MAL COMPRIS

Ma Jolie, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1922

"Je suis seulement la taille de mon lit." (I am only the size of my bed).

Faun Roberts never quite mastered the French of Racine and Flaubert but she had an operable command of the argot of Montparnasse. Her circle included expatriates like Modigliani (whom she detested), Gris (whom she pitied) and Pascin (whose talent she envied but eventually learned to love).

Like most of the voluntarily exiled Roberts was drawn to the margins of society and the freedoms that were found there. Paris in the 20's had a thriving burlesque scene and one of the most popular nightclubs was Le Coup de Fouet owned by the legendary Vibescu Mony. On any given night one could watch circus animals waltzing with transvestites, midgets balancing full beakers of absinthe on their noses while marching in military formation, short salirophilian operettas performed by young men wearing mud-smeared nun's habits and fake mustachios or high stakes omorashi tournaments that typically included actors, writers and politicians.    

There's no denying that Roberts had a taste for the deviant. Her work definitely speaks to her obsessions but neither glorifies nor fetishizes them. A woman in a leather corset was merely a pretext for the formal analysis of a bare, white rectangle of canvas. 

And that, I insist, is the true genius of Faun Roberts. Despite her loaded subject matter she was essentially an abstract painter. Her ability, as the critic Orpheus Eglantine described it at the time, to "lure lyric from the lurid" was indeed her greatest strength. That she is known today simply as "l'artiste Américaine qui était une obsédé sexuelle" is a travesty of scholarship and a myopic rendering of a deeply complex and intellectual painter.

CYTHEREA OF THE CARREFOUR VAVIN

I must confess that despite my unqualified enthusiasm for the idea of Faun Roberts - the thoroughly delectable notion that as early as the nineteen twenties there was a strong, revolutionary female artist working confidently and courageously within the School of Paris - sometimes certain individual works are simply too outrageous, too provocative and downright too smutty, even for me. I have to constantly remind myself that Roberts was a woman who was not content to merely wallow under the shadow of Picasso and Matisse but stubbornly insisted on operating on a parallel and equal level with them.

This ineluctable fact may go a long way in explaining the highly charged and contentious series of small works with the intoxicating title, Onanisme Profonde.

Troisième Onanisme Profonde, Oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1924

These are twelve paintings corresponding to the twelve apostles, each graphically depicting a method of self-gratification. The image above represents a more or less conventional approach toward the task while the other eleven are of increasing ingenuity and include, unsurprisingly, elements of still-life as well.

These pictures were meant to shock and they did.

Deuxième Onanisme Profonde, Oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1924

I believe what Roberts meant to say with these works was that capturing the concupiscent in paint was not the exclusive bailiwick of her male contemporaries. The monopoly of the male gaze was as yet uncontested and an unspoken, painterly Droit du seigneur was suffered by even the most accomplished women of the day.

Faun Roberts was a pioneer, a brave baptizing broad who dared to bare her vagina dentata at the Montparnasse boys club and managed to produce some of the most disturbing modernist images of the early twentieth century.

We owe her a tremendous debt.

QUIETING THE DULL VOICES OF SKEPTICISM

Many of my colleagues have questioned my obsession with the dubious legacy of Faun Roberts. Some remain thoroughly unconvinced of her merit as an artist. Others see my advocacy as a form of special pleading, promoting a thesis of questionable virtue in order to enhance my own career, (full disclosure: I am up for tenure). There are even some who suspect that through Roberts' work I am enacting a vicarious, sexual displacement, using the unsung artist as an erotic proxy, a kind of surrogate strumpet or an inaccessible id. This last accusation is the most enervating as it assumes I suffer from some sort of poverty of prurience or an irreconcilable deficit of ardency and desire.

I can assure you, nothing could be further from the truth (and perhaps more on that in a future post).

What draws me to the life and work of Faun Roberts is the swooning clarity of her vision. She was a pure, unfiltered vessel of indignation. In the few short years that she lived in Paris she erected in paint a sacred sibylline shrine to a form of sexual expression that was still, at the time, very much of a taboo. That she did so in a pictorial idiom that was in its nascent state of conceptual development makes her work even more extraordinary and even more revolutionary.

