Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks

By Whitney Chadwick

Book Overview

Amazons in the Drawing Room presents a comprehensive and definitive analysis of the life and art of Romaine Brooks, reproducing for the first time in color thirty-four of the forty nudes and portraits she painted, as well as thirty-seven automatic pen-and-ink drawings. The first female painter since Artemisia Gentileschi in the seventeenth century to portray an ideal of heroic femininity, Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), like her contemporary Gwen John, shaped an image of the androgynous New Woman for the twentieth century.

An American born in Rome, Brooks spent most of her life in Paris. After a brief but passionate romance with the poet Gabriel D'Annunzio, with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship, she turned to relationships with women and to art to express her emerging self. For many years the companion of Natalie Barney, whom the artist depicted as L'Amazone in one of her most famous portraits, Brooks belonged to the international lesbian community that included Compton and Faith MacKenzie, Ren e Vivien, Radclyffe Hall (who immortalized Brooks as the barely fictionalized American painter Venetia Ford in The Forge), and Una, Lady Troubridge.

The milieu Brooks chose was the privileged, often eccentric demi-monde of wealthy aristocrats and expatriate writers, artists, intellectuals, and performers who gathered in Rome, London, Capri, Paris, and Florence. The social circles she traveled in included Somerset Maugham, Norman Douglas, Charles Freer, Count Robert de Montesquiou, Jean Cocteau, Augustus John, Carl Van Vechten, and Ida Rubenstein, several of whom were subjects for Brooks's portraits.

Amazons in the Drawing Room, published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition of Brooks's work--the first since 1971--opening at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in June 2000, provides a fresh context to view Brooks's haunting and compelling art. Whitney Chadwick's overview of Brooks's life and artistic focus and Joe Luchesi's examination of Brooks's portraits and photographs of Russian dancer Ida Rubenstein bring into sharp focus the complex artistic, literary, and political influences that shaped Brooks's sensibility and approach to portraiture.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520225678
• ISBN13: 9780520225671
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 0.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Check it out

If you want to learn about an interesting female artist, check out this book on Romaine Brooks. Love her work.

A beautiful book

A beautiful collection of work from an artist that deserves a much larger audience. I wish I could own an original.

A Good But Incomplete Job on Romaine Brooks

This book presents itself as "comprehensive and definitive" on the art and life of Romaine Brooks but alas falls short of the goal. Sadly, if you've waited 25 plus years for a decent book on Brooks since the extemely inadequate "Thief of Souls" catalogue from the early 1970's and the wonderful "Between Me and Life" biography by Meryle Secrest, this new catalogue will disappoint. My problem with it is that while bragging that it reproduces "34 of the 40 nudes and portraits" Brooks painted-- why, oh why, couldn't they finish the job and reproduce the remaining six? Even if it is a catalogue to a touring show what harm would it have done to add 3 pages of color plates and include the portrait of Paul Morand, the 2nd D'Annunzio protrait, the Carl Van Vechten and so on? Additionally, the book's format lacks the grandeur of Brook's work as it has a small, blockly format. On the plus side the color reproduction is excellent for all but two of the pictures--the D'Annunzio has too much yellow in it, and "the Huntress" is too dark. How many years must we wait to see all of her work reproduced in one large format resplendent volume, preferably on mat paper, and, for some of the pictures, their frames included? Additionally, the two essays are fine but hardly "definitive" as both are heavily indebted to the Secrest biography which is still the most thorough job on Brooks and inexplicably still out-of-print after 25 years. Still if you love Brook's art this is a must have as there is nothing else. Don't miss the show!