I’m So Excited!

Posted on by Cassandra Langer

Now that Romaine Brooks: A Life is in production (coming from University of Wisconsin Press in Fall 2015), I’ve begun work on the book trailer.

2D Animated Book Trailer to Launch Brooks Bio

This is a really exciting experience: an animated story of Romaine’s life narrated partly by herself and partly by me. I am learning so much from executive producer Suzanne Stroh and her team at Fixed Gaze Films about how these projects get made.

We seem to be starting with last things first. While the soundtrack is usually the last thing that gets laid down, it also sets the tone and pace of the piece. Music is crucial for understanding the biographer (me), the subject (Romaine) and the book itself (a biography and critical appraisal of the artist).

Jared Balogh Soundtrack

I’m delighted that we’ve chosen a cool, elegant and very Modern piece by jazz composer Jared C. Balogh, “Pulling Myself Up Through.” It’s a beautiful composition and a perfect fit for both Romaine and me. I don’t know if I’ll ever meet Mr. Balogh, but if I do, I’m going to buy him a drink and toast his creative genius.

You can hear an excerpt in this sneak preview of Fixed Gaze’s logo animation, a work still in progress.

Romaine Brooks Attracts Young Audience at Age 141

We are still only in the storyboard stage of preproduction on Romaine Brooks: A Life. I don’t want to give away the story line; suffice it to say that even at age 141, Romaine is not alone! I have not yet seen the character sketches, but I couldn’t contain my excitement and wanted to share it with all you Romaine fans.

Genealogy

Posted on by Cassandra Langer

Why should any of us care about family history?

Even I sometimes wonder but am consistently reminded why. As a biographer, researcher, art critic and writer, tedious as tracking these things can be, it’s worth the effort. A case in point is Romaine Brooks and her vague connection to the Bonapartes’ family tree. The question as to which branch comes up in her memoir and now — suddenly — in a Barney letter that is for sale on eBay. One path leads to another entirely.

Independent of the Bonaparte question, tracking down the connection becomes more interesting when you consider that it will establish a date for when Natalie was in Nice visiting Romaine. It requires re-reading of other biographers to see if they are aware of the resulting dates. After that, there’s the cross-referencing of information as the pieces of various puzzles begin to fall into place. And then it’s back to re-checking my chronology of Brooks’ life to see if everything fits.

This is why the small details count in the larger picture of reconstructing a subject’s life and understanding how they lived it as much as anyone removed from a life can.

If you want to read a fictionalized adventure in biography, try Possession. For added enjoyment, see the film.

The manuscript is awaiting copy editing

Posted on by Cassandra Langer

Romaine Brooks: A Life is now in the pipeline and just awaiting copy editing. As the author, I must admit that it has been the journey of a lifetime. My take on Romain’s life and times is entirely new, based on fresh research coming out of France, as well as collections relating to her which other biographers may not have analyzed as closely as I have.

Networking across disciplines yielded fantastic connections that allowed for an unprecedented stage of fact-matching and checking. The process yielded a new and more fully nuanced reading of this fascinating woman’s artistic and daily life that was simply unavailable to earlier biographers, through no fault of their own.

Simply put, Romaine Brooks was not the psychologically challenged lesbian artist as which she has been portrayed by previous biographers.

My book paints a new — and, we now know, much more accurate — picture of her that refutes most of what has been written about Brooks and her art.

The new book also corrects many false impressions, most importantly that she was a fascist sympathizer and virulent anti-Semite. Reading her On The Hills Of Florence during the war and about the six years she and Natalie Barney (who was a quarter Jewish) makes her position as a conservative American living abroad much clearer than the simplistic and unexamined readings of her attitudes that have gone before.

All I can say is the evidence is now online from the Smithsonian institution for you to read for yourselves. What my book does is to contextualize this material in accord with Romaine’s life and choices to achieve a better understand her personality and thought processes.

Equally Intriguing is the true nature of her love life with Natalie Barney and her relationship to Lily de Gramont. I hope you will look forward to reading all about the fascinating Mrs. Brooks come 2015-16.

For those of you who will be in Washington November 20th I will be doing a talk for the Smithsonian fellows lunch time series at the Archives of American art. You are welcome to come at noon to the second floor conference room. Just present I’d and take the elevator to learn more about the Romaine we never knew and the missing works by her that we still need to rediscover and bring before the public. So stay tuned for more news.

