman, not by a man. As such the woman does not appear sexually available in the same way (even though Brooks may indeed be physically attracted to her). She is lost in thought and dream. As the little ship paintings above her seem to suggest, she imagines that which is elsewhere, far away, and waiting to be found on the horizon.
This painting is a strong example of Brooks' early work. While she often focused on women as her main subjects, at the beginning of her career depictions lacked the intimate qualities embedded in her later portraits, which were almost always of lovers and friends. This painting is a somewhat less personal representation of a nude model. Simply by being a woman painting a nude woman was a rare occurrence however, and such reveals the artist's modern forward thinking whilst furthermore achieving an exhilarating sense of breaking taboos. According to writer, Joe Lucchesi, "the subject was highly unusual for a female artist, and the particular erotic charge of White Azaleas was virtually unknown in the work of contemporary female artists." That the artist was aware of the provocative nature of such a subject and her desire to push boundaries within the art world was asserted when she stated, "I grasped every occasion no matter how small to assert my independence of views. I refused to accept slavish traditions in art, and though aware it would shock, I insisted on marking the sex-triangles of all my female nude figures...."
The painting also importantly highlights Brooks' early association with the Symbolism art movement and especially the influence of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Historian Whitney Chadwick describes how in this painting the woman becomes a key item, "...in carefully arranged still-lives that evoke the melancholy and morbid eroticism of the symbolist poets. As in Whistler's Nocturnes, 1870s, feelings are evoked rather than declared. Mood emerges from subtle modulations of a palette mostly limited to ochre, gray, umber, and black, relieved only by the splashes of white produced by a floral arrangement...."
Collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
A nude woman, lying on her back, arms and legs relaxed and outstretched at her sides, with long black hair flowing behind her, appears to float in a dark void across the top half of The Crossing. It is as though the figure rests on a wing or upon a delicate cloud and it remains ambiguous if she is living, or has died. Is she "crossing" to the afterlife? There is a strong sense of expressionist drama at play here and the paintings of Edvard Munch at once comes to mind as well as the metaphysical imagination of the artist and poet, William Blake.
The model is Brooks' lover at the time, Ida Rubenstein, a beautiful dancer. The lack of a domestic setting for the nude and the dreamlike way she seems to drift across the canvas forces the viewer to directly and unapologetically confront both female sexuality generally and more personally the lesbian love that the artist had for the subject. As Joe Lucchesi explains, "...Brooks sharpens, intensifies, and consolidates the symbolist iconography of female sexuality."
Of interesting note however, when Brooks exhibited this painting she referred to it not by its title but as "The Dead Woman." In so doing, she seems to qualify the first intuitive interpretation of the work, that the woman has died and that in turn the artist prevents the viewer from being able to engage with the body sexually. Brooks is asserting her privileged relationship with Rubenstein (a sexy Parisian dancer who would usually perform and reveal only what she wanted) as something that is denied to others, something that is different and that nobody else can see. For Lucchesi, this painting "...alludes to the point at which identity gives fully over to the invisible, in the passage from life to death. This tension suggests that even as the physical body of Rubinstein becomes completely available to vision, the interior identity it contains will never be recovered or revealed." Brooks once again successfully asserts that a woman is more than her sexuality and that depth (even if she must be dead for others to finally see) always prevails.
Oil on canvas - Collection of Smithsonian Museum of Art, Washington DC
A large and powerful female figure dominates Brooks' La France croisée. The woman, who we assume is a nurse for wounded soldiers, wears a cape like black jacket sewn with the symbol of the Red Cross on her right shoulder; her head is wrapped with a long, white flag-like head scarf that seems to call for surrender (and also echoes the dressings that she may have applied to injured men). She stands in front of a depiction of the city of Ypres, wrought by devastation as buildings burn in flames in the background, and as such, hopes for peace. The woman is depicted as a towering hero, with a determined stare and the innocence of intent. She recalls Eugéne Delacroix's famous depiction of Liberty Leading the People (1830); it is as though this woman is the figure who holds the capacity to lead people towards a better future, if they have the courage to join her.
The painting acts as a rare example of Brooks using her art to make a political statement. She pays homage to all the people who tried their hardest to help during World War I. The figure stands stoic and resolved to persevere over the violence that is happening all around her. Cassandra Langer describes this work as, "...Brooks' message of nonviolent resistance and restoration of civility, which translated into hope of triumph for the entrenched French." Interestingly, she chose her lover at the time, Ida Rubinstein to be the personification of the female hero, brings a personal aspect to this painting and pays tribute to the hard work they both did during the war. Brooks' was as an ambulance driver.
The painting was displayed in a Paris gallery in 1915. Brooks created an accompanying flyer that featured a reproduction of the painting alongside a poem by Gabriele D'Annunzio and then sold this to patrons. The funds raised from the thoughtful pamphlet sales went directly towards helping the Red Cross and other war efforts. Such actions, her work as a wartime ambulance driver, and the creation of this painting all contributed to Brooks receiving the Cross of the Legion of Honor by the French government in 1920.
Oil on canvas - Collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
This painting depicts Natalie Barney, a talented writer, and the woman with whom Brooks remained romantically entwined for 50 years. The portrait is somewhat softer and less formal than previous works and as such suggests the comfort and love that Brooks found in the company of Barney. Barney sits - with a snowy scene painted as a backdrop out of the window - inside of her apartment keeping warm wearing a lavish grey coat. The house is 20 Rue Jacob where Barney lived when Brooks met her. Brooks immediately shows her deep admiration for Barney through the inclusion of a small sculpture of a horse. This not only alluded to the sitter's love of riding that led Remy de Gourmont to nickname her "the Amazon", but also the general wildness and free spirited nature of her character.
