Romaine Brooks
Encyclopedia
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 palette
dominated by the color gray. Brooks ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism
and Fauvism
, drawing instead on the Symbolist
and Aesthetic
movements of the 19th century, especially the works of 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.
Brooks had an unhappy childhood after her 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, she painted very little after 1925. She made a series of line drawings during the early 1930s, using an "unpremeditated" technique resembling automatic drawing, then virtually abandoned art, completing only a single portrait after World War II
.
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.
After the foster family located her grandfather on their own, Beatrice was sent to study at an Episcopal boarding school
for several years. 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. In adulthood Goddard Brooks referred to herself as having been a "child-martyr".
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
, then travelled to Rome
to study art. As the only female student in her life class
, as it was unusual for women to work from nude models, Goddard encountered what would now be called 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, and was not bothered again.
In the summer of 1899 Goddard rented a studio in the poorest part of the island of Capri
, which was a very inexpensive place to live. She studied art briefly in Paris, but her funds were insufficient. After several months of near starvation, she suffered a physical breakdown. In 1901 her brother St. Mar died. She returned home to help care for her grief-stricken mother, who died less than a year later from complications of advanced diabetes. She was 28 when she and her sister inherited the large estate their grandfather had left, which made them independently wealthy.
. They quarrelled 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. Brooks spent the rest of his life on Capri
(where he died in 1929) and, for a while, lived there with E. F. Benson, author of the Mapp and Lucia
novels.
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 her paintings were dominated by gray, white, and black, sometimes with ochre
or umber
. She had found the palette she would use her whole career.
and Henri Matisse
were reinventing art in the Bohemian districts of Montparnasse
and Montmartre
, Brooks took an apartment in the fashionable 16th arrondissement, mingled in elite social circles, and painted portraits of wealthy and titled women. This included her current lover, the Princess de Polignac
. Another lover at this time was Lord Alfred Douglas
with the affair lasting from 1907 to 1910. In 1910 she 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 monochromatic 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, veil
s, and elaborate bonnets
on display.
Brooks included two nude studies in this first exhibition—a provocative choice for a woman artist in 1910. In one, The Red Jacket, a young woman stands in front of a large folding screen, wearing only a small open jacket, with her hands behind her back. She is so frail, and her downcast face looks so forlorn, that one contemporary reviewer referred 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 in Brooks's studio. 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, with a distinctly forbidding expression.
The exhibition established Brooks's 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. She became more and more disillusioned with Parisian high society, finding the conversation dull and feeling that people were whispering about her. Despite her artistic success, she described herself as a lapidé—literally, a victim of stoning.
, 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". They spent the summer of 1910 in a villa on the coast of France
, in a romantic interlude that was disrupted when D'Annunzio's jealous ex-mistress arrived in town. Their friendship remained strong throughout D'Annunzio's life.
In 1911 Brooks became romantically involved with Ida Rubinstein
, an actress and dancer formerly with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes
. D'Annunzio had an obsessive but unrequited attraction to her as well. Rubinstein was deeply in love with Brooks; she wanted to buy a farm in the country where they could live alone together—a mode of life in which Brooks had no interest. Although they broke up in 1914, Brooks painted Rubinstein more often than any other subject; for Brooks, Rubinstein's "fragile and androgynous beauty" 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 as a corpse, stretched on a white bed or bier against a black void; in Spring, she strews 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 Saint Sebastian—tied to a post, being shot with an arrow by a masked dwarf standing on a table. The dwarf is thought to represent D'Annunzio.
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 Ida 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.
The political imagery of The Cross of France has been compared to Eugène Delacroix
's painting Liberty Leading the People
, in which a woman personifying Liberty holds up a flag against the background of a burning city. Delacroix's Liberty leads a group of Parisians who have taken up arms, while the subject of The Cross of France stands alone. Brooks used this romantic image of a figure in heroic isolation several times; a 1912 portrait of D'Annunzio, a 1914 self-portrait, and a portrait of Rubinstein completed in 1917 all show their subjects wrapped in dark cloaks and isolated against seascapes.
During the war, D'Annunzio became a national hero as leader of a fighter squadron. During the Paris Peace Conference
, he led a group of nationalist irregulars who seized and held the city of Fiume to prevent Italy from ceding it to Croatia
. He briefly set up a government, the Italian Regency of Carnaro
, with himself as Duce
. Although he was never part of Benito Mussolini
's government, he is regarded as a precursor of Fascism
. The details of Brooks's own politics are unclear, but she was evidently sympathetic to Italian Fascism. The romantic individualism of her paintings may have been influenced by D'Annunzio's ideologies—an idea that has troubled some viewers otherwise attracted to the imagery of Brooks's portraits.
Brooks painted Rubinstein one last time in The Weeping Venus
(1916–17), a nude based on a photograph taken during their relationship. According to her unpublished memoir, the painting represents "the passing away of familiar gods" as a result of World War I. She said she tried to repaint Venus's features many times, but Rubinstein's face somehow kept returning: "It fixes itself in the mind."
, whom she met around the start of World War I. Barney was an American-born writer who hosted a literary salon
on Paris's Left Bank. She was avowedly nonmonogamous; when they met she was already in a close long-term relationship with Duchess Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre
, which would last until the Duchess' death in 1954. She had many other relationships of varying length and devotion as well.
