“Don’t Send These People to Me”

Author Cassandra Langer
Talks about her rediscovery of Romaine Brooks

Suzanne Stroh: Thanks for stopping by on Natalie Barney’s birthday. As you can see, I’ve redecorated. What would Romaine make of cyberspace decor? I’m bracing myself. Be honest. Not enough grey?

Cassandra Langer: I can imagine her walking in, looking around, and without hesitation…rearranging the objects on your desk. Adjusting the composition. A little to the right, no back, perhaps forward, and so on. She was a perfectionist. Then she’d stand back and say, “There. Now it sings.”

That wasn’t too bad. Was she also a social arbiter?

She was a dictator. When it came to taste, she told everybody how and what to think. And they accepted it. Never questioned it. They wouldn’t dare. She was in advance of Elsie de Wolfe, the professional, whom Natalie noted was not the first to do interiors in black and grey. Syrie Maugham and others actually took credit for Romaine’s innovations. Natalie felt Romaine was never given her due in interior design.

Romaine on celebrity?

“You don’t have to know anything about my private life to appreciate my work.”

Working on this book, what surprised you most?

Romaine’s generosity and her sense of humor. Discovering her vulnerability helped me to understand her. You can’t learn about Romaine from her paintings.

It’s hard enough to study the paintings from reproductions. As I learned firsthand at the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek show a couple of years ago, Romaine’s work doesn’t reproduce well. It’s so subtle, so tonal. So much about the surface, control of the surface of the painting. That’s hard to convey in print. And I was shocked by how big the portraits are. Just huge. What would Romaine make of reproductions of her work on the Internet, where it reaches such a wide audience?

She never would have accepted that. Her severe aesthetic required that you spend time up close and personal with any work of art, otherwise you’ve already defined yourself as a cretin.

Few female artists of the 20th century have gained world renown. But some painters have become household names, like Georgia O’Keefe. Why don’t we know more about the life and work of Romaine Brooks?

There are many reasons for this. Primary among them is Brooks’ secretive nature. She was deeply protective of her privacy and ambivalent about being famous. She was a very paranoid personality who feared exposure. Therefore she needed to create a mask a performative persona. She literally performed herself as an artist in public.

Like Salvador Dali?

I think probably less outrageous and more along the lines of Bathus actually. She had elegance and was the epitome of style, but it was not the kind of cape-and-moustache-twirling absurdities that Dali made his reputation on.

It is clear to me that Brooks worked at perfecting this creature over time and became very good at having “the artist” cover and protect the very damaged, vulnerable and needy child she was at heart. Her childhood was a hell of criminal neglect by a narcissistic mother and an absent father, mixed with the terror of living with an insane brother. All her life, Brooks longed for the love of a mothering lover, not a smothering mother. This she found only when she became part of the Barney/de Gramont household in 1918 at 44.

This household, formed by three women lovers who all kept separate residences but conducted their lives jointly and in fixed patterns, finally gave Romaine a secure base. It lasted until the death of Lily in 1954, when Romaine’s household became destabilized and was never firmly established again. It probably interrupted her progression as an established artist of world renown.

Add to this the fact that Brooks detested most modern art—the driving force and economic engine of the visual arts in her day. Brooks felt Modernist painting was wallpaper patterns on canvas. Which meant she would not vie for attention with it. To her, it was beneath contempt and she could not understand Natalie’s embracing it. Do you know, at one time she wanted to paint Gertrude Stein—but that was when Stein had long hair tied up in a bun on her head. When Stein became modern and cut her hair, Romaine no longer was interested in painting her. And she told her so!!! Not always so polite or so diplomatic.

What’s more, Brooks limited production. She was joint heiress of a fortune made in metals and mining by her grandfather, Isaac Waterman, her mother’s father. Brooks never worked under commission like Whistler or Sargent. Her wealth of about three hundred million dollars in today’s money gave her the ability to pick and choose whom she would paint. She only turned to subjects that interested her—not what was fashionable.

