page_title: Romaine Brooks
section_title: Drawings and later life
hierarchical_section_title: Romaine Brooks / Career / Drawings and later life
caption_attribution_description: English: Image originally published in Queer Places: Retracing the Steps of LGBTQ people around the World Authored by Elisa Rolle
context_page_description: Romaine Brooks, was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued tonal palette keyed to the color gray. Brooks ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism and Fauvism, drawing on her own original aesthetic inspired by the works of Charles Conder, Walter Sickert, and James McNeill Whistler. Her subjects ranged from anonymous models to titled aristocrats. 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.
  Brooks had an unhappy childhood after her alcoholic father abandoned the family; her mother was emotionally abusive and her brother mentally ill. By her own account, her childhood cast a shadow over her whole life. She spent several years in Italy and France as a poor art student, then inherited a fortune upon her mother's death in 1902. Wealth gave her the freedom to choose her own subjects. 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.
context_section_description: In 1930, while laid up with a sprained leg, Brooks began a series of more than 100 drawings of humans, angels, demons, animals, and monsters, all formed out of continuous curved lines. She said that when she started a line she did not know where it would go, and that the drawings "evolve [d] from the subconscious...[w]ithout premeditation." Brooks was writing her unpublished memoir No Pleasant Memories at the same time she began this series of drawings.  Critics have interpreted them as exploring the continuing effect of her childhood on her—a theme expressed even in the symbol she used to sign them, a wing on a spring.  Decades later, at 85, she said, "My dead mother gets between me and life."
  Brooks is thought to have stopped painting by several writers, but she herself tells us that she drew all her life.  She moved from Paris to Villa Sant'Agnese, a villa outside Florence, Italy in 1937, and in 1940—fleeing the invasion of France by Germany—Barney joined her there.  After World War II ended, Brooks declined to move back to Paris with Barney, saying she wanted to "get back to [her] painting and painter's life", but in fact she virtually abandoned art after the war.  She and Barney were involved in promoting her work and arranging gallery and museum placements for her paintings.  She became increasingly reclusive, and while Barney continued to visit her frequently, by the mid-1950s she had to stay in a hotel, meeting Brooks only for lunch.  Brooks spent weeks at a time in a darkened room, believing she was losing her eyesight.  According to (Secrest) She became paranoid, fearing that someone was stealing her drawings and that her chauffeur planned to poison her. However, subsequent research (Langer) leads researchers to believe her fears were not unfounded. In a 1965 letter she cautioned Barney not to lie down on the benches in her garden, lest the plants feed on her life force: "Trees especially are our enemies and would suck us dry." In the last year of her life, she stopped communicating with Barney entirely, leaving letters unanswered and refusing to open the door when Barney came to visit. Her reasons for doing so are referenced in Langer's biography. She died in Nice, France, in 1970 at the age of 96. Brooks is buried in the old English Cemetery in Nice, in a family plot with her mother and her brother St. Mar.
caption: Villa Sant'Agnese, Florence, Italy
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