Brooks tolerated Barney's casual affairs well enough to tease her about them, and had a few of her own over the years, but could become jealous when a new love became serious. Usually she simply left town, but at one point she gave Barney an ultimatum to choose between her and Dolly Wilde
—relenting once Barney had given in. At the same time, while Brooks was devoted to Barney, she did not want to live with her full-time, as she disliked Paris, disdained Barney's friends, and hated the constant socializing on which Barney thrived. She felt most fully herself when alone. To accommodate Brooks's need for solitude, they built a summer home consisting of two separate wings joined by a dining room, which they called Villa Trait d'Union, the "hyphenated villa". Brooks spent part of each year in Italy or travelling elsewhere in Europe, away from Barney. The relationship lasted for more than 50 years.
Brooks's portrait of Barney has a softer look than her other paintings of the 1920s. Barney sits, swathed in a fur coat, in the house at 20 Rue Jacob where she lived and held her salon. In the window behind her, the courtyard is dusted with snow. Brooks often included animals or models of animals in her compositions to represent the personalities of her sitters; she painted Barney with a small sculpture of a horse, alluding to the love of riding that had led Remy de Gourmont to nickname her "the Amazon". The paper on which the horse stands may be one of Barney's manuscripts.
From 1920 to 1924, most of Brooks's subjects were of women who were in Barney's social circle or who visited her salon. Truman Capote
, who toured Brooks's studio in the late 1940s, may have been exaggerating when he called it "the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts", but she did paint Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre; Barney's lover Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux; her own lover Renata Borgatti
; Una, Lady Troubridge
, the partner of Radclyffe Hall
; and the artist Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein)
.
Several of these paintings depict women who had adopted some aspects of male dress. While in 1903 Brooks had shocked her husband by cutting her hair short and ordering a suit of men's clothes from a tailor, by the mid 1920s bobbed
and cropped
hairstyles were in and wearing tailored jackets—usually with a skirt—was a recognized fashion, discussed in magazines as the "severely masculine" look. Women like Gluck, Troubridge, and Brooks used variations of the masculine mode, not to pass as men, but as a signal—a way of making their sexuality visible to others. At the time these paintings were made, however, it was a code that only a select few knew how to read. To a mainstream audience, the women in these paintings probably just looked fashionable.
Gluck, an English artist whom Brooks painted around 1923, was noted in the contemporary press as much for her style of dress as for her art. She pushed the masculine style further than most by wearing trousers on all occasions, which was not considered acceptable in the 1920s. Articles about her presented her cross-dressing as an artistic eccentricity or as a sign that she was ultra-modern. Brooks's portrait shows Gluck in a starched white shirt, a silk tie, and a long black belted coat that she designed and had made by a "mad dressmaker"; her right hand, at her waist, holds a man's hat. Brooks painted these masculine accoutrements with the same attention she had once given to the parasols and ostrich plumes of La Belle Époque
. But while many of her early paintings show sad and withdrawn figures "consumed by petticoats, veiled hats and other period trappings of femininity", Gluck is self-possessed and quietly intense—an artist who insists on being taken seriously. Her appearance is so androgynous that it would be difficult to identify her as a woman without help from the title, and the title itself—Peter, a Young English Girl—underscores the gender ambiguity of the image.
Brooks's 1923 self-portrait has a grimmer tone. Brooks—who also designed her own clothes—painted herself in a tailored riding coat, gloves, and top hat. Behind her is a ruined building rendered in gray and black, underneath a slate-colored sky. The only spots of strong color are her lipstick and the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor that she wears on her lapel, recalling the Red Cross insignia in The Cross of France. Her eyes are shaded by the brim of her hat, so that, according to one critic, "she's watching you before you get close enough to look at her. She's not passively inviting your approach; she's deciding whether you're worth bothering with."
in 1936 and Muriel Draper in 1938. At the same time that her artwork diminished, she became the subject of literary portraits by three writers. Each portrayed her as part of lesbian social circles in Paris and Capri
.
Brooks was the model for the painter Venetia Ford in Radclyffe Hall
's first novel, The Forge (1924). The protagonist, Susan Brent, first encounters Ford among a group of women at a masquerade ball
in Paris; the descriptions of these women correspond closely to Brooks's portraits, particularly those of Elisabeth de Gramont and Una Troubridge. Brent decides to leave her husband and pursue art after seeing the painting The Weeping Venus. Brooks also appeared in Compton Mackenzie
's Extraordinary Women (1928), a novel about a group of lesbians on Capri during World War I, as the composer Olympia Leigh. Although the novel is satirical, Mackenzie treats Brooks with more dignity than the rest of the characters, portraying her as a detached observer of the others' jealous intrigues—even those of which she is the focus. In Djuna Barnes
's Ladies Almanack
(1928), a roman à clef
of Natalie Barney's circle in Paris, she makes a brief appearance as Cynic Sal, who "dresse[s] like a coachman of the period of Pecksniff"—a reference to the style of dress seen in her 1923 self-portrait.