It all adds up to a perfect storm for erasure.

And if that isn’t enough, there is her out lesbian feminism. She was highly critical of, and competitive with, the male art establishment. It clearly did not include women unless they were mistresses or subservient wives. Romaine never stood still for that. In fact, when her niece got married, she inquired of her sister Maya, “How could you allow her to be sold into slavery?”

Ouch.

Not tactful, despite exquisite manners. Romaine was never one to beat about the bush when it came to truth or consequences. She called ‘em as she saw ‘em and let the chips fly. Her portraiture was seen as especially radical. It was representative, not abstracting, and yet it eschewed flesh tones and all that was expected of mimetic art. Brooks painted “difficult” portraits that made no attempt to flatter. Rather they stripped away and revealed the model’s innermost soul. Thus Robert de Montesquiou, in his review in Le Figaro that secured her reputation in France, called Brooks “a thief of souls,” because she was able to reveal what her sitters did not necessarily want seen about themselves.

They were pretty brave to sit for her. Why did they risk it?

Ego, I suspect. Look at her sitters—and I am not counting the various models she used. What she turned out gained attention, because to be painted by Romaine Brooks meant you “were” somebody.

According to Romaine, what was the responsibility of an artist?

To be true to her art, however she defines that. I have written extensively on Romaine’s aesthetics. It has taken me years to uncover them. Brooks made little mention of what inspired her. She tried to hide her influences and camouflaged her references.

She was an alchemist, mixing subtle color on a tonal scale that aspired to the effect of a tone poem or a Debussy-like orchestration across the painted surface. You can read this even in her earliest work, influenced by various English, French and American painters. My book goes into this in detail for the first time. She took a great deal, aesthetically speaking, from Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s notions of what is noble, true and good. She drew from various French theorists as well as from art critic Bernard Berenson, who was a good friend. They walked the hills of Florence with talking art and aesthetics.

In her view, what privileges should be accorded to an artist?

Artists are “elect of God.” They are accorded nothing; they are entitled everything!

Old school.

She believed art deserves the full attention of sophisticated viewers. She believed that it is a privilege to experience great art. People should respect that by bringing their full sensibilities to art. Not just glancing at it. She made an important distinction between just looking at art and seeing it. That, she felt, is an artist’s due. Or at least what was due to her art. She really wanted only the most refined sensibilities judging her paintings. Not dismissing them as mere portraiture.

Steve Jobs thought of himself as an artist. Would Romaine agree?

Romaine would have thought Jobs a particular kind of Genius but not an artist. No, that was reserved for those who worked with emotions.

As an accomplished interior designer, what would she think of product designers like Jobs and their useful things of technological beauty?

She would have approved of his elegance in design. Her own Paris apartment was black, white and gray and she made much use of crystal. So the iPad would have appealed to her on that basis alone. She might have played with the iPad’s brush tool to make fluid line drawings like the ones she did in the 1930s. At the end of her life she claimed she could hardly recall them—or else she called them “meaningless.” They were hardly meaningless. More camouflage on her part. She wanted to shroud her creative process in mystery. It’s all the more interesting because, as I point out in my book, she uses psychological language to describe these drawings yet she seems never to availed herself of the new “Jewish science,” even though her friend Bryher, the poet and literary patron, was instrumental in getting Freud out of Vienna to safety in England.

So she didn’t reveal much about her work habits.

With Romaine, you could get away with anything if you were an artist. Even so, her friend Bryher said it was perfectly fine to ask her how the work was going, but not what she was working on.

She was born in Rome, raised in Philadelphia, schooled in Switzerland, discovered in London and lived much of her life in France and Italy. Have you ever heard her voice? What accent did she speak with?

There is a mysterious recording of Romaine in the Smithsonian, which I’ve never listened to. Romaine’s biographer Meryle Secrest mentions its existence at the end of her book. I look forward to hunting it down.

