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.
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| 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.
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