Brooks stopped drawing around 1935. She moved from Paris to a villa outside Florence, Italy in 1937, and in 1940—fleeing the invasion of France by Germany—Barney joined her there. After World War II
ended, Brooks declined to move back to Paris with Barney, saying she wanted to "get back to [her] painting and painter's life", but in fact she virtually abandoned art after the war. She lost interest in promoting her own work, leaving it to Barney to arrange gallery placements of her paintings. She became increasingly reclusive, and while Barney continued to visit her frequently, by the mid-1950s she had to stay in a hotel, meeting Brooks only for lunch. Brooks spent weeks at a time in a darkened room, believing she was losing her eyesight. She became paranoid, fearing that someone was stealing her drawings and that her chauffeur planned to poison her. In a 1965 letter she cautioned Barney not to lie down on the benches in her garden, lest the plants feed on her life force: "Trees especially are our enemies and would suck us dry." In the last year of her life, she stopped communicating with Barney entirely, leaving letters unanswered and refusing to open the door when Barney came to visit. She died in Nice
, France, in 1970 at the age of 96.
, and the Abstract Expressionists did not exist." However, critics have identified the influence of Aubrey Beardsley
's illustrations and of Symbolism
, particularly in her paintings of Ida Rubinstein. The imagery of the 1930s drawings suggests Surrealism
, and Brooks's use of "unpremeditated" drawing as a route to the subconscious resembles the experiments with automatic drawing made by Surrealists such as André Masson
.
The most widely observed influence on Brooks's painting is that of James McNeill Whistler
, whose subdued palette
probably inspired her use of the color gray. She may have been introduced to Whistler's work by the art collector Charles Lang Freer
, whom she met on Capri around 1899, and who bought one of her early works. Brooks said she "wondered at the magic subtlety of [Whistler's] tones" but thought his 'symphonies' lacked corresponding subtlety of expression. One 1920 portrait may take its composition
from a painting by Whistler. While the poses are almost identical, Brooks removes the little girl and all the details of Whistler's domestic scene, leaving only Borgatti and her piano—an image of an artist completely focused on her art.
since the 1980s, and new interest in the exploration of gender and sexuality through art have led to a reassessment of her work. She is now seen as a precursor of present-day artists whose works depict cross-dressing
and transgender
themes. Critics have described her portraits of the 1920s as a "sly celebration of gender-bending as a kind of heroic act" and as creating "the first visible Sapphic
stars in the history of modernism."
More generally, Brooks's portraits starting with The Cross of France have been interpreted as creating new images of strong women. The portraits of the 1920s in particular—cross-dressed and otherwise—portray their subjects as powerful, self-confident, and fearless. One critic compared them to the faces on Mount Rushmore
. Brooks seems to have seen her portraits in this light. According to a memoir by Natalie Barney, one woman complained, upon seeing her portrait, "You haven't beautified me", to which Brooks replied, "I have ennobled you."
Yet Brooks did not always ennoble her subjects. Inherited wealth freed her from the need to sell her paintings; she did not care whether she pleased her sitters or not, and her wit, when unleashed, could be devastating. A striking example is her 1914–15 portrait of Elsie de Wolfe
, an interior designer whom she felt had copied her monochromatic color schemes. Brooks painted de Wolfe porcelain-pale, in an off-white dress and a bonnet resembling a shower cap; a white ceramic goat placed on a table at her elbow seems to mimic her simpering expression.
One of Brooks's most analyzed paintings, a 1924 portrait of Una, Lady Troubridge, has been seen as everything from an image of female self-empowerment to a caricature. Art critic Michael Duncan sees the painting as making fun of Troubridge's "dandified appearance", while for Meryle Secrest it is "a tour de force of ironic commentary". Laura Doan, pointing out newspaper and magazine articles from 1924 in which high collars, tailored satin jackets, and watch fobs are described as the latest in women's wear, describes Troubridge as having a "keen fashion sense and an eye for sartorial detail". But, these British fashions may not have been favored in Paris; Natalie Barney and others in her circle considered Troubridge's outfits ridiculous. Brooks expressed her own view in a letter to Barney: "Una is funny to paint. Her get-up is remarkable. She will live perhaps and cause future generations to smile."
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and Capri
Capri
Capri is an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, in the Campania region of Southern Italy...
. She specialized in portraiture
Portrait painting
Portrait painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to depict the visual appearance of the subject. Beside human beings, animals, pets and even inanimate objects can be chosen as the subject for a portrait...
and used a subdued palette
Palette (painting)
A palette , in the original sense of the word, is a rigid, flat surface on which a painter arranges and mixes paints. A palette is usually made of wood, plastic, ceramic, or other hard, inert, nonporous material, and can vary greatly in size and shape...
dominated by the color gray. Brooks ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
and Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
, drawing instead on the Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
and Aesthetic
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
movements of the 19th century, especially the works of James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...
. 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.
Brooks had an unhappy childhood after her 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
Gabriele D'Annunzio
Gabriele D'Annunzio or d'Annunzio was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, and dramatist...
, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein
Ida Rubinstein
Ida Lvovna Rubinstein was a Russian ballerina, actress, patron and Belle Époque figure.- Early life :Born in Kharkov, or possibly St. Petersburg,p408 into a wealthy Jewish family, Rubinstein was orphaned at an early age. She had, by the standard of Russian ballet, little formal training. Tutored...
, and her partner of more than 50 years, the writer Natalie Barney.