New Event and interview with me about Brooks

Posted on by Cassandra Langer

Hi, all! Just letting you know about a great online event put together by a colleague of mine. Please tune in for Suzanne’s site reopening on Thursday, October 31, 2013 at www.suzannestroh.com.

It’s a virtual party to celebrate the 137th birthday of expatriate arts patron Natalie Barney (1876-1972). A major reappraisal of Barney’s life and legacy is underway, led by the translation of Francesco Rapazzini’s biography of the woman Barney secretly married in 1918, author and sculptor Élisabeth de Gramont (1875-1954). Forty years after Barney’s death, her secret 1926 novel has finally been published in French. It details the household both women established with American painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970).

The Accidental Biographer: Beware!

Posted on by Cassandra Langer
Image
Romaine Brooks well knew what having the impeders drag you down felt like, and she imagined it here for all of us to identify with when we encounter our own impeders!

I never started out as a biographer. It was always about how I took in the picture before me, tasted it, rolled it over, let it sit in my sensorium, and savored all its flavor — appreciating the artistry of the maker; composition, color, execution, emotions. In short, I was able to follow along when an artist grabbed me with just one look and took me to places both familiar and strange.

From childhood, even as a small toddler, I’ve had this uncanny ability to experience words and pictures in the most intense way. It was one of these experiences (as I write in my introduction to Romaine Brooks: A Life (forthcoming from University of Wisconsin press in 2015) that set me on a 44-year course of investigation. I left me with a need to know so intense that throughout my academic and teaching career I felt compelled to follow the elusive trail that Beatrice Romaine Goddard (Brooks) had forged.

An Intriguing Subject…and Audience

It began with the first scholarly/critical article to be written in America on Brooks’s intriguing, chromatically painted portraits. I followed up with a lecture that garnered the attendance of an ACLU representative from Florida International University. This was, after all, the early 1970s, and I was  an out lesbian dealing with an out subject and painter of lesbian and gay subjects. Over the years I continued to write critical commentary on any Brooks articles and/or essays that appeared.

Finally, in 2000, after reading yet another essay sidestepping the problems of Brooks’s complicated relationship with D’Annunzio and right-wing conservative politics of the period, my frustrations propelled me to deal with the issue head-on. I then published two more articles to set the framework for an in-depth look at Romaine’s fascist aesthetics in my new book.

Thus, the Accidental Biographer

In order to unearth the truth of Romaine’s life, I had to become an accidental biographer. That determination set me on a course I never intended to take. If you truly want to understand the real nature of the biographer’s art, you’ll have to read my introduction as to how this studio/art history/philosophy student was compelled to become a reluctant biographer by default.

Romaine: “Camp” or not?

Posted on by Cassandra Langer

ImageYou will have to be the judge, given the recent issue of GLReview that discusses the concept of camp and gives various definitions:

“The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.” Wilde

“Camp is [understood] not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.” Sontag

Sontag goes on to say that, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks.” She associates camp with performance, “being-as-playing-a-role,” and with the artificial: “It is the difference…between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.”

Certainly Brooks qualifies as one of the first female dandies, and her creation of an artist-self falls into the category of the performative identity. Her paintings and interpretations of various new women, bisexuals, and internatonal metro-sexuals  positions her as a radical modernist — albeit, as outlined in Romaine Brooks: A Life from the right rather than center or left. What could be more camp than her dramatic 1912 self-portrait or her stylized self-portrayal of 1923? This perhaps explains her enduring appeal across generations and various cultures.

Brooks’ queer heroic portraits of women

Posted on by Cassandra Langer

This page is dedicated to the lesbian expatriate artist Romaine Goddard Brooks (1874-1970). Brooks was the epitome of style and could give most fashion designers today cards and spades when it comes to understated elegance. She designed her own man-tailored clothinge and made everything in her life according to her singular tastes.

I am going to be presenting a talk on Romaine’s relationship with adventurer, man of letters and womanizer, Gabriele d’Annunzio, on Saturday. This takes place in Las Vegas at the Women and Fascism panel of the Modern Studies Association. I was invited by author Barbara Wills whose recent book Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma has created a great stir among those devoted to feminist and queer studies, as well as among admirers of Stein’s modernism.

My own presentation deals with Romaine Brooks’ queer heroic portraits of women. I have written a couple of articles on these but this will be my first dedicated presentation detailing, however briefly, the connection between Romaine Brooks and Gabriele d’Annunzio and the impact that relationship had on her signature style.