Romaine Brooks

Beatrice Romaine Brooks better known as Romaine Brooks was born in Rome, Italy in 1874. Romaine had a very rough childhood,she came from a very wealthy family.Her mother was very demanding and abusive person.She had an older brother named St.Mar,who her mother cherished. He also happen to be mentally ill. They abused her both physically and psychologically. As a result of the constant  abused Romaine was left to deal with insecurity issues and was unable to know or feel what love is. Being abused left Romaine emotionally scared. In 1902 she gain inheritance and married John Ellingham Brooks,gay pianist. Naturally the relationship did not work out, but Brooks continued to take care of Ellingham for the rest of his life. Following the failure that was her marriage Brooks, decided to reinvent herself and drop her first name Beatrice.

White Azaleas, Romaine Brooks 1910. 

The Red Jacket , Romaine Brooks 1910. 

While still in Rome she studied with an  avant-garde group of artists, writers, and intellectuals with whom she associated in Capri, Paris, and the French Riviera.  Brooks's got a chance to study with Gustave Courtois in 1905. Brooks's got her chance to showcased her work in her first one person exhibition show at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1910. During this exhibition, she showcased her first nudes The Red Jacket (1910), and White Azaleas (1910). According to Chadwick the two paintings "evoke the melancholy and morbid eroticism of the Symbolist  Poets" (Chadwick 300).  She also had many paintings that showed women confined to balconies. I believe those paintings were a representation of her emotional neglect that she felt from the lack of love that she received from her mother.

The Amazon, Romaine Brooks 1920. 

Chadwick also brings up the comparison of Brooks's The Balcony and the Portrait of Jean Cocteau  to Manet's The Balcony, and Robert Delaunay's The Eiffel Tower. Chadwick states "it shows the poet posing with insouciant elegance in front of the skeletal framework of the monument that had to come to stand for the modern city" (Chadwick 300). In her paintings Brooks's wanted to depict the modern lesbian which she did in her 1920 paintings, Boreale and The Amazon. Chadwick emphasized that those paintings "visually articulate the modern lesbian relationship to contemporary medical literature on  homosexuality, as well as to pictorial traditions that destabilize the categories of masculinity and femininity" (Chadwick 300). Brooks's was producing art work that combine powerful femininity and the modern lesbian as one.

Portrait of Jean Cocteau,Romaine Brooks 1914. 

 Brooks's paintings are rather mysterious and dark. She doesn't seem to use bright colors at all. In a way the paintings actually appear to be rather dull. In her 1923 Self Portrait, Brooks's crossed dress. she wore what seem to be a long black coat, a white collar shirt, dark gloves and a black top hat.She looked rather confident and her stance made her appear powerful. In this painting Brooks's is the modern lesbian.

Self Portrait, Romaine Brooks 1923. 

Brooks's was able to display this new identity as the modern lesbian in her pictures.Her paintings were simple yet elegant. She became  known as the first woman painter to forge a new visual imagery for the twentieth century lesbian (Chadwick 299). She shattered the social norms and help form this new woman. Whether you were a lesbian or not, Brooks's paintings were relate able  because it showed women in powerful stature. This was the epitome of what the 20th century was for women. To be considered Independent and just as powerful as men.



                                                             








                                                     Bibliography/ Work Cited
 

1.   Brooks, Romaine 

http://www.glbtq.com/arts/brooks_r.html

    2. Romaine Brooks
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artist/?id=599


    3. Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 4th ed. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Print.