Although she lived until 1970, she painted very little after 1925. She made a series of line drawings during the early 1930s, using an "unpremeditated" technique resembling automatic drawing, then virtually abandoned art, completing only a single portrait after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
Early life and education
Beatrice Romaine Goddard was born in Rome, Italy, the youngest of three children of wealthy Americans Ella Waterman Goddard and Major Henry Goddard; her maternal grandfather was the multi-millionaire Isaac S. Waterman, Jr. Her parents divorced when she was small, and her father abandoned the family. Beatrice was raised by her mother, who was unstable and abused her emotionally while doting on her mentally ill brother, St. Mar. They lived mostly in New York, where from an early age 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 CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
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.
After the foster family located her grandfather on their own, Beatrice was sent to study at an Episcopal boarding school
Boarding school
A boarding school is a school where some or all pupils study and live during the school year with their fellow students and possibly teachers and/or administrators. The word 'boarding' is used in the sense of "bed and board," i.e., lodging and meals...
for several years. Later she attended a convent
Convent
A convent is either a community of priests, religious brothers, religious sisters, or nuns, or the building used by the community, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion...
school, in between times spent with her mother, who moved around Europe constantly, although the stress of travel made St. Mar harder to control. In adulthood Goddard Brooks referred to herself as having been a "child-martyr".
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
Cabaret
Cabaret is a form, or place, of entertainment featuring comedy, song, dance, and theatre, distinguished mainly by the performance venue: a restaurant or nightclub with a stage for performances and the audience sitting at tables watching the performance, as introduced by a master of ceremonies or...
, then travelled to Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
to study art. As the only female student in her life class
Life class
A life class is a class held in art schools for the purpose of instructing art students on drawing or painting the human figure from live models, typically nude or with minimal clothing...
, as it was unusual for women to work from nude models, Goddard encountered what would now be called sexual harassment
Sexual harassment
Sexual harassment, is intimidation, bullying or coercion of a sexual nature, or the unwelcome or inappropriate promise of rewards in exchange for sexual favors. In some contexts or circumstances, sexual harassment is illegal. It includes a range of behavior from seemingly mild transgressions and...
. 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, and was not bothered again.
In the summer of 1899 Goddard rented a studio in the poorest part of the island of Capri
Capri
Capri is an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, in the Campania region of Southern Italy...
, which was a very inexpensive place to live. She studied art briefly in Paris, but her funds were insufficient. After several months of near starvation, she suffered a physical breakdown. In 1901 her brother St. Mar died. She returned home to help care for her grief-stricken mother, who died less than a year later from complications of advanced diabetes. She was 28 when she and her sister inherited the large estate their grandfather had left, which made them independently wealthy.
Marriage and family
On 13 June 1903 Goddard married her friend John Ellingham Brooks, an unsuccessful pianist and translator who was in deep financial difficulty. He was homosexual, and the bisexual Goddard never revealed exactly why she married him. Her 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 convenienceMarriage of convenience
A marriage of convenience is a marriage contracted for reasons other than the reasons of relationship, family, or love. Instead, such a marriage is orchestrated for personal gain or some other sort of strategic purpose, such as political marriage. The phrase is a calque of - a marriage of...
. They quarrelled 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. Brooks spent the rest of his life on Capri
Capri
Capri is an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, in the Campania region of Southern Italy...
(where he died in 1929) and, for a while, lived there with E. F. Benson, author of the Mapp and Lucia
Mapp and Lucia
Mapp and Lucia is a collective name for a series of novels by E. F. Benson, and is also the name of a television series based on those novels.-The novels:...
novels.
Career
In 1904 Romaine Brooks, the name she preferred, 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 CornishCornwall
Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...
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 her paintings were dominated by gray, white, and black, sometimes with ochre
Ochre
Ochre is the term for both a golden-yellow or light yellow brown color and for a form of earth pigment which produces the color. The pigment can also be used to create a reddish tint known as "red ochre". The more rarely used terms "purple ochre" and "brown ochre" also exist for variant hues...
or umber
Umber
Umber is a natural brown clay pigment which contains iron and manganese oxides. The color becomes more intense when calcined , and the resulting pigment is called burnt umber. Its name derives from the Latin word umbra and was originally extracted in Umbria, a mountainous region of central Italy,...
. She had found the palette she would use her whole career.
First exhibition
Brooks left St. Ives and moved to Paris. As painters such as Pablo PicassoPablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
and Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
were reinventing art in the Bohemian districts of Montparnasse
Montparnasse
Montparnasse is an area of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail...
and Montmartre
Montmartre
Montmartre is a hill which is 130 metres high, giving its name to the surrounding district, in the north of Paris in the 18th arrondissement, a part of the Right Bank. Montmartre is primarily known for the white-domed Basilica of the Sacré Cœur on its summit and as a nightclub district...
, Brooks took an apartment in the fashionable 16th arrondissement, mingled in elite social circles, and painted portraits of wealthy and titled women. This included her current lover, the Princess de Polignac
Winnaretta Singer
Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac was an American musical patron and heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune.-Early Life and Family:...
. Another lover at this time was Lord Alfred Douglas
Lord Alfred Douglas
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas , nicknamed Bosie, was a British author, poet and translator, better known as the intimate friend and lover of the writer Oscar Wilde...
with the affair lasting from 1907 to 1910. In 1910 she had her first solo show at the prestigious Gallery Durand-Ruel
Paul Durand-Ruel
Paul Durand-Ruel was a French art dealer who is associated with the Impressionists. He was one of the first modern art dealers who provided support to his painters with stipends and solo exhibitions....
