Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks

by Whitney Chadwick, Joe Lucchesi (Contributor)

Amazons in the Drawing Room presents a comprehensive and definitive analysis of the life and art of Romaine Brooks, reproducing for the first time in color thirty-four of the forty nudes and portraits she painted, as well as thirty-seven automatic pen-and-ink drawings. The first female painter since Artemisia Gentileschi in the seventeenth century to portray an ideal of heroic femininity, Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), like her contemporary Gwen John, shaped an image of the androgynous New Woman for the twentieth century.

An American born in Rome, Brooks spent most of her life in Paris. After a brief but passionate romance with the poet Gabriel D'Annunzio, with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship, she turned to relationships with women and to art to express her emerging self. For many years the companion of Natalie Barney, whom the artist depicted as L'Amazone in one of her most famous portraits, Brooks belonged to the international lesbian community that included Compton and Faith MacKenzie, Renée Vivien, Radclyffe Hall (who immortalized Brooks as the barely fictionalized American painter Venetia Ford in The Forge ), and Una, Lady Troubridge.

The milieu Brooks chose was the privileged, often eccentric demi-monde of wealthy aristocrats and expatriate writers, artists, intellectuals, and performers who gathered in Rome, London, Capri, Paris, and Florence. The social circles she traveled in included Somerset Maugham, Norman Douglas, Charles Freer, Count Robert de Montesquiou, Jean Cocteau, Augustus John, Carl Van Vechten, and Ida Rubenstein, several of whom were subjects for Brooks's portraits.

Amazons in the Drawing Room , published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition of Brooks's work--the first since 1971--opening at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in June 2000, provides a fresh context to view Brooks's haunting and compelling art. Whitney Chadwick's overview of Brooks's life and artistic focus and Joe Luchesi's examination of Brooks's portraits and photographs of Russian dancer Ida Rubenstein bring into sharp focus the complex artistic, literary, and political influences that shaped Brooks's sensibility and approach to portraiture.

Genres: Art, Art History, Biography, Queer, Nonfiction, Lesbian

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Whitney Chadwick is a professor emerita at San Francisco State University. She has published on issues of gender and sexuality in surrealism, modernism, and contemporary art. Her book Women, Art, and Society (Thames and Hudson, 1990; fifth revised and updated edition, 2011) explores the history of women’s contributions to visual culture from the Middle Ages to the 21st century through an examination of the intersection of class, gender, race, and sexuality with culture, geography, politics, and criticism.

Chadwick received her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. In 2003, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Gothenburg. Her research has been supported by fellowships at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Forum for Advanced Studies in Arts, Languages, and Theology at Uppsala University.

(from https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/peo...)

Reviews

[leti · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perro mierdon el libro

[Jennpants · Rating 2 out of 5]

Romaine Brooks was part of some of the first circles of out lesbian artists and writers in the in the time period before and during the two world wars. It's interesting to note that her contemporaries that chose to hide their sexuality from the public eye (ex. gertrude stein, radclyff hall, etc.)tended to support Modernist aesthetics or other new styles of the time while Brooks' paintings remained austere, severely limited in color palatte, mostly portraits.

Brooks can be credited with being one of the first artists to create a lesbian take on the female body/portrait/nude and one of the forerunners of introducing a more slender, more androgynous female nude (compared to the "fuller" bodied nudes en vogue at the time).

I was bummed to read about Brooks' attachment to her extremely upper class (read: stinking rich) background -- indeed, it was probably the only reason why she was able to live the lifestyle she did. However, at the onset of WWII Brooks and her lover at the time, Natalie Barney, were both threatened by the possibility of communism. There was also some very vague allusions to Brooks' relationships with people who would go on to inspire fascim in France?

Major bummer.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main draw are the large, handsome reproductions, of course, but Joe Lucchesi's cycle of essays analyzing Brooks's groundbreaking female/lesbian gaze in the haunting nudes modeled on friend and lover Ida Rubinstein helped throw their quietly subversive qualities into sharp focus.

[Anna Vladeni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Σε σχέση και με τη «πρώτη αγάπη» που έχω διαβάσει, του ίδιου συγγραφέα, φαίνεται να υπάρχει ένα μοτίβο, αναφορικά με τη πλοκή.

[Montana Vince · Rating 5 out of 5]

love how this combined queer history/culture with her work! rare to have a book solely focus on that and was very tender for my lesbian heart 💖🧡💛

[Clementine · Rating 3 out of 5]

For my school project