美国国家公共电台 NPR Painter Romaine Brooks Challenged Conventions In Shades Of Gray

Painter Romaine Brooks Challenged Conventions In Shades Of Gray

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And let's turn from gender in sports to gender in art. The Smithsonian is showing works of a 20th-century female artist who toyed with gender roles. She wore manly clothes and painted androgynous women. An American who lived in Paris, she left most of her work to the American Art Museum. NPR's special correspondent Susan Stamberg introduces Romaine Brooks.

SUSAN STAMBERG, BYLINE: Brooks introduces herself in a 1923 self-portrait - narrowly cut, long, black riding jacket, white blouse, short-cropped hair, eyes shadowed by a black, high hat, but you can still see puffy circles. There is the tiniest smudge of maybe pink on her lips. Otherwise, the whole thing is black and various shades of gray. The women she paints share that severe palette and a certain mood.

JOE LUCCHESI: Loneliness, strength, vulnerability...

STAMBERG: Joe Lucchesi of St. Mary's College of Maryland is consulting curator of the Romaine Brooks show.

LUCCHESI: A kind of careworn but very strong presence all combined in one.

STAMBERG: In their man-tailored jackets, their aesthetic sensibilities, their intense love relationships, Brooks' women moved in the artistic circles of 1920s Paris.

LUCCHESI: There were poets. There were novelists, socialites, photographers.

STAMBERG: Painters - very fashionable and rich. The money helped insulate them from social constraints of their day. The money made them free. In Romaine Brooks' case, free to paint what she wanted to paint - the unconventional, androgynous women, the limited, gloomy palette and to ignore what her big guy contemporaries were doing, Picasso and Matisse, whose vivid and revolutionary canvases filled the homes of Gertrude Stein and family.

LUCCHESI: She really painted as though Picasso and Matisse didn't exist.

STAMBERG: Critics liked her, but she didn't sell much - didn't have to. She had inherited a fortune after a miserable childhood. Her unpublished memoir is called "No Pleasant Memories." And so Brooks could mix her whites and blacks into shades of grays and paint "White Azaleas," her 1910 take on Manet's famous "Olympia" - nude, reclining on couch near a huge arrangement of flowers, just staring into space.

VIRGINIA MECKLENBURG: It's wistful in some ways.

STAMBERG: This is Smithsonian curator Virginia Mecklenburg.

MECKLENBURG: Wistful, maybe wishful also. But there is an erotic undertone to Brooks' nudes. There is some sort of a longing.

STAMBERG: For what?

MECKLENBURG: For sexual encounter. If not sexual encounter, for emotional intimacy, I think, is probably a better way to put it.

STAMBERG: Her bare body twists in our direction. She's making herself very available. But there's no come hither in the twist, just melancholy gloom. Romaine Brooks and her circle of wealthy women lead gloomy lives on canvas. But Virginia Mecklenburg says, on the streets, it was different.

MECKLENBURG: They were having a good time in Paris in the teens and the '20s. They were having a good time on the Bois de Boulogne, taking carriage rides, on horses, going to parties. There was a really active, high-energy, friendly, fun relationship among all of these women.

STAMBERG: At the American Art Museum's Romaine Brooks' show, up until October 2, you sort of wish some of that fun showed up on the canvases. But what is there is a brave sense of modernity and freedom. In Washington, I'm Susan Stamberg, NPR News.