, displaying thirteen paintings, almost all of women or young girls. Some were portraits; others showed anonymous models in interior scenes or against monochromatic backgrounds, often with pensive or withdrawn expressions. The paintings were generally naturalistic
Naturalism (art)
Naturalism in art refers to the depiction of realistic objects in a natural setting. The Realism movement of the 19th century advocated naturalism in reaction to the stylized and idealized depictions of subjects in Romanticism, but many painters have adopted a similar approach over the centuries...
, showing an attentive eye for the details of Belle Époque
Belle Époque
The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque was a period in European social history that began during the late 19th century and lasted until World War I. Occurring during the era of the French Third Republic and the German Empire, it was a period characterised by optimism and new technological and medical...
fashion, with parasols, veil
Veil
A veil is an article of clothing, worn almost exclusively by women, that is intended to cover some part of the head or face.One view is that as a religious item, it is intended to show honor to an object or space...
s, and elaborate bonnets
Bonnet (headgear)
Bonnets are a variety of headgear for both sexes, which have in common only the absence of a brim. Bonnet derives from the same word in French, where it originally indicated a type of material...
on display.
Brooks included two nude studies in this first exhibition—a provocative choice for a woman artist in 1910. In one, The Red Jacket, a young woman stands in front of a large folding screen, wearing only a small open jacket, with her hands behind her back. She is so frail, and her downcast face looks so forlorn, that one contemporary reviewer referred 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 in Brooks's studio. Contemporary reviews compared it to Francisco de Goya's La maja desnuda
La Maja Desnuda
La maja desnuda is an oil on canvas painting by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya , portraying a nude woman reclining on a bed of pillows. It was executed some time between 1797 and 1800, and is sometimes said to be the first clear depiction of female pubic hair in a large Western painting...
and Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
's Olympia
Olympia (painting)
Olympia is an oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet. Painted in 1863, it measures 130.5 by 190 centimetres . The nation of France acquired the painting in 1890 with a public subscription organized by Claude Monet...
. Unlike the women in those paintings, the subject of White Azaleas looks away from the viewer, with a distinctly forbidding expression.
The exhibition established Brooks's reputation as an artist. Reviews were effusive, and the poet Robert de Montesquiou
Robert de Montesquiou
Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac , was a French aesthete, Symbolist poet, art collector and dandy....
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. She became more and more disillusioned with Parisian high society, finding the conversation dull and feeling that people were whispering about her. Despite her artistic success, she described herself as a lapidé—literally, a victim of stoning.
Gabriele D'Annunzio and Ida Rubinstein
In 1909 Brooks met Gabriele D'AnnunzioGabriele D'Annunzio
Gabriele D'Annunzio or d'Annunzio was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, and dramatist...
, 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". They spent the summer of 1910 in a villa on the coast of France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, in a romantic interlude that was disrupted when D'Annunzio's jealous ex-mistress arrived in town. Their friendship remained strong throughout D'Annunzio's life.
In 1911 Brooks became romantically involved with Ida Rubinstein
Ida Rubinstein
Ida Lvovna Rubinstein was a Russian ballerina, actress, patron and Belle Époque figure.- Early life :Born in Kharkov, or possibly St. Petersburg,p408 into a wealthy Jewish family, Rubinstein was orphaned at an early age. She had, by the standard of Russian ballet, little formal training. Tutored...
, an actress and dancer formerly with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes
Ballets Russes
The Ballets Russes was an itinerant ballet company from Russia which performed between 1909 and 1929 in many countries. Directed by Sergei Diaghilev, it is regarded as the greatest ballet company of the 20th century. Many of its dancers originated from the Imperial Ballet of Saint Petersburg...
. D'Annunzio had an obsessive but unrequited attraction to her as well. Rubinstein was deeply in love with Brooks; she wanted to buy a farm in the country where they could live alone together—a mode of life in which Brooks had no interest. Although they broke up in 1914, Brooks painted Rubinstein more often than any other subject; for Brooks, Rubinstein's "fragile and androgynous beauty" 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 as a corpse, stretched on a white bed or bier against a black void; in Spring, she strews 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 Saint Sebastian—tied to a post, being shot with an arrow by a masked dwarf standing on a table. The dwarf is thought to represent D'Annunzio.
At the beginning of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, 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
Ypres
Ypres is a Belgian municipality located in the Flemish province of West Flanders. The municipality comprises the city of Ypres and the villages of Boezinge, Brielen, Dikkebus, Elverdinge, Hollebeke, Sint-Jan, Vlamertinge, Voormezele, Zillebeke, and Zuidschote...
burns in the distance behind her. Although it is not a portrait of Ida 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
Légion d'honneur
The Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...
for her fundraising efforts.
The political imagery of The Cross of France has been compared to Eugène Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
's painting Liberty Leading the People
Liberty Leading the People
Liberty Leading the People is a painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled Charles X of France. A woman personifying Liberty leads the people forward over the bodies of the fallen, holding the tricouleur flag of the French Revolution in one hand and...
, in which a woman personifying Liberty holds up a flag against the background of a burning city. Delacroix's Liberty leads a group of Parisians who have taken up arms, while the subject of The Cross of France stands alone. Brooks used this romantic image of a figure in heroic isolation several times; a 1912 portrait of D'Annunzio, a 1914 self-portrait, and a portrait of Rubinstein completed in 1917 all show their subjects wrapped in dark cloaks and isolated against seascapes.
