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

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.

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.

From 1911 to 1914, Brooks was intimately involved with Rubinstein, who was then greatly celebrated for her performances with the Ballets Russes and as the cross-dressing star of D'Annunzio's drama The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Brooks completed several portraits of her lover, including one titled The Cross of France (1914) that presents her as a grimly determined wartime heroine. An even more theatrical painting of 1917 depicts Rubinstein against a cloudy sky, her body draped in black and white cloaks, two scarves wrapped around her noble head.

An earlier pair of works convey the operatic extremes of Brooks's passion for Rubinstein. In Spring (ca. 1912), Brooks strikes an aberrantly upbeat note, posing Ida as a neo-Symbolist maiden idling in a dreamlike, Arcadian setting. Wearing only an open, sheathlike black cloak, the actress holds an extravagantly long chain of flowers that trails awkwardly alongside her. A deer skitters past a single birch tree in a vaguely rendered open meadow. Perhaps more in keeping with Brooks's usual sensibility is The Crossing (ca. 1911), which shows Rubinstein as a nude, emaciated corpse displayed on a winglike cloud, drifting through deep blue-gray oblivion. With Ida's bony hips tilted up and toward the viewer, this exercise in love/death has a chilly morbidity reminiscent of the most extreme passages of Baudelaire.

Ten photographs of Rubinstein, taken by Brooks around 1911 and never before exhibited, present the actress in more casual poses, modeling a floor-length spotted fur coat and lounging on a satin bedspread, wearing only a head scarf. As in The Crossing, Brooks makes no attempt to camouflage the sexual connotations of the nude shots. Rubinstein's body is again angled toward the viewer, her pubic region front and center. In her unpublished memoir, Brooks recalled her desire to break with sexual convention:

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 traditional depilatory effect shocked me, and I discarded it altogether. (5)

These off-the-cuff, frankly erotic photos have a surprising immediacy, hinting at pleasures expunged in the memoir. They also serve as fresh documents of the sexual experimentation that proliferated in prewar Europe.

Other portraits commemorate a kind of romantic heroism. Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Poet in Exile (1912) offers the solitary writer/war hero/celebrity before a romantic gray-green seascape. Wrapped in a pitch-black cape, the elegant figure, whose accomplishments and cult following were acknowledged last spring in an exhibition at the Musee d'Orsay, (6) is a spectral visionary who leans on a parapet above crashing waves, mouth agape, his bald pate and limpid eyes glinting with moonlight. In what seems to be a companion piece from the same year, At the Edge of the Sea (Self-Portrait), Brooks stands before a comparable backdrop in a similar pose and cape. Depicted in white and blue-gray, she is windswept yet undaunted, gazing confidently above and beyond the viewer.

Brooks's most accomplished works portray women as defiantly self-possessed figures. In the crepuscular Renata Borgatti at the Piano (ca. 1920), the cloak and body of an intensely butch figure with large masculine hands dissolve completely into the shadows of an immense grand piano. The rakish Elizabeth de Gramont, Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre (ca. 1924) appears before a hazily sketched villa in mannish haircut and ruffled Byronic drag. With her fierce red bob, black cloak and low-cut leopard-print dress, Baroness Emile d'Erlanger (ca. 1924) poses next to an uncaged wildcat. The 8-foot-high portrait of the Marquise Casati (ca. 1920) presents the socialite as a melodramatic freestanding nude in a cavelike setting. Taunting viewers with her wild, red-haired mane and baggy, 4 A.M. eyes, she braces herself with a gaunt outstretched arm against the edge of the canvas, encased in a bat-wing wrap, ready to vamp.

In 1930, bedridden with an injured leg, Brooks began a series of more than 100 pen-and-ink drawings, 31 of which were displayed in the exhibition. Drawn in simple intertwined and curving lines, and made without forethought (though sometimes clearly in response to childhood memories), these allegorical caricatures depict female figures in psychologically charged states of isolation, longing and fear. We Weep and We Weep Alone features two cloaked women scurrying off, leaving behind a third to be consoled by an attentive hound. In The Past, a woman sits on her suitcase at the edge of the sea. Foot-Stool depicts a buxom beauty who seems oblivious to the fact that a man is literally climbing over her to make his way into the arms of an androgynous figure.

Other drawings suggest strange fairy tales. It Feeds on Our Illusions retells "Beauty and the Beast" with an amorphous creature enveloping a flapper who holds a daisy. Caught presents a tussle between a young woman and three writhing demons. In Enemy Fat, a figure struggles to escape the clutches of a looming obese hulk. Brooks's drawings reveal a paranoid yet tough-minded worldview that seems remarkably apt for today. With unpredictable bursts of humor, urgency and emblematic stylization, they presage the quirky drawings of two later, individualistic women artists whose works explore personal fears and strenghts, Louise Bourgeois and Beatrice Wood.

Although Brooks's output is small and she made little work after 1930, her significance seems large in the wake of the figurative revival of the past two decades. Prior dismissals of Brooks as being stylistically retardataire no longer signify in an era that reveres artists such as Kurt Kauper, Elizabeth Peyton, Amy Adler and John Currin. Contemporary identity-based art likewise seems elevated by Brooks's earlier, subtle achievements. Her works' sly celebration of gender-bending as a kind of heroic act provides, for example, a fascinating reference for the cross-dressing projects of Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper and Catherine Opie.

Without rhetoric, shock tactics or strident political hectoring, Brooks unequivocally expressed the social and cultural differences of her lesbian friends and acquaintances. Through her dignified, captivating depictions of socially outre individuals, Brooks's portraits continue to challenge and transcend social norms. They provide sterling evidence of portraiture's ability to marshal the specifics of an individual's depiction for radical social goals.

1. Peter, a Young English Girl depicts the painter Peyter Gluck, whose intriguing art remains virtually unknown in this country. Two reproductions of her work are featured in Emmanuel Cooper's The Sexual Perspective: Homesexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, London, Routledge, 1994.

2. In a 1924 letter to Natalie Barney, Brooks commented, "Una is funny to paint, her getup is remarkable. She will live perhaps & cause future generations to smile." See Whitney Chadwick, "Amazons and Heroes: Romaine Brooks and Her World," Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks, Chesterfield, Mass., and Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, Chameleon Books and the University of California Press, 2000, p. 35.

3. Drawing on the artist's unpublished memoir, No Pleasant Memories, Meryle Secrest's gripping biography, Between Me and Life, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1974, track Brooks's intense relationships, bitter dissatisfactions, and final decades of self-imposed isolation.

4. Cited by Joe Lucchesi in "An Apparition in a Black Flowing Cloak': Romaine Brooks's Portraits of Ida Rubinstein," in Amazons in the Drawing Room, p. 76.

5. From No Pleasant Memories, cited by Lucchesi, p. 76.

6. "D'Annunzio (1863-1938)," at the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, Apr. 9-July 15, 2001. The exhibition's vast array of memorabilia included Brook's painting The Cross of France and numerous photographs of Ida Rubinstein in various roles.

"Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks" was organized by guest curator Joe Lucchesi for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., where it was shown June 29-Sept. 24, 2000. The exhibition traveled to the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Oct. 11, 2000-Jan. 21, 2001. The exhibition was accompanied by a 128-page catalogue featuring essays by Whitney Chadwick and Joe Lucchesi.

Author: Michael Duncan is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.

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