Romaine Goddard Brooks

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romaine_Goddard_Brooks



Romaine Brooks (May 1, 1874 – December 7, 1970), born Beatrice Romaine Goddard, was an American painter who specialized in portraiture and used a subdued palette dominated by the color gray. She ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism and Fauvism, drawing instead on the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements of the 19th Century, especially the works of James McNeill Whistler. Her subjects ranged from anonymous models to titled aristocrats, but she is best known for her images of women in androgynous or masculine dress, including her self-portrait of 1923, which is her most widely reproduced work.<1>

Brooks had an unhappy childhood with an emotionally abusive mother and mentally ill brother, which by her own account cast a shadow over her whole life. She spent several years in Italy and France as an impoverished art student, then inherited a large fortune upon her mother's death. Wealth gave her the freedom to choose her own subjects, and she often painted people close to her, such as the Italian writer and politician Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, and her partner of more than 50 years, the writer Natalie Barney.

Although she lived to be 96, she painted very little after 1925. She made a series of line drawings during the early 1930s, using an "unpremeditated" technique resembling automatic drawing, then virtually abandoned art, completing only a single portrait after World War II.
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1. There used to be a nice batch of her paintings at the

National Museum of Women in the Arts in our nation's capital.

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2. WOW! Thankyou

I'd not heard of her before but I really like her work!

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3. I hadn't heard of her either, then I visited the NMWA (whose website

seems to be down) in the late eighties and, wham, couldn't believe how great she was.

Later I found a reference to her paintings in a little essay by Truman Capote wherein he described a visit with Brooks' companion Natalie Barney and his first view of the paintings.

I finally found a book about her with nice reproductions of her paintings. She's not mentioned much in surveys of 20th Century art.