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| 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.
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