The Female Gaze

Through biographies about and the art of Romaine Brooks

My perception of art was instantly and forever changed when I stumbled upon work of Romaine Brooks. The first painting of hers I’d seen, “Peter, A Young Girl” (of fellow lesbian artist Gluck) was transformational: here was a person of near-indeterminate gender, dressed and named as a man of the era yet the title signaled femininity.

Romaine’s¹ work showed me the pervasiveness of the heteronormativity in art by in offering an alternative the female gaze. Up until then, the art I’d seen before was through heteronormative gaze², of women pleasing and viewed through the male eye, or subjected to masculine power. Those women were the soft, seductive, with coy gazes, or the gentle mother of the heteronormative gaze³ (see footnote for a breakdown with examples). The women portrayed throughout most of art history appeared secondary to the men or their children.

Romaine’s women stood aloof and alone, unaware of their viewer. Here were also queer women who did not conform to the aesthetics of their gender of birth or fashions of their era, and these far outnumber her paintings of men. The women in Romaine’s work had agency, independence, and lives focused on work and interests. Comparing with Renata Borgatti (linked), a professional pianist alone, in a stark room, just her at her piano, James ONeill Whistler’s similar At the Piano, with a child listening, in a gracefully furnished room. Romaine often added symbols of personalities and interests to her feminine portraits, eg., a small horse in her portrait of her lover L’amazon, Natalie Barney, or Lady Una Troubridge’s prized dachshunds. Contrary to her reputation as a famous salon hostess and infamous seductress of women, Brooks painted Barney as a cozy figure, bundled up on what looks like a cold snowy day. Barney sits at a table or desk with papers in front of her to show her work and ambition as a writer, and her uplifted face, firm posture, and deep-set eyes retain deep inner strength.

Through her most famous, Romaine’s own 1923 self-portrait (linked and shown in the second photograph here), Romaine depicts her view on herself. Her eyes are obscured by a top hat, the shadowed blackened buildings behind her giving the feeling of aloneness and a place of no return. Note, too, the masculinity of her clothes, contrasting with the femininity of her reddened cheeks and lips. Her face is half-hidden, as if to determine if you’re worth her time, and perhaps you are only if you are a woman she deems worthy of her attraction.

To compare another of her works to a more mainstream piece: Romaine’s White Azaleas or La Trajet (linked) to the Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Grande Odalisque shows more plainly the difference between her gaze and a more heteronormative one. The Odalisque looks back flirtatiously and boldly at the viewer, seeking their attention. The androgynous yet feminine form of Brooks’ La Trajet has greater erotic charge, yet she looks straight forward, perhaps sleeping or satiated. In any event, she has no need to seen. Even nude and supine, she lacks self-consciousness and instead conveys strength.

After discovering her art, I learned all I could about Romaine the person, whose life fascinates me nearly as much as her art. Broad sketches of her life: she was born Beatrice Romaine Goddard to an heiress and her husband. Her parents divorced when she was young, she was raised by her mother, who wasn’t mentally stable and focused on her equally unstable brother to the point of neglecting Romaine. Romaine was often subjected to abuse by said mother, including being left to an impoverished laundress, which Romaine preferred over her mother’s abuse…eventually, her wealthy grandfather found her again, she’s sent to a convent, her earliest stirrings of sexuality show attraction to women, when she’s eighteen, she’s able to escape to Europe, to Italy and Cornwall (England), taking classes on painting during which she’s sexually harassed as she’s the only woman, she’s near-starving, but later considers this to be one of the best times of her life. She has a child, most likely fathered by her brother-in-law, who likely coerced or assaulted her when she approached him about money. She leaves the child in a convent as she cannot afford to support it. Her mother and brother die, she inherits a fortune (truly, a mining fortune), and finds out that her baby died when she was only two and a half months old. The inheritance allows her to create art that she’ll never need to sell. Romaine marries a man with the last name Brooks, a lavender marriage which quickly falls apart as she suspects her queer husband is overly interested in her money becoming his.

