The Female Gaze

Through biographies about and the art of Romaine Brooks

My all-time ultimate favorite artist (at least through 2024) is Romaine Brooks. Truman Capote famously said of her work: “[she painted] the all-time ultimate gallery of famous dykes”. Coming across the first painting of hers I’d seen, “Peter, A Young Girl” (of fellow lesbian artist Gluck) was a transformational experience. Here was a person of near-indeterminate gender, dressed as a man of the era yet the title reveals her femininity. Most of the art I’d seen before shows us the heteronormative gaze (note 1), women pleasing or viewed through the male eye or subjected to masculine power. This is present with Klimt’s women, their bodies decorated, their faces almost lost in a sea of color, metallic gold, and texture, the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood’s works, the women beautiful, with glowing faces, flowing hair, but also overwrought, distressed, or seductresses, such as John Everett Millais’ Ophelia or John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallott or Lamia, sometimes absorbed in their children or worn by motherhood eg, multiple Renaissance Madonnas and pietas, or coyly gazing at the viewer, aware of being seen or offering a sexualized invitation eg, Grande Odalisque, Venus of Urbino, even the Mona Lisa. The heteronormative gaze influences women as artists as well, as those artists view other women as figures in a masculine world, as with Mary Cassatt, who painted women with their children frequently and the faces of her subjects are often soft and indistinct as they deliberately turn away from the viewer, and even if the painter is feminist icon such as Artemisia Gentileschi, whose paintings show women wrecking revenge on men, so the women in her works were subjected to male power.

Romaine Brooks’ art was transformational to my understanding of the pervasiveness of the heteronormative gaze in that she painted women through the female gaze: the women exist for themselves, and convey agency, independence, and strength. Her portraits, especially those of queer women who did not conform to the aesthetics of their gender of birth or fashions of their era, far outnumber her paintings of men. The women she painted often are absorbed into their work or shown with symbols of their passions. 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. Brooks 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. Although 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 as she’s a writer, and her uplifted face, firm posture, and deep-set eyes convey agency and strength. Her subjects show little awareness of their viewers, as with Brooks’ most famous work, her 1923 self-portrait (linked and shown in the second photographer). Note the masculinity of her clothes, contrasting with the femininity of her reddened cheeks and lips. She barely looks out from her top hat, 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. A comparison of her White Azaleas or La Trajet (linked) to the aforementioned Grande Odalisque shows more plainly the difference between her gaze and a more heteronormative one, as 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, dead, 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 Brooks the person, whose life fascinates me nearly as much as her art. In a post earlier this week, I said I was a “Constance Debré fan girl”, which feels accurate in that I think I’ll move on from the fan-girling. My love for Romaine Brooks is more enduring. 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 Brooks. Brooks was often subjected to abuse by said mother, including being left to an impoverished laundress, which Brooks 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. Brooks 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 on 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. Brooks 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 Brooks I know of. The best of them is Cassandra Langer’s Romaine Brooks: A Life (2015), which would be interesting reading for a non-Brooks fan as well, as it’s one of the better biographies. Langer writes of Brooks with a slight bias of love and appreciation that she is aware of and works to overcome. Her arguments are reasoned, well researched, and laid about logically. Langer shows Brooks’ as a woman that overcame some of her childhood trauma, putting her art and Natalie Barney above everything else, while remaining a complex person. Langer does so without demonizing or deifying her, while defending Brooks’ against other biographers speculations of Brooks’ 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 frequently aware of the author, who sort of 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. 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.

Note 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.

Note 2: Natalie Barney rented a home in Paris on rue Jacob for decades. It was the site of her salons. Despite inheriting the equivalent of over $100MM adjusted for inflation and despite a petition signed by over 300 people, she was eventually evicted by her new landlord, a minister of justice. Michel Debrè, Constance Debrè’s grandfather, who eventually became Prime Minister and is considered the “father” of the French constitution. It’s interesting to me to think of the vague links between queer women, as if literary/artistic queer women are in conversation through their art over decades.