As for her speech and accent—American, according to all reports, and charming—everyone mentions how arresting her voice was. Not unexpected, as Romaine had to make a choice between a career in singing or art. After the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth around 1896-1897, when Romaine gave up the baby for adoption, she fled to Rome and turned to her art.

Romaine was very style conscious. She painted celebrities and hung out with movie stars. Would she find those types and fashions more beautiful today, or less?

She would not have liked today’s fashions. She commented in the 1930s that she was not American, because Americans were all the same, dressed the same, etc. Romaine totally disdained conformity.

She would definitely find all the blonde Gwyneth look-alikes boring, empty headed and uncultured and cultivated with terrible manners and little or no real sense of class or style. She would recoil from vulgar red carpet displays of less than sterling assets. “Cheap and substandard” is what I think she would say. “No Dietrichs here.” She liked Marlene. She liked Noel Coward. She liked what she liked and was very specific about it.

Was she a sports fan?

I don’t know. She never comments on sports or races, to my knowledge. She was a strong swimmer, according to both Natalie and Lily, and she had wanted to go on a sketching expedition when she first married Brooks, so one has to conclude that she was energetic and toned. Attractive to women, obviously. And although Meryle Secrest says her lovemaking was not revealed from what others have written, Romaine must have been very skilled at making love to women.

So much for sport. What did she think of recorded music? Did she go to the movies? Was she a big reader?

We know she went to the movies and commented on several films. As long as her eyes held out, she was an avid reader with a wide range of interests, focused mainly on arts and culture. Recorded music? She doesn’t say, but she played Paul Whiteman and other records at her villa on Capri, which had a couple of dance floors. We know she liked music and was at least modern enough to use a telephone and fly in a plane. I suspect she would have been a bit of a purist. She was highly critical of performances.

She liked clubbing and often went dancing with Carl Van Vechten in Greenwich Village and in Harlem. His love of black boys was well known and he photographed many of them in the nude and forwarded their careers in the arts.

Wasn’t he Gertrude Stein’s literary executor?

Yes, a patron of the Harlem Renaissance. He was also a respected writer and photographer. They were good friends.

What was Romaine like as a friend?

Reserved. Inclined to make judgments. She could be verbally devastating. And she was very sensitive. No matter how close the friendship, if you offended her, that was it. She would just no longer consider you a friend.

But she was susceptible to flattery.

Yes, like Gertrude Stein, who died with more paintings by Francis Rose than Pablo Picasso.

So Romaine could veer into dodgy friendships.

And when she did, it was with someone like the painter Edouard MacAvoy (1905-1991) who flattered the hell out of her when she was in desperate need of recognition as an artist. And this she finally got, from 1966 to around 1969, as far as I can ascertain. She gave him some of her paintings and drawings. After that, it’s hard to tell what happened between the two of them.

In fifty years of living with Natalie Barney, what was Romaine’s biggest complaint?

Well, to be clear, she only lived with Nat Nat for six years during the war in Italy. But her main complaint was Natalie’s total self-indulgence and inability to perceive reality. Her war diary, On the Hills of Florence, makes this clear. For six years during World War II, Romaine observed this close up and personal. This was the only time they lived together. In spite of the privations they suffered in Florence during the German occupation, Natalie seemed oblivious. For instance, she fretted over Dolly Wilde, an addict living in Paris, and kept writing home to ask her housekeeper, Berthe, to send Dolly luxuries. What luxuries? It drove Romaine crazy.

What was her greatest joy?

Besides making art, when she could do it according to her exacting standards, otherwise she would not paint at all? Feeling the love she never had. It was something she never took for granted, and that’s why when Janine Lahovary came on the scene, it impacted so badly on Romaine.

That was the woman Natalie cruised on the promenade in Nice at age 79?

They met on a park bench.

Natalie’s new love. And she’d been together with Romaine for what, like 39 years? Ouch.

