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1/27/2016

Brooks, Romaine - Smithsonian American Art Museum

Romaine Brooks

Romaine Brooks lived most of her life in Paris where she was a leading figure of an artistic counterculture of upper-class Europeans and American expatriates, many of whom were creative, bohemian, and homosexual. Brooks crafted an androgynous appearance that challenged conventional ideas of how women should look and behave, and these ideas extended to many of the portraits she painted in the 1920s, which are some of her best known works.
Early in her career, 


>> Romaine Brooks 1874 Rom † 1970 Nizza

adopted a muted palette primarily of black, white, and various subtle shades of gray, sometimes with highlights of ochre, umber, or red, strongly reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler whose paintings she admired. Her first exhibition in 1910 at the prestigious Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris established her reputation as an artist. One of the paintings, Azalées Blanches (White Azaleas), a nude reclining on a couch in the artist’s studio, elicited comparisons to Francisco Goya’s Naked Maja and Edouard Manet’s Olympia by contemporary critics. A painting from 1914, La France Croisee, a symbolic image of France at war, was compared to Eugéne Delacroix’s masterful Liberty Leading the People. Working in Paris at a time when Pablo Picasso and other modernist artists were challenging traditional approaches to art, Romaine Brooks maintained her independence from contemporary art movements.
In the 1930s, Brooks began writing an autobiographical manuscript titled No Pleasant Memories, and created a number of imaginative line drawings as illustrations. The book was never published, and Brooks all but abandoned her art career by the late 1930s.
Brooks’ exploration of gender and sexuality in many of her portraits led to renewed interest in her work in the 1980s, and her powerful images are still compelling to audiences today. This exhibition (17.06.2016 - 10.10.2016) brings together 50 paintings and drawings from the museum’s permanent collection. Toward the end of her life, Brooks made several generous donations of paintings and drawings to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Because she was independently wealthy and did not depend on her art for income, some of her most important paintings were still in her possession. Several of these paintings and the drawings have not been seen for decades and are included in this exhibition. (Text: Smithsonian America Art Museum)