A CHORUS AT THE CLOISTER

Previously unknown watercolor by Faun Roberts provisionally dated 1918 - 1920

Following the steep Apennine escarpments to Romagna, slowly finding my way to the coastal town of Balleria I inadvertently turned a quiet vacation into a caffeinated vigil at the municipal archives.

I can't seem to get away from Faun Roberts.

With rising remorse, I left my boyfriend behind as soon as I realized that Faun Roberts had spent considerable time after World War I in a sanatorium in San Mauro Pascoli. It's funny how coincidence is cousin to fate.

I had packed a light bag for a long weekend of intimacy - a bathing suit, a few t-shirts, a few toiletries and a two historical novels by Antonio Spurcus - and with the best intentions set out to put my work behind me. 

Fortunately destiny delivered a rapturous surprise.

On page 606 of Spurcus's underrated opus "Downsized Phials of Morphine," there is a short aside, referencing "the trifling scribbles of Faun Roberts ... small amusements from her Adriatic confinement."

What "Adriatic confinement" was he talking about!? I had no idea whether this was based on fact or was a novelistic invention, but I was determined to find out.

The long weekend turned into three months and the boyfriend turned into the ex-boyfriend but through the shears of academic detective work I found the Holy Grail.

The details will appear in my book but suffice it to say, I found over 200 gorgeous watercolors that have eluded collectors and historians for close to 100 years!

ORNITHOLOGY

David Schoffman and I spotting a small flock of Red-billed Choughs, l"Isle-Adam, France 2012

On a recent trip to Auvers-sur-Oise researching my book on Faun Roberts I ran into the Los Angeles painter David Schoffman. We have known each other as nodding acquaintances for several years - we share several mutual friends - but this was the first time I spent any significant time with him. I've always heard that he was a pompous, pedantic blowhard and so prior to this trip, even though we live in the same city, I never really made an effort to get to know him.

It turns out that we have two important things in common. The first being Faun Roberts.

Schoffman, through some fluke (his version) or through some marginally legal series of transactions (my version), owns two paintings by Roberts. Princes Polyxena from 1926 and the recently authenticated extremely large Victims Demand Allegiances, also from '26. 

Victims Demand Allegiances, oil on canvas, 120 x 84 inches. 1926 (collection of David Schoffman)

Princes Polyxena, distemper on panel, 1926 (collection of David Schoffman)

Schoffman claims that his affinity for Roberts dates back to his student days in Paris. His classmate at l'Académie, Currado Malaspina was an avid enthusiast of modern expatriate painters such as Stanley Wm. Hayter, Patrick Henry Bruce and Max Weber. In the process of searching private collections for long forgotten works they unexpectedly came across a few small drawings by Faun Roberts. Malaspina has always diminished the importance of this discovery referring to Roberts as "une amatrice agaçante" but Schoffman, I was pleasantly surprised to learn, felt otherwise.

Upon returning to L.A. I visited David's cramped Culver City apartment and lo and behold, hung crookedly on single rusted nails, in a room that serves inefficiently as both pantry and office, side by side as if waiting for a tram are the two stunning Roberts' !!

I still find Schoffman pompous and pedantic but he does have a few redeeming attributes.

Oh, and the second thing we have in common?

Birdwatching.

from David Schoffman's birdwatching sketchbook #103

A TERRACE OF CONCEPTS TOO LONG IGNORED

My Cathedral, Faun Roberts, Oil on panel, 1925

Faun Roberts braved the treacherous early twentieth century seas to redefine herself both as an artist and as a woman in a radically laicized France. 1902 Paris was still the Paris of La Belle Époque, a vibrant city where a 31 year old Marcel Proust was translating John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens and Rainer Maria Rilke was under-employed as an amanuensis for Auguste Rodin.  Roberts soon enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and studied with, among others Jacques-Émile Blanche and Walter Richard Sickert. (Among her fellow students were Hans Hoffmann and fellow American expatriate Dennis Strairchild).

An aspect of early 20th century modernism that has been unjustly neglected is the profound influence of what was known at the time as "littérature fessée" or "flagellation literature." Newly published books like George H. Stock's  The Magnetism of the Rod and Jean de Villiot's La Femme et son Maître were widely read in artistic circles and young Faun Roberts was no exception in her avid (and dare I say puerile) interest. 

Books like these, published in a stridently secularized Paris gave visual artists the "permission" and the legitimate opportunity to explore more explicitly a new vocabulary of erotic imagery. What is clear however is that long before her male counterparts expressed their libidinous ideas in paintings and prints, Faun Roberts did so in a manner that was both shockingly frank and brazenly autobiographical.

War Finds Peace at Last, Faun Roberts, Oil on canvas, 1924

Silenced Beast

Hearts, Sustenance, oil on panel, Faun Roberts 1922

The vivid pudenda - four emphatic brushstrokes holding an illusion aloft like winded sheaves - was something Faun Roberts' male contemporaries either clumsily obscured or childishly mocked. Picasso treated female genitalia like jujus or at best like grinning mascots, the silent trophies that were his droit du seigneur. Lesser artists avoided the subject entirely. Faun Roberts was the very first visual artist to take female sexuality as a primary subject and to treat it with a proud, unambiguous dignity.