During the war, D'Annunzio became a national hero as leader of a fighter squadron. During the Paris Peace Conference
Paris Peace Conference, 1919
The Paris Peace Conference was the meeting of the Allied victors following the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers following the armistices of 1918. It took place in Paris in 1919 and involved diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities...
, he led a group of nationalist irregulars who seized and held the city of Fiume to prevent Italy from ceding it to Croatia
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
. He briefly set up a government, the Italian Regency of Carnaro
Italian Regency of Carnaro
The Italian Regency of Carnaro was a self-proclaimed state in the city of Fiume led by Gabriele d'Annunzio between 1919 and 1920.-Impresa di Fiume:...
, with himself as Duce
Duce
Duce is an Italian title, derived from the Latin word dux, and cognate with duke. National Fascist Party leader Benito Mussolini was identified by Fascists as Il Duce of the movement and became a reference to the dictator position of Head of Government and Duce of Fascism of Italy was established...
. Although he was never part of Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
's government, he is regarded as a precursor of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
. The details of Brooks's own politics are unclear, but she was evidently sympathetic to Italian Fascism. The romantic individualism of her paintings may have been influenced by D'Annunzio's ideologies—an idea that has troubled some viewers otherwise attracted to the imagery of Brooks's portraits.
Brooks painted Rubinstein one last time in The Weeping Venus
Venus (mythology)
Venus is a Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty, sex,sexual seduction and fertility, who played a key role in many Roman religious festivals and myths...
(1916–17), a nude based on a photograph taken during their relationship. According to her unpublished memoir, the painting represents "the passing away of familiar gods" as a result of World War I. She said she tried to repaint Venus's features many times, but Rubinstein's face somehow kept returning: "It fixes itself in the mind."
Natalie Barney and Left Bank portraits
The longest and most important relationship of Brooks's life was with Natalie Clifford BarneyNatalie Clifford Barney
Natalie Clifford Barney was an American playwright, poet and novelist who lived as an expatriate in Paris....
, whom she met around the start of World War I. Barney was an American-born writer who hosted a literary salon
Salon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
on Paris's Left Bank. She was avowedly nonmonogamous; when they met she was already in a close long-term relationship with Duchess Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre
Elisabeth de Gramont
Antoinette Corisande Élisabeth, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre was a French writer of the early 20th century, best known for her long-term lesbian relationship with Natalie Clifford Barney...
, which would last until the Duchess' death in 1954. She had many other relationships of varying length and devotion as well.
Brooks tolerated Barney's casual affairs well enough to tease her about them, and had a few of her own over the years, but could become jealous when a new love became serious. Usually she simply left town, but at one point she gave Barney an ultimatum to choose between her and Dolly Wilde
Dolly Wilde
Dorothy Ierne Wilde, known as Dolly Wilde, was an Anglo-Irish socialite, made famous by her family connections and her reputation as a witty conversationalist...
—relenting once Barney had given in. At the same time, while Brooks was devoted to Barney, she did not want to live with her full-time, as she disliked Paris, disdained Barney's friends, and hated the constant socializing on which Barney thrived. She felt most fully herself when alone. To accommodate Brooks's need for solitude, they built a summer home consisting of two separate wings joined by a dining room, which they called Villa Trait d'Union, the "hyphenated villa". Brooks spent part of each year in Italy or travelling elsewhere in Europe, away from Barney. The relationship lasted for more than 50 years.
Brooks's portrait of Barney has a softer look than her other paintings of the 1920s. Barney sits, swathed in a fur coat, in the house at 20 Rue Jacob where she lived and held her salon. In the window behind her, the courtyard is dusted with snow. Brooks often included animals or models of animals in her compositions to represent the personalities of her sitters; she painted Barney with a small sculpture of a horse, alluding to the love of riding that had led Remy de Gourmont to nickname her "the Amazon". The paper on which the horse stands may be one of Barney's manuscripts.
From 1920 to 1924, most of Brooks's subjects were of women who were in Barney's social circle or who visited her salon. Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
, who toured Brooks's studio in the late 1940s, may have been exaggerating when he called it "the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts", but she did paint Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre; Barney's lover Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux; her own lover Renata Borgatti
Renata Borgatti
Renata Borgatti was an Italian classical musician, performing in Europe and the United States.-Early life:She was the daughter of the great Wagnerian tenor Giuseppe Borgatti , whose imposing career at Milan's La Scala opera house was ended by blindness...
; Una, Lady Troubridge
Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge
Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge was a British sculptor and translator. She is best known as the long-time partner of Marguerite "John" Radclyffe-Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness.Troubridge was an educated woman who had many achievements in her own right...
, the partner of Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness.- Life :...
; and the artist Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein)
Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein)
Gluck was a British painter.-Biography:Gluck was born into a wealthy Jewish family, the child of Joseph Gluckstein, whose brothers Isidore and Montague had founded J. Lyons and Co., a British coffee house and catering empire. Gluck's American-born mother, Francesca Halle, was an opera singer...
.
