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Painter Romaine Brooks Challenged Conventions In Shades Of Gray

A wealthy American living in Paris, Romaine Brooks had the freedom to paint whatever and however she wanted. Don't let her sober, 1923 <em>Self-Portrait </em>fool you — Smithsonian curator Virginia Mecklenburg says in the 1910s and 1920s, Brooks and her circle of friends had plenty of fun in Paris.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
A wealthy American living in Paris, Romaine Brooks had the freedom to paint whatever and however she wanted. Don't let her sober, 1923 Self-Portrait fool you — Smithsonian curator Virginia Mecklenburg says in the 1910s and 1920s, Brooks and her circle of friends had plenty of fun in Paris.

Twentieth century painter Romaine Brooks introduces herself in a 1923 self-portrait: She wears a narrowly cut, long, black riding jacket with a white blouse. She has short cropped hair, and her eyes are shadowed by a black high hat. There's the slightest smudge of maybe pink on her lips — otherwise the whole portrait is black and various shades of gray.

An American who lived in Paris, Brooks conveys loneliness, strength and vulnerability, says Joe Lucchesi, consulting curator of an exhibit of Brooks' work at the Smithsonian — "a kind of careworn but very strong presence all combined in one."

Brooks painted androgynous women and depicted nudes so melancholy they'd make Renoir's pink ladies weep. She left most of her work to the American Art Museum, where her work is currently on view.

The women she paints share a severe palette and a certain mood. In their man-tailored jackets, their aesthetic sensibilities, their intense love relationships, Brooks' women moved in the artistic circles of 1920s Paris. Poets, novelists, socialites, photographers and painters, they were fashionable and rich. Their money helped insulate them from social constraints of their day.

In Brooks' case, money freed her to paint whatever and however she wanted — the unconventional, androgynous women, the limited, gloomy palette — and to ignore what her Big Guy contemporaries were doing — Picasso and Matisse, whose vivid and revolutionary canvases filled the homes of Gertrude Stein and family.

"She really painted as though Picasso and Matisse didn't exist," Lucchesi says.

Brooks' 1910 <em>Azalées Blanches (White Azaleas) </em>recalls Édouard Manet's 1863<em> <a href="http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/search.html?no_cache=1&zoom=1&tx_damzoom_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=4042" target="_blank">Olympia</a><em>.</em></em>
/ Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Smithsonian American Art Museum
Brooks' 1910 Azalées Blanches (White Azaleas) recalls Édouard Manet's 1863 Olympia.

Critics liked her, but she didn't sell much — she didn't have to. She'd inherited a fortune after a miserable childhood (her unpublished memoir is called No Pleasant Memories). And so Brooks could mix her whites and blacks into shades of grays and paint White Azaleas — her 1910 take on Édouard Manet's famous Olympia, nude reclining on couch, staring into space, as a servant brings her a huge arrangement of flowers.

Brooks sold reproductions of her 1914 <em>La France Croisée </em>to raise money for the Red Cross during World War I.
/ Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Smithsonian American Art Museum
Brooks sold reproductions of her 1914 La France Croisée to raise money for the Red Cross during World War I.

"It's wistful in some ways," says Smithsonian curator Virginia Mecklenburg. "Wistful, maybe wishful also, but there's an erotic undertone to Brooks' nudes. There is some sort of a longing ... if not [for] sexual encounter, for emotional intimacy is probably a better way to put it."

Her bare body twists in our direction — she's making herself very available. But there's no come hither in the twist, just melancholy gloom.

Brooks and her circle of wealthy women lead gloomy lives on canvas, but Mecklenburg says on the streets, it was different.

"They were having a good time in Paris in the teens and the '20s," she says. "On the Bois de Boulogne, taking carriage rides, on horses, going to parties, there was a really active, high-energy, friendly, fun relationship among all these women."

At the Romaine Brooks show at the American Art Museum, you might wish some of that fun showed up on the canvases — but what isthere is a brave sense of modernity and freedom.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Nationally renowned broadcast journalist Susan Stamberg is a special correspondent for NPR.