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Our Miss Brooks: erotic and histrionic, the paintings of Romaine Brooks capture a cosmopolitan community of avant-gardists, expatriates and sensualists. Her coolly mannered early-20th-century portraits were the subject of an overdue retrospective
Art in America, March, 2002 by Michael Duncan
For decades, the atmospheric, somber portraits by Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) were marginalized by art history, considered belated and melancholic reflections of rarefied, fin de siecle taste. The gender-bending figurative explorations of the past 20 years, however, have given a new currency to Brooks's depictions of her largely lesbian and gay artistic circle. A recent traveling exhibition, "Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks," curated by Joe Lucchesi for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, surveyed more than 60 of the American expatriate's paintings and drawings, inviting reevaluation of this offbeat artist.
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Although Brooks painted such celebrated figures of her time as Jean Cocteau, Carl Van Vechten and Gabriele D'Annunzio, it is her moody portrayals of independent women that consistently stop viewers in their tracks. Brooks's Self-Portrait (1923) and Peter, a Young English Girl (1923-24) are remarkably dignified, straightforward depictions of women who have shed the traditional frills of femininity in favor of a casually masculine manner of dress and carriage. (1) With no apologies or special pleading, Brooks coolly presents each subject in black clothes against somber blue-gray backgrounds that accent the figures' perfect poise and handsome appeal. Seen in profile, the self-possessed Peter gazes contemplatively to her right, while the self-portrayed Brooks stares out with steely eyes hooded by the shadows of an imposing, chicly butch hat.
Just as surprising, but in a satiric mode, is Una, Lady Troubridge (1924), a portrait of the lover and biographer of Radclyffe Hall, the author of the notorious 1917 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Brooks was clearly amused by her friend's dandified appearance, bone-thin in foppish drag, complete with masculine-cut jacket, high collar, monocle, bobbed hair and imperiously arched eyebrows. As perfect accoutrements, two pet dachshunds in jeweled collars stand by the elongated figure, looking up in admiration of their sleek counterpart. (2)
Understated and matter-of-fact, these cross-gendered works challenge the conventions of centuries of depictions of women--and do so with knowing sophistication. They also serve as iconic precedents for the unorthodox conceptions of the female gender by contemporary artists such as Monica Majoli, Nicole Eisenman, Susan Hauptmann, Sandra Skolnick and Hilary Harkness. Brooks is, nevertheless, a compromised spokesperson for the liberation of women. Dressing always in black, she seems to have been steeped in a kind of perpetual gloom. Born into a prosperous Philadelphia family, she never fully overcame a miserable childhood spent being carted around Europe by an unhinged, striving mother whose attentions were totally focused on her mentally disturbed son. (3)
Slowly managing to disengage from her dysfunctional family, Brooks studied painting in Rome and Paris. Soon thereafter, she attached herself to the group of gay artists and hangers-on located at that time in Capri. Financially independent after her mother's death in 1902, she flitted from Nice to London to Paris, painting as she liked, gradually gaining confidence in her role as an outsider. A romantic attachment to the dramatic cult figure D'Annunzio and a more passionate affair with actress/dancer Ida Rubinstein were prelude to a 50-year relationship with fellow American expatriate Natalie Barney. Although an interesting writer of poetry and epigrams, Barney is today known chiefly for her lively pre-World War I Parisian salon, which offered writers such as Colette, Radclyffe Hall, Marcel Proust, Andre Gide and Remy de Gourmont a more literary and sexually flamboyant alternative to the artist-dominated gatherings at Gertrude Stein's house on Rue de Fleurus.
Brooks's early works consist principally of portraits of moody female models posing in murky Whistlerian settings. In The White Bird (ca. 1906-07), a wistful, slumped-shouldered young woman stands enveloped in a white shawl as if impeded from spreading her wings. The Black Cap (1907) depicts a downcast figure swallowed by a voluminous skirt that occupies the entire lower surface of the painting. Other works present women who seem variously consumed by petticoats, veiled hats and other period trappings of femininity.
The brooding, disaffected tone of these portraits also permeates a couple of early erotically charged paintings. In The Red Jacket (1910), an anxious model stands before a blurry decorative screen, looking absorbed in the gray-green shadows of the room. Nude but for the open jacket, she clasps her arms behind her back, her weight balanced languidly on one leg, as if bored by her own sensual appeal.
White Azaleas (1910) presents an erotically accessible odalisque, stretched out on a low daybed. Only loosely delineated, the nude's languorous body seems to melt into the mattress, her dark hair merging with the room's romantic shadows. In a review of Brooks's first solo exhibition in 1910, her friend and fellow esthete, Count Robert de Montesquiou, noted the sexual availability of the model, referring to the figure as "a little sister of Olympia." (4) But Brooks's purpose seems more directly sensuous than that of Manet: she angles the nude's lower body toward the viewer, portraying her odalisque in a more compliant posture, leaning back into her pillows, legs relaxed, as if ready to be ravished.
