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.
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. File:Romaine Brooks portrait, circa 1910.jpg|thumb|left|Romaine Brooks, / Perou, photographer. From the Romaine Brooks papers,
Archives of American Art.|280x280px 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were portraits; others showed anonymous models in interior scenes or against tonal backgrounds, often with pensive or withdrawn expressions.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. 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. 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. Despite her artistic success, she described herself as a
lapidée—literally, a victim of stoning.
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". 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. 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. 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 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; 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. 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 in both the 1912 portrait of D'Annunzio and her 1914 self-portrait; the subjects are 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. He was never part of
Benito Mussolini's government. Although he is regarded as a precursor of Fascism, D'Annunzio disavowed any connection with Mussolini or Fascism toward the end of his life. The details of Brooks's own conservative politics have been clouded by her friendship with D'Annunzio, and admiration of him as an artist and fellow sufferer. There is no evidence that she was a card-carrying Fascist or that she was sympathetic to Italian Fascism. The classicizing individualism of her paintings may have been influenced by D'Annunzio's aesthetics—an idea that has troubled some viewers otherwise attracted to the imagery of Brooks's portraits. On June 16, 2016, under the direction of Dr. Langer and Legion Group Arts, young Italian researcher Giovanni Rapazzini de Buzzaccarini discovered a long-lost early work by Brooks at the Vittoriale in Gardone. Brooks had copied (Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci 1450–1523)
Perugino's
Portrait of a Young Man at the Uffizi when she was a penniless art student in Rome. She painted the man because she thought he resembled herself as a girl. She later gave the painting to D'Annunzio as a joke when she refused to become his lover. D'Annunzio was in the tasteless habit—Romaine thought—of hanging pictures of his mistresses in a rogue's gallery. Buzzaccarini found this painting in the music room. D'Annunzio and Brooks had spent the summer of 1910 in a villa on the coast of France until D'Annunzio was disrupted by one of his jealous ex-mistresses. She came to the gates of Brooks' villa with pistol in hand, demanding entry. Brooks painted Rubinstein one last time in
The Weeping Venus (1916–1917), a nude based on a photographs that Brooks took during their relationship; she needed them because Rubinstein was such a restless and unreliable model. According to Brooks' 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' life was her three-way partnership with
Natalie Clifford Barney, an American-born writer, and
Lily de Gramont, a French aristocrat. She formed a trio with them that lasted the rest of their lives. Barney was notoriously non-monogamous, a fact that the other two women had to accept. Brooks met Barney in 1916, at a time when the writer had already been involved for about seven years with Duchess Elisabeth de Gramont, also known as Lily or Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre. She was married and the mother of two daughters. After a brief dust-up that resulted in Barney's offering Gramont a marriage contract while at the same time refusing to give up Brooks, the three women formed a stable lifelong triangle in which none was a third wheel. Gramont, one of the most glamorous taste-makers and aristocrats of the period, summed up their values when she said, "Civilized beings are those who know how to take more from life than others." At the same time, while Brooks was devoted to Barney, she did not want to live with her full-time. 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, the women 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 traveling 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 seen 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. |303x303px From 1920 to 1924, most of Brooks's subjects were 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 Brooks painted many of them. Barney's lover of the moment was
Eyre de Lanux; her own lover
Renata Borgatti;
Una, Lady Troubridge, the partner of
Radclyffe Hall; and the artist
Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein). Another of Brooks' lovers was the wildly eccentric Marchesa
Luisa Casati, whose portrait she painted in 1920 while on Capri. Several of these paintings depict women who had adopted some elements 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" for women and wearing tailored jackets—usually with a skirt—was a recognized fashion, discussed in magazines as the "severely masculine" look. Women such as 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' 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. However, while many of Brooks' 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 somber 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. There is no evidence to substantiate the claim that Brooks ceased painting after 1925. While in New York during the '30s, she produced portraits of Carl Van Vechten in 1936 Muriel Draper in 1938 that we know of. We know that she purchased paints in WWII when she and Natalie were trapped in Florence. As researchers, we know from photographs that there are lost works by Brooks still to be rediscovered. Moreover, Brooks did complete what previous scholars thought to be her last portrait at the age of 87 in 1961. The artist stated that she had drawn all her life so there is no reason to assume she was not doing so by the time MacAvoy painted her portrait. In fact, she herself says in her audio interview from 1968 that she was miffed by the fact that McAvoy portrait of her showed a bunch of dried up brushes rather than the glass table she used as a palette "As if I didn't paint." Her comments seem to indicate she was anything but dried up as a painter. In fact, she had intended to paint a portrait of MacAvoy but he never had time to sit for her. During the '30s, 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.
Drawings and later life From the 1930s onward, her work was largely forgotten. 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 on a spring. Decades later, at 85, she said, "My dead mother gets between me and life." Brooks is thought to have stopped painting by several writers, but she herself tells us that she drew all her life. She moved from Paris to Villa Sant'Agnese, 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 and Barney were involved in promoting her work and arranging gallery and museum placements for 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. According to Secrest, she became paranoid, fearing that someone was stealing her drawings and that her chauffeur planned to poison her. However, subsequent research (Langer) leads researchers to believe her fears were not unfounded. 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. Her reasons for doing so are referenced in Langer's biography. She died in Nice, France in 1970 at the age of 96. Brooks is buried in the old English Cemetery in Nice, in a family plot with her mother and her brother St. Mar. == Influences ==