translator’s notebook

“lost” recording of romaine brooks

finally surfaces at the archives of american art

Founded in Detroit? The Archives of American Art? Yep. Imagine that.

Never a dull moment fleshing out the life and loves of Élisabeth de Gramont, whose biography I’m translating. Last week it was ferreting out a “lost” recording made by Lily’s longtime friend, the expatriate American modernist figurative painter Romaine Brooks, whom Lily visited while grieving the death of her daughter Béatrix. Who knew I would end up learning more about my home town art museum?

Turns out, the Archives of American Art is part of the Smithsonian Institution today, but it grew out of a collaboration between collectors, scholars and Detroit’s business community in 1954, led by E.P. Richardson, then the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts. That was 22 years after Lily de Gramont lectured on Russian travel, French cooking and the arts to a Detroit audience that may well have included my great aunt Marguerite, another Belle Époque adventuress. And it was more than a decade before curator Sam Wagstaff arrived at the DIA to signal that Michigan art lovers were energetically building major collections in good taste.

Those were the days when it was a stretch convincing the art world that Midwesterners could be on the cutting edge of anything, since Modernism had long gone out of fashion.

(Ironic, of course, since Midwesterners had made an outsized contribution to that movement, as Lily de Gramont well knew. She counted many famous Midwestern modernists among her close friends. Take Cincinnati’s child, Natalie Barney, whom Lily called her Eternal Mate. And photographer Berenice Abbott, also from Ohio. Then there was journalist Janet Flanner, the flower of Indianapolis who blossomed into The New Yorker’s “man” in Paris. And of course the dozens of other artists and composers Lily hobnobbed with between the wars, including Hemingway. And Minnesota-born Scott Fitzgerald. And Virgil Thompson, the composer from Kansas City.)

From a legacy perspective, though, the Detroit Institute of Arts was already on the map by the 1960s, something I hadn’t realized during a childhood spent dreamily roaming the galleries while my more practical (and dutiful) family members helped organize the galas.

Recently, the museum of 66,000 objects, offering a solid survey course in the history of art, has been fighting for survival in a bankrupt city trying to balance immediate needs with long term investment in culture and the arts. Only last week, as reported in this story by Philip Kennecott for The Washington Post, a federal judge’s ruling paved the way for a compromise that may keep the collection intact. As I was relieved to read,

This month, a coalition of foundations and nonprofit organizations pledged $330 million towards the city’s pension obligations in exchange for an arrangement that would transfer the entire DIA collection from the city to an independent, nonprofit museum entity. That would allow the city to meet some of its financial obligations to its most vulnerable creditors — former city employees — while foreclosing the possibility that the DIA’s art could be sold to meet city obligations.

But back to Detroit’s permanent and enduring cultural legacy, the Archives of American Art.

I visited the Archives on Friday with Romaine Brooks biographer Cassandra Langer to listen to a fascinating recording that had been mysteriously “lost” for twenty years, apparently owing to a mixup in call numbers. It was a French interview of Romaine Brooks probably conducted around 1968, when the painter was about 93 years old. You should have seen the look on Cassandra’s face as she heard her subject’s voice for the first time. Priceless.

 

I’ll let Cassandra Langer tell you more about her impressions, along with what’s in the recording that will upend conventional wisdom about this vastly undervalued artist.

This is just a short note to announce that Jean-Loup Combemale and I will soon be making a transcription of the interview, eventually to be made available at the Archives to scholars and researchers.

(It was my impression, on Friday, that there are no plans to make the recording available online because the interview is in French. Consider that this is merely one of thousands of art-focused oral histories in the national collection, among 20,000,000 objects catalogued. We hope the transcription will work well for researchers unable to visit Washington.)

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