Janine fell in love with Natalie, who was ambivalent about starting an affair at her age. Romaine did warn her about being careful, noting that she was not jealous, just concerned. She knew Natalie had a weak heart. And of course she knew about Natalie’s prowess in the bedroom.

Sports again! We need to focus on the Lahovary problem for Romaine. You say it was the biggest contributing factor to her breakup with Natalie.

Brooks could not stand anything that was, in her estimation, substandard. Lahovary was a cut (or ten!) below Brooks’ lowest standard. To Romaine’s credit, given how emotionally damaged she was, she gave it her best try. But it was useless. Janine offended her every sensibility. As time went on, Natalie urged Romaine to accept Janine’s help in practical matters. Things like planning her estate and managing the curatorial responsibilities involved with traveling her retrospective to America.

I believe that the conflicts involved in this last attempt to preserve and assure her legacy resulted in the final break between Brooks and Barney in 1969 or perhaps a little earlier—it is hard to determine when exactly. Till now, that breakup has been narrated as a relationship crisis of lost love. I have come to see it as more of a domestic crisis. Equally tragic, but different. Romaine blamed Janine for the confusion in her life. Escalating tensions finally led to a decision on Brooks’ part to cut herself off from Natalie and Janine, who were living together in Paris. Romaine was living across the country, alone in Nice. She was growing old, paranoid and going blind. She couldn’t read any more, so she had to hire a secretary to help out with her correspondence.

Ask somebody to read you a love letter by Natalie Barney? I’m blushing just thinking about it.

So now she could trust no one to read Natalie’s letter and/or write responses. Of course, there was the telephone. But could she trust that no one was listening?

They were really cut off from one another. I never realized that.

Yes, really. Romaine would not open Natalie’s letters. She marked them, “Return to Miss Barney.” And also, Romaine was shutting down. Spending more and more time with the ghosts that had haunted her since the traumatic childhood with a narcissistic mother and an insane brother. Today we might call it PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. When fireworks went off in the courtyard, they reminded Romaine of the bombs she had endured during both first and second world wars. And of her crazy brother’s nonstop banging on the piano, which her mother, Ella, had encouraged as signs of St. Mar’s genius. Romaine was so distressed, she had to be held in Anna’s her housekeeper arms even though she thought Anna dirty and crude.

So now we have a much clearer picture of why—when Barney sent her doctor to help Brooks out—Romaine felt that Natalie had sent him to drug her. She did not want to be treated. The kind of management Barney and Lahovary prescribed could not improve Brooks’ life at that point. And she knew it.

All factors in Romaine cutting off communication from the woman who had been her “nearest and dearest,” as Natalie put it, for over 40 years.

Romaine Brooks is a hard lesbian icon to like, much less love. She has been vilified as an anti-Semite and a fascist, but after many years of research, you take issue with that assessment. In your upcoming book, you will dig deeper into those topics. Can you give us a preview of what’s in store?

Brooks, like many of her generation, was a pacifist. She believed all war bestial and inhumane. Her iconic 1914 painting, The Cross of France, depicting Ida Rubenstein as a nurse wearing the Red Cross, became a rallying cry of World War I. The image raised so much money for the International Red Cross that it was cited when Brooks was given the Légion d’Honneur after the war.

In 1937 she moved to Florence, believing that Mussolini would keep Italy out of the war. But even the best laid plans do go awry. This was the case for Brooks and then, in 1940 by default, for Natalie Barney who joined her there. Romaine was never a Nazi party member, nor even fascist, but because of her admiration for Gabrielle D’Annunzio, Italian culture and her identification with Italy, where she had been born, she tended to turn a blind eye to its faults. She misjudged D’Annunzio and Mussolini, who followed D’Annunzio’s model in Ethiopia, and the horrendous wrongs perpetrated by Italy there. She mistakenly believed that Hitler would preserve civilization and great art. She soon discovered this was not the case when the Nazis started blowing up the bridges of Florence after Hitler had promised not to.

