Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris

Introduction

T his book began as the story of one portrait—Romaine Brooks’s Self-Portrait of 1923—which has both personal and professional signiWcance to me (Wg.1). My awareness of alternatives to the scenarios of marriage and motherhood that shaped a woman’s destiny when I was growing up in my sheltered Connecticut suburb owes an enormous debt to a very limited repertoire of images, images that sparked in me a sense of recognition, unnamed potential, unimagined horizons of possibility . Brooks’s Self-Portrait is one such image. I Wrst stood face to face with this near life-scale portrait at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., over thirty years ago, when I was a college student. As my eyes took in the artist’s daring statement of self—the deWant stance, the sober costume with its rakishly turned collar, the unyielding set of the chin, eyes ablaze from the shade of an outsized top hat—I experienced a shock of recognition: She’s my kind of woman, I said to myself, not needing conWrmation from the wall text (which offered none in any event). As it happens I was reading the visual cues correctly, although I was unaware at that time of either the complexity or the history of the codes that underwrote the portrait’s legibility to me as a statement of lesbian identity, of autonomy and active desire—and as such, a statement of emancipation from the bounds of femininity. That was the beginning of my attraction to and curiosity about Paris of the 1920s. It was also the beginning of my own ability to imagine myself, to see myself, not just as a woman who loved women but as a member of a visual (if not always visible) community— Introduction Mythology is history. —Charlotte Wolff, Love Between Women 00front.qxd 6/23/2005 8:57 AM Page 1 and thus to participate in a visual culture whose history can be traced back to the Paris of Brooks’s era. What Romaine Brooks’s self-portrait meant to me in 1971, and later, in the 1990s, when I began to study her portraiture within lesbian-feminist theoretical frameworks, had little to do, however, with what it meant to her in 1923. What, after all, did “lesbian identity” mean in Paris at that time, when the closet (a Wgure central to identity politics movements of the later twentieth century) and its subjects of enclosure were still under construction ?1 This is only one of many questions we must ask in order to begin to understand what this portrait signiWed for Brooks and her audiences in 1923 Paris, London, and New York. One critic, taking inventory of “the black hat, quite tall, the regard in the shadow of a brim that advances slightly, the pallid face, lips . . . colored , a little black blazer with a red ribbon on the lapel providing the only note of contrast,” describes Brooks’s likeness as “a being invisible to our eyes.”2 Why invisible? The artist, on occasion, introduced her painting as 2 WOMEN TOGETHER/WOMEN APART Fig. 1. Romaine Brooks, SelfPortrait , 1923. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Artist 00front.qxd 6/23/2005 8:57 AM Page 2 “un portrait psychologique.”3 What does that mean? At what point do invisibility and psychology meet? Are today’s categories of identity, with their contingency on the politics of visibility, useful in an analysis of texts produced in Paris between World War I and World War II? What sense does it make to invoke the phrase lesbian identity—even in the format of a question such as this—in relation to the self-representational initiatives of Brooks and her contemporaries? What do I mean by lesbian anyway? Let me address the last question Wrst. By lesbian, I mean, Wrst and foremost , the female subject of homoerotic desire. I take erotic desire to mean both intense physical attraction and passionate emotional investment. While embracing lesbianism as an identity has been, for women of my generation , both collectively and individually empowering, the term lesbianism itself—at once too discursively mercurial, too historically connotative, and too semantically absolute—fails to do justice to the rich spectrum of erotic practices and identities that it presumes to describe in a word. Admittedly, to unite same-sex relationships and cultures of the contemporary era—let alone those of 1920s and 1930s Paris—under...