Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris

Two. Romaine Brooks: Portraits That Look Back

T he lesbian society portraitist Romaine Brooks, an outstanding member of Paris’s growing population of modern women, cut a striking Wgure on the European cultural scene during the 1910s and 1920s. Her dashing fashions, raven hair, pale complexion, and penetrating eyes invested the painter with an aura of romance. Mireille Havet described Brooks, amid a select group of admirers, as wrapped in “the perverse and disquieting mystery of her spacious black living room, with its off-white and vermilion accents, gold cushions, lacquer ware, mirrors, geometrically patterned rugs, and grand Wreplace.” The only natural touch, “a rude and untamable Wre,” threw light on the “admirable, hermetic face” of the hostess, with her “sad smile, that of a disappointed child, and an authoritarian and ardent regard that caresses and questions .”1 Brooks staged her professional and social interactions within contexts , like the mise-en-scène that Havet described, of her own devising. The artist’s decor, like her demeanor, was of a piece with the dark and somewhat disquieting paintings that claimed pride of place in the overall scheme. “Ça, c’est moi,” Brooks would declare to her guests, gesturing dramatically toward the 1923 self-portrait. The critic Albert Flament recorded his impression of this expatriate’s “joyous accent thrown like a veil over the void of her solitude.” Flament had no sooner stepped across the painter’s threshold when Brooks introduced him to a “portrait Two Romaine Brooks Portraits That Look Back A new star makes a new heaven. —Natalie Clifford Barney, The One Who Is Legion 02Chap2.qxd 6/23/2005 8:57 AM Page 43 psychologique” (the 1923 self-portrait) that she had propped on an easel by the windows. Flament noted the effect of this dual encounter: “‘Un portrait psychologique’. . . ! In the three-faced psyche glass I perceive the real face of Mrs. Brooks, who has just made herself up with that ochre powder she loves so much. . . . And I shift my eyes back to that other visage , severe and pale, a being invisible to our eyes that [the artist] has rendered on canvas . . . , a solitary wanderer, at large within a devastated habitat.”2 Flament represents the 1923 self-portrait as a sort of uncanny double, a manifestation of the subject’s unconscious (singular, invisible, private) essence. Brooks’s early supporter Robert de Montesquiou, in his article “Cambrioleurs d’ames,” acknowledged the uncanny effect of Brooks’s portraiture more generally. It was as if, he observed, these paintings had the power to usurp the essence of their sitters, the power to “steal their souls.” Montesquiou, model for the neurasthenic protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Wn-de-siècle classic À Rebours (Against nature), recognized Brooks as a kindred spirit; he called attention to her work on the occasions when she saw Wt to release it from her salon for display in exhibitions or galleries. The portraits demonstrated a degree of panache and savoir faire that some believed ill suited to a woman painter, a wealthy one who painted only what and when she pleased. A number of critics remarked that Brooks’s portraits derived their strength from the models who posed for her more than from the artist herself. Certainly the works produced by Brooks during the 1920s, in particular, dramatize a sense of entitlement shared by the artist and her sitters—that is, the upper echelons of Paris’s cosmopolitan lesbian society. These portraits “look back” in more ways than one. Most obviously, the independent women represented by Brooks—commanding equal footing with the artist-heiress—conWdently return the gaze of the observer. At the same time, these portraits revise and revitalize an iconography of distinction codiWed in the previous century. Elite Wgures such as the dandy and the Xâneur, for instance, emerge anew in and through Brooks’s portrait oeuvre. Characterized by extreme reWnement, meticulous attention to surface appearances, and indifference to commercial expediency, dandyism offered an alternative to the ethos of masculine sobriety that prevailed in Baudelaire’s era. Via costume and gesture, the dandy set himself apart from the sober legions of businessmen and statesmen responsible for building the great Wnancial and colonial empires of nineteenth-century Europe. In the writings of Baudelaire and his contemporaries, another privileged 44 WOMEN TOGETHER/WOMEN APART 02Chap2.qxd 6/23/2005 8:57 AM Page 44 male character, the Xâneur, also stood apart from the industrious fray of capitalist expansion...