Romaine Brooks (born Beatrice Romaine Goddard; May 1, 1874 – December 7, 1970) was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued tonal palette keyed to the color gray. Brooks ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism and Fauvism, drawing on her own original aesthetic inspired by the works of Charles Conder, Walter Sickert, and James McNeill Whistler. Her subjects ranged from anonymous models to titled aristocrats. She is best known for her images of women in androgynous or masculine dress, including her self-portrait of 1923, which is her most widely reproduced work.Latimer, Women Together, 51.
Although her family was wealthy, Brooks had an unhappy childhood after her alcoholic father abandoned the family; her mother was emotionally abusive and her brother mentally ill. By her own account, her childhood cast a shadow over her whole life. She spent several years in Italy and France as a poor art student, then inherited a fortune upon her mother's death in 1902. Wealth gave her the freedom to choose her own subjects. She often painted people close to her, such as the Italian writer and politician Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, and her partner of more than 50 years, the writer Natalie Barney.
Although she lived until 1970, it is erroneously believed that she painted very little after 1925 despite evidence to the contrary. She made a series of drawings during the 1930s, using an "unpremeditated" techniques predating automatic drawing. She spent time in New York City in the mid 1930s, completing portraits of Carl Van Vechten and Muriel Draper. Many of her works are unaccounted for, but photographic reproductions attest to her ongoing artwork. It is thought to have culminated in her 1961 portrait of Duke Uberto Strozzi.
Life and career
Early life and education
Beatrice Romaine Goddard was born on May 1, 1874, in Rome, the youngest of three children of the wealthy American Ella (Waterman) Goddard and her husband Major Henry Goddard who was also American. Her maternal grandfather was the coal mining multi-millionaire Isaac S. Waterman Jr. Her parents divorced when she was small, and her father abandoned the family. Beatrice was raised in New York by her unstable mother, who abused her emotionally while doting on her mentally ill brother, St. Mar. According to one source, Goddard had to tend to St. Mar, because he attacked anyone else who came near him. According to her memoir, when she was seven, her mother fostered her to a poor family living in a New York City tenement, then disappeared and stopped making the agreed-upon payments. The family continued to care for Beatrice, although they sank further into poverty. She did not tell them where her grandfather lived for fear of being returned to her mother. Other sources record that she attended a girls' school in New Jersey, an Italian convent and a Swiss finishing school.
After the foster family located her grandfather, he arranged to send Beatrice to study for several years at St. Mary's Hall (now Doane Academy) an Episcopal girls boarding school in Burlington, New Jersey. Later, she attended a convent school, in between times spent with her mother, who moved around Europe constantly, although the stress of travel made St. Mar harder to control.Secrest, 17–42. In adulthood, Goddard Brooks referred to herself as having been a "child-martyr".Rodriguez, 223.
In 1893 at the age of 19, Goddard left her family and went to Paris. She extracted a meager allowance from her mother, took voice lessons, and for a time sang in a cabaret, before finding out she was pregnant and delivering a baby girl on February 17, 1897. She placed the infant in a convent for care, then travelled to Rome to study art. Goddard was the only female student in her life class, as it was unusual for women to work from nude models. She encountered sexual harassment. When a fellow student left a book open on her stool with pornographic passages underlined, she picked it up and hit him in the face with it, but he and his friends stalked her. She fled to Capri after he tried to force her to marry him.Secrest, 108–109.
In the summer of 1899, Goddard rented a studio in the poorest part of the island of Capri. Despite her best efforts, her funds were still insufficient. After several months of near starvation, she suffered a physical breakdown. In 1901, she returned to New York when her brother St. Mar died; with her grief-stricken mother dying less than a year later from diabetes complications. Goddard was 28 when she and her sister inherited the large estate their Waterman grandfather had left, which made them independently wealthy.Secrest, 123–145, 173.
Personal life Despite being a lesbian, on June 13, 1903, Goddard married her friend John Ellingham Brooks and acquired British nationality. Brooks was an unsuccessful pianist and translator who was in deep financial difficulty. He was homosexual as well, and Goddard never revealed exactly why she married him. Her first biographer Meryle Secrest suggests that she was motivated by concern for him and a desire for companionship, rather than the need for a marriage of convenience. They quarreled almost immediately when she cut her hair and ordered men's clothes for a planned walking tour of England; he refused to be seen in public with her dressed that way. Chafing at his desire for outward propriety, she left him after only a year and moved to London. His repeated references to "our" money frightened her, as the money was her inheritance and none of it his.Secrest, 179–181. After they split, she continued to give Brooks an allowance of 300 pounds per year. He lived comfortably on Capri, with E. F. Benson,Diana Souhami (2004) Wild Girls until he died of liver cancer in 1929.
