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.