In Greek mythology the Amazons were a tribe of women warriors, aggressive and powerful. Furthermore, the significance and symbolism of the horse is important here as it is a motif that recurs again and again in Brooks' work. The horse represents an untamable force of nature but also stands as a creature that is extremely kind and useful to the needs and progress of people. As such artists throughout history return to equestrian images. For example, Odilon Redon, French symbolist often depicted horses and so did the Blue Rider group surrounding the Russian painter, Wasilly Kandinsky. Also of course, there is the long history of great men seated on horseback as means to assert their power.
Oil on canvas - Collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
Here the artist stands tall, assured, and beautiful, dressed in a black equestrian suit with dark grey gloves and complete with top hat. She stands in front of a landscape of decaying buildings, but by contrast, she herself is at the pinnacle of her creative career making what was to become her seminal work. Rendered, as is typical, in a somber palette of gray, black, and white, the only bit of color is the tiny red Legion of Honor cross, pinned on her jacket, which she wears with great pride and honor. Indeed, similar to a J.M.W.Turner landscape, Brooks presents the viewer with muted tones but then grabs the eye's attention with highlights in red. It is not only the cross, but also the rouge on the woman's lips that draws in the gaze. These hints of color could be described what years later, when discussing photography, were called "punctum" by the scholar, Roland Barthes; such are the moments, the glimmers of meaning that hit hard and stay with us long after seeing an image. As such, we remember pain, sexuality, and honor because of the small but memorable traces of red in this painting.
By depicting herself in non- gender-specific costume, Brooks is making the statement of her career. She shuns the shackles of femininity and instead mimics masculine dress in order to progress with work, ideas, and artistic idealism. The equestrian costume was a good option to achieve this intended effect and as Whitney Chadwick explained, by the 1800s, "[t]he adoption of equestrian attire signals a loosening of the figure's ties to the conventionally 'feminine' and, at times [...] specifically points to sexual ambiguity." More than simply an embrace of modernism where the boundaries between gender lines was beginning to become blurred in general, these works also specifically assert the status of lesbians within society. For Chadwick this is "...a new image of the noble and independent lesbian." As such the painting revels Brooks as a revolutionary, making visible an aspect of identity that previously had been entirely hidden.
Oil on canvas - Collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
Caught is a work on paper by Brooks that is part of a larger series. The work features a central female figure who appears to be being restrained by three demon-like creatures. This is one of many drawings that Brooks created in the early 1930s, which were intended to be included in what remained her unpublished memoir, No Pleasant Memories.
The demons here could be representations of the tormentors of the artist's early childhood - for example, her mentally ill and abusive mother of whom she stated, "I...cannot remember a single jot of kindness on her part;" and an insane brother who according to some historical accounts may have molested Brooks. The more passive demon could be a reference to her older sister Maya who remained uninvolved with her sister and of no help to her during their formative years. Or, with no shortage of traumatic episodes, the demons could stand for Maya's husband, the man who forcefully raped and impregnated Brooks.
These drawings, often completed in what appears to be one single, continuous line have contributed to comments that Brooks' was a forerunner to the movement of Surrealism. The artist Édouard Georges Mac-Avoy went so far as to call her "the first surrealist." These drawings do indeed have much in common with the early automatist works of André Masson. This line of enquiry is made stronger by the subconscious, dream (and nightmare)-like themes of many of the drawings. According to historian Cassandra Langer, "Romaine Brooks was well known for describing her drawings as spontaneous creations of the imagination" and as such, "...her depiction of overweight, suffocating monsters in drawings[...] have always been interpreted as proto-Surrealist fantasies."
Graphite on paper - Collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
A rather formal and somber portrait, in this relatively late painting for Brooks she depicts a man seated in a dark wrap-around armchair looking thoughtfully outwards. The gray of the man's suit at once compliments and merges with the lighter gray background. The work is considered to be the last major work completed by Brooks before her death nine years later. As such the sitter was considered an important figure in her life. She had first met Duke Uberto Strozzi during the war and described him as "blond and slim almost to emaciation. His gray eyes are deeply set and his face though sharp and youthful seems as though incised on a very old medal. The first time I met this young man he suggested something medieval and ascetic, an impression I could never evoke again." Somehow the man's appearance brought feelings of nostalgia to Brooks and unearthed something of a lost golden age of art history.
Furthermore, the painting is one of the rare instances when Brooks' chose a man as her subject. She portrays him with the same sensitivity as her female sitters and similarly imbues him with great depth and capacity for reflection. Indeed, perhaps by age eighty-seven, somehow the battles of gender and sexual equality were no longer hers to fight and she was able to see all people for their qualities. Whitney Chadwick supports this idea when she states, "Brooks' portrait of the duke is a sympathetic if austere portrayal of a man, withdrawn into his own soul, who clearly stands for the aristocratic ideal that Brooks had pursued through her life. Like her earlier portraits, it is an unflinching image of the individual alone, caught between introspection and a defiant assertion of self against an inhospitable world."
Oil on canvas - Collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
Content compiled and written by Jessica DiPalma
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Rebecca Baillie