Career In 1904, Brooks became dissatisfied with her work, and in particular with the bright color schemes that she had used in her early paintings. She travelled to St. Ives on the Cornish coast, rented a small studio, and began learning to create finer gradations of gray. When a group of local artists asked her to give an informal show of her work, she displayed only some pieces of cardboard on which she had dabbed her experiments with gray paint. From then on, nearly all of her paintings are keyed to a gray, white and black color scheme with touches and tints of ochre, umber, alizarin and teal. By 1905, she had found her tonal palette, and would continue to develop these harmonics her whole career.Secrest, 186–189.
First exhibition
Brooks left St. Ives and moved to Paris. Poor young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were creating new art in the Bohemian districts of Montparnasse and Montmartre. In contrast, Brooks took an apartment in the fashionable 16th arrondissement, mingled in elite social circles, and painted portraits of wealthy and titled women. These included her current lover, the Princess de Polignac.
In 1910, Brooks had her first solo show at the prestigious Gallery Durand-Ruel, displaying thirteen paintings, almost all of women or young girls. Some were portraits; others showed anonymous models in interior scenes or against tonal backgrounds, often with pensive or withdrawn expressions. The paintings were generally naturalistic, showing an attentive eye for the details of Belle Époque fashion, with parasols, veils, and elaborate bonnets on display.Chadwick, 18–19.
Brooks included two nude studies in this first exhibition—a provocative choice for a woman artist in 1910. In The Red Jacket, also known as La Jaquette Rouge, a young woman stands in front of a large folding screen, wearing only a small open jacket, with her hands behind her back. Her emaciated stature and forlorn expression led one contemporary reviewer to refer to her as a consumptive; Brooks described her simply as "a poor girl who was cold". The other, White Azaleas, is a more sexually charged nude study of a woman reclining on a couch. Contemporary reviews compared it to Francisco de Goya's La maja desnuda and Édouard Manet's Olympia. Unlike the women in those paintings, the subject of White Azaleas looks away from the viewer; in the background above her is a series of Japanese prints which Brooks loved.Lucchesi, Apparition, 75–76.
The exhibition established Brooks' reputation as an artist. Reviews were effusive, and the poet Robert de Montesquiou wrote an appreciation calling her "the thief of souls." The restrained, almost monochromatic decor of her home also attracted attention; she was often asked to give advice on interior design, and sometimes did, though she did not relish the role of decorator. Brooks became increasingly disillusioned with Parisian high society, finding the conversation dull, and feeling that people were whispering about her.Secrest, 197, 204–206. Despite her artistic success, she described herself as a lapidée—literally, a victim of stoning.Latimer, "Sapphic Modernity", 38.See Romaine Brooks, On The Hills of Florence, SIA available online.
Gabriele D'Annunzio and Ida Rubinstein In 1909, Brooks met Gabriele D'Annunzio, an Italian writer and politician who had come to France to escape his debts. She saw him as a martyred artist, another lapidé; he wrote poems based on her works and called her "the most profound and wise orchestrator of grays in modern painting".Secrest, 193.
In 1911, Brooks became romantically involved with the Ukrainian-Jewish actress and dancer Ida Rubinstein. Rubenstein was a tremendous celebrity of her day and caused quite a stir by appearing with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. D'Annunzio had an obsessive but unrequited attraction to Rubinstein as well.Lucchesi, "Apparition", 80 and Secrest, 243–244. Rubinstein was deeply in love with Brooks; she wanted to buy a farm in the country where they could live together—a mode of life in which Brooks had no interest.Secrest, 243.
Although they broke up in 1914, Brooks painted Rubinstein more often than any other subject; for Brooks, Rubinstein's "fragile and androgynous beauty"From Brooks's unpublished memoir No Pleasant Memories; quoted in Lucchesi, "Apparition", 85. represented an aesthetic ideal. The earliest of these paintings are a series of allegorical nudes. In The Crossing (also exhibited as The Dead Woman), Rubinstein appears to be in a coma, stretched out on a white bed or bier against a black void variously interpreted as death or floating in spent sexual satisfaction on Brooks' symbolic wing; in Spring, she is depicted as a pagan Madonna strewing flowers on the ground in a grassy meadow. When Rubinstein starred in D'Annunzio's play The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, Brooks painted her as a blonde Saint Sebastian—tied to a post, being shot with an arrow by a masked dwarf standing on a table. The dwarf is a satiric representation of D'Annunzio.Secrest, 248.
At the beginning of World War I, Brooks painted The Cross of France, a symbolic image of France at war, showing a Red Cross nurse looking off to the side with a resolute expression while Ypres burns in the distance behind her. Although it is not a portrait of Rubinstein, it does resemble her, and she may have modelled for it. It was exhibited along with a poem by D'Annunzio calling for courage and resolution in wartime, and later reproduced in a booklet sold to raise funds for the Red Cross. After the war, Brooks received the cross of the Legion of Honor for her fundraising efforts.