Amazons
in the Drawing Room : The Art of Romaine Brooks by
Whitney Chadwick, Joe Lucchesi (Introduction),
Romaine Brooks, Nancy Risque Rohrbach
There can be few art historians better placed
than Whitney Chadwick (Women,
Art, and Society) to write the biographical essay that
prefaces this catalog of the work of Romaine Brooks, the
expatriate American artist more famous for her role in Natalie
Barney's sapphic circle in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s than for
her striking paintings. Anyone familiar with the birth of modern
art will immediately note Brooks's influences, from Whistler to
Klimt, Schiele, and Gauguin. What is less obvious is her
advancement, as Chadwick argues, of an ideal of heroic femininity:
even if it is an ironic ideal, as seen in her most remarkable and
possibly best-known painting, the 1924 portrait of Una, Lady
Troubridge, the lover of Radclyffe Hall, in morning coat and
striped trousers, flanked by her dachshunds. While art history
continues to privilege stylistic innovation over content, there is
hope for the resuscitation of Brooks as perhaps the first painter
to document a lesbian gaze, as in her beautiful profile of the
short-haired, androgynous Peter, A Young English Girl
(1923-4). The book includes an essay by Joe Lucheesi on Brooks's
portraits of the dancer and mime Ida Rubinstein, one of her
lovers. --Regina Marler
Amazons in the Drawing Room presents a
comprehensive and definitive analysis of the life and art of
Romaine Brooks, reproducing for the first time in color
thirty-four of the forty nudes and portraits she painted, as well
as thirty-seven automatic pen-and-ink drawings. The first female
painter since Artemisia Gentileschi in the seventeenth century to
portray an ideal of heroic femininity, Romaine Brooks (1874-1970),
like her contemporary Gwen John, shaped an image of the
androgynous New Woman for the twentieth century.
An American born in Rome, Brooks spent most of
her life in Paris. After a brief but passionate romance with the
poet Gabriel D'Annunzio, with whom she maintained a lifelong
friendship, she turned to relationships with women and to art to
express her emerging self. For many years the companion of Natalie
Barney, whom the artist depicted as L'Amazone in one of her
most famous portraits, Brooks belonged to the international
lesbian community that included Compton and Faith MacKenzie, Rene
Vivien, Radclyffe Hall (who immortalized Brooks as the barely
fictionalized American painter Venetia Ford in The Forge),
and Una, Lady Troubridge.
The milieu Brooks chose was the privileged,
often eccentric demi-monde of wealthy aristocrats and expatriate
writers, artists, intellectuals, and performers who gathered in
Rome, London, Capri, Paris, and Florence.
The social circles she traveled in included
Somerset Maugham, Norman Douglas, Charles Freer, Count Robert de
Montesquiou, Jean Cocteau, Augustus John, Carl Van Vechten, and
Ida Rubenstein, several of whom were subjects for Brooks's
portraits.
Amazons in the Drawing Room, published in
conjunction with a major traveling exhibition of Brooks's
work--the first since 1971--opening at the National Museum of
Women in the Arts in June 2000, provides a fresh context to view
Brooks's haunting and compelling art. Whitney Chadwick's overview
of Brooks's life and artistic focus and Joe Luchesi's examination
of Brooks's portraits and photographs of Russian dancer Ida
Rubenstein bring into sharp focus the complex artistic, literary,
and political influences that shaped Brooks's sensibility and
approach to portraiture.