My research into the life and work of Roberts, an uncharted slag heap of prevarication, gossip and venomous volumes of male condescension, continues to be a glorious revelation. Her unfailing strength, her stirring determination and her sheer unparalleled talent is simply staggering. The constellation of women that surrounded and supported her - Joelle Mony, Gertrude Stein, Filida Doro and Mary Cassatt, to name just a few - were the twigs upon the branch of an immeasurable vision.

That vision is precisely what has paved the path for generations of women artists to come.

YOUNG FAUN ROBERTS

Ma Jolie, Faun Roberts, Oil on burlap, 1923

Faun Roberts was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1882. Her father, Arthur Canon Roberts was a famous Pentecostal pastor who was fond of fasting and had a propensity for eschatological visions of fires, floggings and midtribulation rapture. Faun, who at an early age developed a healthy skepticism regarding her father's glossolalic growls and mutterings was characterized by her kin as "difficult." A scrawny, introverted poetry writing teenager, young Faun recognized in herself early on, a strong, passionate attraction to women.

In 1902, Faun Roberts boarded the SS La Touraine for Le Havre and never set foot in America again.

SAPPHO

Faun Roberts (1882 - 1946) was gay and that may have contributed to the eclipse of her legacy. Her explicitly homoerotic subject matter probably didn't help much either. Her most famous (or infamous) series of paintings "Hymns to Aphrodite" have never been exhibited in their entirety and are still rarely mentioned in the conventional academic renderings of early 20th art.

Hymn to Aphrodite #14, Faun Roberts, 1922

The enterprise of redressing this gross historical injustice has fallen upon me and I embrace it with eager enthusiasm. With the generous help of the Bernard and Bernice Schrittberg Foundation I have been able to carry on my work for the past two years. I have had access to over 29 private and public collections, countless state and national archives, (including those in former communist countries) and have interviewed about a dozen surviving intimates of the artist herself.

What emerges is a portrait of a woman of great depth, passion and complexity. In addition to her pioneering artistic vision, her prodigious command of the formal graphic language of modernism, Faun Roberts was also a feminist icon avant le lettre.

I can easily and honestly say that Faun Roberts has radically and definitively altered my identity as a woman.

The Lack of Anxiety of Influence (when it comes to women)

American expatriate artist Faun Roberts first met George Rouault in a bar in Berne. Roberts was taking the cure at the notorious Abführmittel Sanatorium on the outskirts of Koniz. Roualt was in Switzerland looking for God. 

Considering their differences, they hit it off famously.

Santir ma Chatte, Faun Roberts, 1924

Who exactly influenced whom is an issue that till now has been under-addressed. The marginalization of female artists in general and Faun Roberts in particular is much more than just an egregious academic oversight. It speaks of a culture of gender bias that stretches well into the mid eighteenth century. Whether it deals with Delacroix and Cecilia Montoya, the until now little known Romantic painter and librettist known mostly for her frescoes in l'église de Sainte-Agnès de l'Oreille in Charleroi, or Bouguereau and his infinitely more talented model Filida Tonerea whose sketches supplied many if not most of the compositional ideas behind La Naissance de Vénus and Nymphaeum. And of course when it concerns the relationship between Faun Roberts and the likes of Rouault, Picasso, Dufy and Derain.

Reine de Cirque, George Rouault

The images are now finally allowed to speak for themselves and it is only a matter of time for the historical record to be corrected. I can only hope that the auction houses follow suit.

After receiving his masters degree in critical theory from CalArts in 2009, my young colleague Spark Boon took a fateful trip to Paris. It was there through a chance meeting with Tuvia Van Oles, grand nephew to the great American expatriate artist Faun Roberts that he began his obsessive search for the forgotten women artists of early Modernism.

Spark Boon at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2011

Through Van Oles, the young scholar Boon was granted access to the entire Faun Roberts estate. For months he pored over her papers, her correspondences, her diaries and even her tax returns. But the truly great boon to Boon was the ready availability of Faun Roberts' infamous works on paper.

Dreams of Phaon the Ferryman, oil on rough rag paper, Faun Roberts 1923

It's been said that Picasso's erotic works from the 50's and 60's would not have been possible without his intimate knowledge of Faun Roberts and her work.

Pablo Picasso

Spark Boon has made a major contribution to our understanding of the critical role women played in the history of 20th century art. I look forward to the publication of his dissertation.

THE FORESTS OF ESTONIA

When I moved from Estonia to Los Angeles I was only four years old but memories of the dead wood of Western Taiga are indelibly etched in my imagination.

Orestia Shestov at a friend's studio, 2012

My work as an artist and writer is rooted in those memories. No strip mall, no freeway, no glimmering marquee can efface those memories.