Several of these paintings depict women who had adopted some aspects of male dress. While in 1903 Brooks had shocked her husband by cutting her hair short and ordering a suit of men's clothes from a tailor, by the mid 1920s bobbed
Bob cut
A "bob cut" is a short haircut for women in which the hair is typically cut straight around the head at about jaw-level, often with a fringe at the front.-The beginning:...
and cropped
Crop (hairstyle)
A crop is a short hairstyle worn with the hair cut very close to the head. It is frequently sported by both men and women, though the style is usually only named as a crop when sported by a woman. Men entering the armed forces in many countries have their hair cropped during Recruit Training...
hairstyles were in and wearing tailored jackets—usually with a skirt—was a recognized fashion, discussed in magazines as the "severely masculine" look. Women like Gluck, Troubridge, and Brooks used variations of the masculine mode, not to pass as men, but as a signal—a way of making their sexuality visible to others. At the time these paintings were made, however, it was a code that only a select few knew how to read. To a mainstream audience, the women in these paintings probably just looked fashionable.
Gluck, an English artist whom Brooks painted around 1923, was noted in the contemporary press as much for her style of dress as for her art. She pushed the masculine style further than most by wearing trousers on all occasions, which was not considered acceptable in the 1920s. Articles about her presented her cross-dressing as an artistic eccentricity or as a sign that she was ultra-modern. Brooks's portrait shows Gluck in a starched white shirt, a silk tie, and a long black belted coat that she designed and had made by a "mad dressmaker"; her right hand, at her waist, holds a man's hat. Brooks painted these masculine accoutrements with the same attention she had once given to the parasols and ostrich plumes of La Belle Époque
Belle Époque
The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque was a period in European social history that began during the late 19th century and lasted until World War I. Occurring during the era of the French Third Republic and the German Empire, it was a period characterised by optimism and new technological and medical...
. But while many of her early paintings show sad and withdrawn figures "consumed by petticoats, veiled hats and other period trappings of femininity", Gluck is self-possessed and quietly intense—an artist who insists on being taken seriously. Her appearance is so androgynous that it would be difficult to identify her as a woman without help from the title, and the title itself—Peter, a Young English Girl—underscores the gender ambiguity of the image.
Brooks's 1923 self-portrait has a grimmer tone. Brooks—who also designed her own clothes—painted herself in a tailored riding coat, gloves, and top hat. Behind her is a ruined building rendered in gray and black, underneath a slate-colored sky. The only spots of strong color are her lipstick and the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor that she wears on her lapel, recalling the Red Cross insignia in The Cross of France. Her eyes are shaded by the brim of her hat, so that, according to one critic, "she's watching you before you get close enough to look at her. She's not passively inviting your approach; she's deciding whether you're worth bothering with."
Literary portraits of Brooks
In 1925 Brooks had solo exhibitions in Paris, London, and New York. After that year she produced only four more paintings, including portraits of Carl Van VechtenCarl van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.-Biography:...
in 1936 and Muriel Draper in 1938. At the same time that her artwork diminished, she became the subject of literary portraits by three writers. Each portrayed her as part of lesbian social circles in Paris and Capri
Capri
Capri is an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, in the Campania region of Southern Italy...
.
Brooks was the model for the painter Venetia Ford in Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness.- Life :...
's first novel, The Forge (1924). The protagonist, Susan Brent, first encounters Ford among a group of women at a masquerade ball
Masquerade ball
A masquerade ball is an event which the participants attend in costume wearing a mask. - History :...
in Paris; the descriptions of these women correspond closely to Brooks's portraits, particularly those of Elisabeth de Gramont and Una Troubridge. Brent decides to leave her husband and pursue art after seeing the painting The Weeping Venus. Brooks also appeared in Compton Mackenzie
Compton Mackenzie
Sir Compton Mackenzie, OBE was a writer and a Scottish nationalist.-Background:Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool, England, into a theatrical family of Mackenzies, but many of whose members used Compton as their stage surname, starting with his grandfather Henry Compton, a well-known...
's Extraordinary Women (1928), a novel about a group of lesbians on Capri during World War I, as the composer Olympia Leigh. Although the novel is satirical, Mackenzie treats Brooks with more dignity than the rest of the characters, portraying her as a detached observer of the others' jealous intrigues—even those of which she is the focus. In Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens...
's Ladies Almanack
Ladies Almanack
Ladies Almanack, or Ladies Almanack: showing their Signs and their Tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers, written & illustrated by a lady of fashion, written by Djuna Barnes in...
(1928), a roman à clef
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
of Natalie Barney's circle in Paris, she makes a brief appearance as Cynic Sal, who "dresse[s] like a coachman of the period of Pecksniff"—a reference to the style of dress seen in her 1923 self-portrait.
Drawings and later life
In 1930, while laid up with a sprained leg, Brooks began a series of more than 100 drawings of humans, angels, demons, animals, and monsters, all formed out of continuous curved lines. She said that when she started a line she did not know where it would go, and that the drawings "evolve [d] from the subconscious...[w]ithout premeditation." Brooks was writing her unpublished memoir No Pleasant Memories at the same time she began this series of drawings. Critics have interpreted them as exploring the continuing effect of her childhood on her—a theme expressed even in the symbol she used to sign them, a wing tethered with a rope or chain. Decades later, at 85, she said "My dead mother gets between me and life."Brooks stopped drawing around 1935. She moved from Paris to a villa outside Florence, Italy in 1937, and in 1940—fleeing the invasion of France by Germany—Barney joined her there. After World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
ended, Brooks declined to move back to Paris with Barney, saying she wanted to "get back to [her] painting and painter's life", but in fact she virtually abandoned art after the war. She lost interest in promoting her own work, leaving it to Barney to arrange gallery placements of her paintings. She became increasingly reclusive, and while Barney continued to visit her frequently, by the mid-1950s she had to stay in a hotel, meeting Brooks only for lunch. Brooks spent weeks at a time in a darkened room, believing she was losing her eyesight. She became paranoid, fearing that someone was stealing her drawings and that her chauffeur planned to poison her. In a 1965 letter she cautioned Barney not to lie down on the benches in her garden, lest the plants feed on her life force: "Trees especially are our enemies and would suck us dry." In the last year of her life, she stopped communicating with Barney entirely, leaving letters unanswered and refusing to open the door when Barney came to visit. She died in Nice
Nice
Nice is the fifth most populous city in France, after Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Toulouse, with a population of 348,721 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Nice extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of more than 955,000 on an area of...
