Adventures, Romaine Brooks
from Adventures of the Mind, Natalie Barney
Romaine Brooks, for want of tolerable friends, has not had the enemies she deserves.
One of them, believing that he described her unkindly, made this remark which seems to be a most heartening description: "She is a foreigner everywhere."
And, in fact, Romaine Brooks belongs to no time, to no country, to no milieu, to no school, to no tradition; nor is she in revolt against these institutions, but, rather, like Walt Whitman, neither for them nor against them – she does not know what they are. She is the epitome, the "flowery summit" of a civilization in decline, whose character she was able to capture. Almost a subconscious psychologist, she puts on her canvases the best kept secrets of the distinctive personalities she paints. She operates on them, relieves them of existence, through a confession so strong and so delicate that they themselves are won over to it. Her radiant personality, with an apparent naiveté, reassures falsely. Under this good-natured appearance, she makes contact with the beings whom she permits to pass before her, the better to renounce them.
Not just anyone is painted by Romaine Brooks!
She paints as she lives, with the inspiration that has managed to restrain her and which she has expressed in her art.
Today, people talk a great deal about "modernism," about "movement," without sufficiently realizing that an acquired speed cannot be movement – movement, as has been proven, being born from a relativity that one can no longer be unaware of.
Romaine Brooks grasps the movement of each person and fills the space that separates her from it through the most brilliant of communions.
Her two portraits of d'Annunzio, one the bitter rake and the poet, the other the soaring warrior, give a maximum of what two beings can add to each other, the quality of each increasing the value of the other.
It is this quality that Romaine Brooks provides, which prompted one of these society models well known for her good looks to remark:
"You haven't made me look very pretty!"
"I have made you look noble," replied her friend Romaine.
Her eye, developed to the point that it cannot tolerate bright colors, once caused her to eject from her studio another society woman, who had tactlessly arrived dressed in garish green.
It is for this same reason that Romaine Brooks's palette fears the promiscuity of salons. Her discrimination does not tolerate certain environments.
She has within her no unkindness, no malice, but when her hypersensitivity makes others suffer, it is only her way of expressing her own suffering.
She makes up for that in being good, even as she drives people to despair and completely overwhelms a humanity from whom she expects nothing, except the productive peace which to her is worth its absence. However, her search "for new elements" on which to hang a routed sensitivity indicates to what degree she might have wished to enjoy them. And isn't her solitude a reproach to their absence rather than a too-voluntary escape into herself? It is because Romaine Brooks is too attentive and genuinely demanding that she so rarely finds anything outside her work to satisfy her interest in mankind.
She is of an integrity, of such a moral purity, that she throws into relief the blemishes of others.
Her self-portraits (one of which is on view at the Jeu de Paume) show a lavish desolation. She takes refuge in books, where the best of us is to be found. And as this taste for others is constantly repressed, thwarted, because it is too ardent, you don't know whether to envy her or pity her for not being able to satisfy it elsewhere. Let her be so dissatisfied at giving more pleasure than she gets!
Endowed with another means of expression, she uses her voice to interpret hymns and "performs the function of angels," precisely because her being has caused the timbre of her singing to evolve heavenward.
She occasionally comes back down here to chastise with her writings those who have seemed to want to let her down, or to judge her, a thing that she cannot endure. And is she not right, since judgment supposes equality? When someone whom with good reason she considers inferior reveals some despicable trait, she abandons her song and her paint brush to seize her pen, and she sends him a last judgment; but a slander merely confronted is only half-punished. May he, then, receive her reply and punishment through the bookstore, because her writings are bound to strike a whole species of individuals rather than waste themselves on only one person.
Celebrated, at the peak of several fashions that she created and inaugurated in her home, she retired to let her imitators catch up with her, there where she no longer is!
She slowly but surely prepared her memoirs of a painter in which the portraits of groups and social classes that she has passed through are set by an inexorable fixative. Moreover, she is illustrating this work and will give those of us who are waiting another book of views without text: these sketches correspond to the expulsion of our interior demons, to imaginary catastrophes, to baseless fears in which one seems to participate in the confused birth of dreams. And for these autobiographical memoirs I prophesy a success equal to that of these unique sketches. When painters meddle in writing... I was the first and the most demanding of her readers:
"Naught blinds us less than admiration, friend."
Source: Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind. Trans. John Spalding Gatton. NYU Press, 1992.