If she had any political concerns, they were for preserving civilization and peaceful order on the world stage, where the war trauma she had experienced mirrored the trauma in her own life. These are experiences and views she shared with many conservative modernists of her generation. It sounds strange to us, today, that the conservatives between the wars were the pacifists. Because today we associate pacifism with liberalism. But the aggressors of World War II were totalitarians, not conservatives. Romaine’s real fear of war disallowed her seeing the equally real dangers of fascism–and she even thought that Hitler might be a savior of civilization.

She never advocated exterminating the Jews. She had many friends who were Jewish. The third woman in her household, Lily de Gramont, grew up in a Jewish family with three Rothschild siblings. Romaine had at least two important, long-term lovers who were Jewish or had Jewish blood. Perhaps more important for an artist, they became cherished muses and models. Throughout her writings she expresses admiration for the “ancient race,” especially when she considers the talents and achievements of Russian performance artist and philanthropist Ida Rubinstein. In my book, I go into this in detail, examining many other facets of Brooks’ personality and psychohistory to unpack the baggage that has unfairly been laid at her door. At the same time, my biography holds Brooks responsible for her incredibly shallow grasp of the political realities of her time.

What about her anti-Semitism?

Romaine also expressed attitudes that dominated Europe and America when it came to Jews as a class of people, and she reflected the anti-Semitisms of her class and those brought up as Catholics in France—if not America. Natalie Barney expressed the same attitudes even though she, herself, was a quarter Jewish. Today we find these attitudes repellant and morally reprehensible. It is hard for us to understand how prevalent they were. To understand how a lesbian could be an anti-Semite or a political conservative was one of my goals in writing the book.

Brooks was an elitist and remained one all her life. Her elitism colored her view of history. It was myopic and not very well informed, according to at least one man I interviewed who knew her well. Understanding that gives us insights into her checkered ethics. This in no way takes away from her many personal kindnesses or from what she accomplished. We have to learn to be realistic about the lives women like Barney and Brooks lived and not to veil the truth of their very complicated lives. This is what my book attempts to do, along with several others that are forthcoming, in correcting mistakes and assumptions about how these women lived their lives, who they loved and how.

What would she make of how we live our lives today?

She would despise the casualness of it. She had exquisite manners and she did not like uncalled-for intimacy. Natalie would encourage people to make impromptu studio visits. Romaine would just refuse to answer the door. She said to Natalie, “Don’t send these people to me.”

In today’s climate of sexual fluidity for young people, would Romaine call herself a lesbian?

Perhaps not, but then she thought of herself and Natalie as a kind of third sex. This idea was based on their understanding and interpretation of the classical tradition of Sapphic lesbianism in Greek history, not on the prevalent “sexual inversion” theories of the day. It was a philosophy very unlike that of Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall—friends whom they both found laughable at different times. They felt the same, to a different extent, about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, whose relationship was so clearly modeled on the traditional gender roles of heterosexual marriage. Romaine would have called herself ROMAINE—sui generis.

Natalie was ambivalent, at best, about motherhood. She had no time for children. And yet Romaine brought out maternal instincts in Natalie, whose nurturing love was the most profound and satisfying Romaine ever knew. Romaine herself gave birth to a child she never mothered. Lily de Gramont lost three of her five pregnancies, two because of beatings, and had to mother two daughters damaged by domestic violence. Given today’s favorable climate for lesbian parenting, coupled with the availability of anonymous sperm donation and fertility medicine, do you think Natalie, Romaine and Élisabeth would have had a child together?

Yes, I think so. And it would have been a beautiful, much beloved child. Their love child.

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Cassandra Langer’s book, All or nothing: Romaine Brooks (1874–1970), will be published in 2015 by the University of Wisconsin Press. Poet, artist and art historian specializing in feminism, Cassandra Langer is the author of numerous books of art criticism, including Mother & Child in Art (New York, Crescent Books, 1992). She is a frequent contributor to The Gay & Lesbian Review and is currently working on a novel.