, France, in 1970 at the age of 96.
Influences
Brooks kept aloof from the artistic trends and movements of her time, "act[ing] as if the Fauvists, the CubistsCubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
, and the Abstract Expressionists did not exist." However, critics have identified the influence of Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A....
's illustrations and of Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
, particularly in her paintings of Ida Rubinstein. The imagery of the 1930s drawings suggests Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, and Brooks's use of "unpremeditated" drawing as a route to the subconscious resembles the experiments with automatic drawing made by Surrealists such as André Masson
André Masson
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.-Biography:Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris...
.
The most widely observed influence on Brooks's painting is that of James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...
, whose subdued palette
Palette (painting)
A palette , in the original sense of the word, is a rigid, flat surface on which a painter arranges and mixes paints. A palette is usually made of wood, plastic, ceramic, or other hard, inert, nonporous material, and can vary greatly in size and shape...
probably inspired her use of the color gray. She may have been introduced to Whistler's work by the art collector Charles Lang Freer
Charles Lang Freer
Charles Lang Freer was an American railroad-car manufacturer from Detroit, Michigan who gave to the United States his art collections and funds for a building to house them. The Freer Gallery of Art founded by him is part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C..-Early life:Freer was...
, whom she met on Capri around 1899, and who bought one of her early works. Brooks said she "wondered at the magic subtlety of [Whistler's] tones" but thought his 'symphonies' lacked corresponding subtlety of expression. One 1920 portrait may take its composition
Composition (visual arts)
In the visual arts – in particular painting, graphic design, photography and sculpture – composition is the placement or arrangement of visual elements or ingredients in a work of art or a photograph, as distinct from the subject of a work...
from a painting by Whistler. While the poses are almost identical, Brooks removes the little girl and all the details of Whistler's domestic scene, leaving only Borgatti and her piano—an image of an artist completely focused on her art.
Legacy and modern criticism
Brooks's conservative style led many art critics to dismiss her, and by the 1960s her work was largely forgotten. The revival of figurative paintingFigurative art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...
since the 1980s, and new interest in the exploration of gender and sexuality through art have led to a reassessment of her work. She is now seen as a precursor of present-day artists whose works depict cross-dressing
Cross-dressing
Cross-dressing is the wearing of clothing and other accoutrement commonly associated with a gender within a particular society that is seen as different than the one usually presented by the dresser...
and transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....
themes. Critics have described her portraits of the 1920s as a "sly celebration of gender-bending as a kind of heroic act" and as creating "the first visible Sapphic
Sappho
Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
stars in the history of modernism."
More generally, Brooks's portraits starting with The Cross of France have been interpreted as creating new images of strong women. The portraits of the 1920s in particular—cross-dressed and otherwise—portray their subjects as powerful, self-confident, and fearless. One critic compared them to the faces on Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore near Keystone, South Dakota, in the United States...
. Brooks seems to have seen her portraits in this light. According to a memoir by Natalie Barney, one woman complained, upon seeing her portrait, "You haven't beautified me", to which Brooks replied, "I have ennobled you."
Yet Brooks did not always ennoble her subjects. Inherited wealth freed her from the need to sell her paintings; she did not care whether she pleased her sitters or not, and her wit, when unleashed, could be devastating. A striking example is her 1914–15 portrait of Elsie de Wolfe
Elsie de Wolfe
]Elsie de Wolfe was an American actress, interior decorator, nominal author of the influential 1913 book The House in Good Taste, and a prominent figure in New York, Paris, and London society...
, an interior designer whom she felt had copied her monochromatic color schemes. Brooks painted de Wolfe porcelain-pale, in an off-white dress and a bonnet resembling a shower cap; a white ceramic goat placed on a table at her elbow seems to mimic her simpering expression.
One of Brooks's most analyzed paintings, a 1924 portrait of Una, Lady Troubridge, has been seen as everything from an image of female self-empowerment to a caricature. Art critic Michael Duncan sees the painting as making fun of Troubridge's "dandified appearance", while for Meryle Secrest it is "a tour de force of ironic commentary". Laura Doan, pointing out newspaper and magazine articles from 1924 in which high collars, tailored satin jackets, and watch fobs are described as the latest in women's wear, describes Troubridge as having a "keen fashion sense and an eye for sartorial detail". But, these British fashions may not have been favored in Paris; Natalie Barney and others in her circle considered Troubridge's outfits ridiculous. Brooks expressed her own view in a letter to Barney: "Una is funny to paint. Her get-up is remarkable. She will live perhaps and cause future generations to smile."