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.