When it does, she moves to Paris, takes many lovers, including poet Rene Vivien, pianist Renata Borgatti, heiress Winnaretta Singer, and paints her lover Ida Rubinstein (linked) more frequently than any other subject. She later says Ida’s face (linked) and form (linked) haunted her until she had painted her repeatedly to overcome the lingering memories. Her longest, deepest love is fellow American heiress Natalie Barney (note 2), and they remained partners, though never monogamously, for over fifty years. Romaine is sometimes called a bigot as she thought Aryans were the superior race, but she also partnered with Jewish women, including Singer and Rubinstein. Since her lover Natalie Barney was one-quarter Jewish (thus in danger as Hitler’s forces invade France), she arranged for her and Barney to live together in Florence, Italy during WWII. Near the end of their lives, she cuts off contact with Barney, and dies with only hired help around to help her.

I wrote that out from memory, as I’ve read every biography on Romaine I know of. The best of them is Cassandra Langer’s Romaine Brooks: A Life (2015), which would be interesting reading for a non-Romaine fan as well, as it’s one of the better biographies I’ve read. Langer writes of Romaine with love, but never allows that to overshadow her impartiality. Romaine comes alive in Langer’s biography: a woman that overcame some of her childhood trauma, putting her art (and maybe Natalie Barney) above everything else, while remaining a complex person that cannot be reduced to cliches. Langer does so without demonizing or deifying her, while defending Romaine against other biographers speculations of Romaine coldness or lack of love, her lack of typically feminine traits, a lack of understanding that seems altogether too typical of how much of the world sees women and particularly women with trauma.

The biographies with negative biases include Meryle Secrest’s Between Life and Me (1974), and the one I’m holding in the first photograph, Diana Souhami’s Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks (2004), which I finished about a week ago. As I read Souhami’s book, I was too frequently aware of the author, who made her presence and opinions on Barney, Brooks, and their relationship known throughout. Fortunately, it has lovely colored plates of Brooks’ work, and I use it in my photographs here. I also have a few older out-of-print books that were released with showing of Brooks’ work, including two by Adelyn Breeskin and one by Whitney Chadwick. And there’s the most biased work of all: part of Romaine Brooks’ memoirs published under the title Strange Impressions (available through David Zwirner books). Brooks originally called the full memoir No Pleasant Memories, and they’re transcribed by the Smithsonian, to which she left the bulk of her work. Publishers found the full book unpublishable, yet it’s well-written (prose styling), and dives deeply into of her childhood. While that childhood affected her for the rest of her life, she did not allow it to stop her from finding and keeping love, nor from creating art that is original, timeless, and far ahead of its time, of ours as well, in breaking the barriers of gender and sexuality.

I’ve introduced Romaine Brooks to several friends and acquaintances. Every single one has been left in awe. One said that her work was far ahead of its time, looking modern even today. Another messaged me a week later to ask “your favorite artist’s name, so I can show it to my boyfriend.” If it was better known, I think Romaine would be wildly popular today. And so, if you hadn’t heard of her before, I’m glad I introduced you to her. Enjoy.

1. You could say “male gaze” or a friend of mine says “straight gaze”, but I use the lengthier, modern term “heteronormative” because (1) women who use it too, eg., look at Mary Cassatt’s work, the women in her work are often mothers, their faces obscured and fixed on their children, and (2) I could imagine someone who’s queer but embodying and using “straight” aesthetic standards might use it as well, eg., most of my bisexual, heteroromantic friends still adhere to the gender norms and aesthetics of the heteronormative world, so to say “straight” is too narrow.

2. I’ve opted to use refer to Romaine, birth name Beatrice Romaine Goddard, by her chosen name rather than the standard of referring to her by the name of the husband only briefly had a marriage of convenience with.

3. Art history offers you many examples of this. There are Klimt’s women, their bodies decorated, their faces almost lost in a sea of color, metallic gold, and texture. The works of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood are popular with the Tumblr-era/sad girl subset; with glowing skin, flowing hair, but also overwrought, distressed, or seductresses. Examples of this include John Everett Millais’ Ophelia or John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallott or Lamia. Lamia exposes another thread: the women men should fear, also seen in works depicting the biblical Salome (eg, Gustav Moreau) or Delilah. Other works view women through the masculine lens of an idealized mother, eg, multiple Renaissance Madonnas and pietas, the work of Mary Cassatt. The motherhood represented is soft, gentle, her face gazed, distant, wistful, or sometimes sad or mourning. Other show women coyly gazing at the viewer, aware of being seen or offering a sexualized invitation eg, Grande Odalisque or Venus of Urbino.