L'Oubli du Blasphème, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1929 (private collection)

One could easily depreciate Roberts' mechanical mastery or even her formal dexterity, seeing her idiomatic visual lexicon as evidence of inadequate facility or clumsy execution but it would be a gross miscarriage of judgement to ignore the unequivocal concrete nature of her artistic point of view. Each one of her works is a categorical manifesto for shameless, libertine, wicked female transgression. There is simply nothing even remotely like it within the entire canon of early Modernist history.

So to my leery, incredulous colleagues who remain agnostic at best and distrustful at worst, I have only this to say:

In the Paris of the 20's and 30's, the instruments of innovation were available almost exclusively to men. Rivalry and perfidy were as rampant as syphilis and equally malevolent. As a gay woman Faun Roberts stood courageously alone within this cauldron of wrinkled revolution. With a clear, coherent and beautiful vision she created some of the most forceful images reflecting our fluid and troubling time.

Even in the antique light of retrospect, her legacy echos with the undying dignity of courage, prescience and unbridled genius.

A CAUTIONARY NOTE TO THE ANOINTED

On one thing Vladimir Putin and I agree: One must exercise caution when claiming the mantle of exceptionalism. Believe me, having been born in Estonia, there is no love lost between me and the former KGB boss but his trenchant remarks on choseness have more than a balmy whiff of truth.

Take for example the subject of my doctoral dissertation, the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts. While she lived in Paris from 1919 to 1934, the idea that the center of the art world would migrate elsewhere would have been inconceivable. That the aesthetic hegemony of Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Leger would be contested seemed at the time to be about as likely as a swift French capitulation to an invading German army.    

Concentrated power, and yes, even intellectual power, tends to expire like melted ice. It's time for a radical revision of the history of Modernism. It's time to challenge the canonical narrative of the School of Paris and recognize that Faun Roberts has been unjustly dwarfed by her more famous contemporaries.

Chuchoté de Soeur, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1931

It is only the entrenched interests of the hubristic academy that prevents the correction of this gross injustice. I dare say that Roberts' nationality and gender have deprived her of her rightful place as one of that generation's most important painters. I call upon both my male and my female colleagues to take a fresh look at the historical record.  Void of malice, preconception or professional anxiety I believe that after examining the precise chronologies of influence, the extensive correspondences and the unexpurgated catalogues raisonnés the inevitable conclusion will be reached.

Faun Roberts was one of the prime catalysts for the development of 20th century European painting. Without Roberts the shape of Modernism would have been dramatically different and probably less interesting. The hard truth is both vivid and damning.

 It was a truly exceptional American woman who was the father of Modern Art!

EN VACANCES

 In 1919, a pebble's toss from the crystalline Martian red peaks of the Aiguilles Rouges, Faun Roberts had her Road to Damascus moment. It was there in Chamonix, shortly after the Great War and skiing as sport was returning to the European cascades.

Hollow Persuasion, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1920 (Private collection)

After the canons had been temporarily quelled, the Haute-Savoie became a hotbed of atheism and anarchism. It was in Alby-sur-Chéran where Guillet fled to avoid conscription and where he ultimately completed his masterful Bildungsroman "Le Problème avec les Filles." Antoine Dota, the now forgotten composer of subversive operetti, held court in Présilly, living lavishly in a sumptuous and dilapidated villa he inherited from his reactionary grandfather, Gianmaria Dota. And most famously or notoriously, it was in Marcellaz-Albanais where Rougier, Barnier and Cauvet plotted their failed assassination attempt of Ferdinand Foch.

Ferdinand Foch

 Faun Roberts may of may not have come across these characters, but there is little doubt that on the foot of the French Alps revolutionary change was  flowing as freely as the springs of Évian-les-Bains.

It was quite by accident that the first of Roberts' so-called sapphic paintings was completed in Chamonix.  

Anactória, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1919 (Private collection)

Anactória began as a more or less conventional landscape when the famous blizzard of 1919 covered the area around Mont Blanc in a blanket of blinding white. Looking for relief, Roberts enlisted Marie-Claude Bidoni, daughter of the proprietor of Chalet Mercerie to pose for a portrait.

And in a hot flash of libidinous light, Saul became Paul and Faun Roberts found, at last, her subject matter. 

FLESH IS THE NOOSE THAT SWALLOWS THE STING

Faun Roberts would have been amused witnessing the gradual legislative legitimization of the homosexual lifestyle. To her the words 'gay' and 'marriage' were oxymoronic. But such is the hum of time.

To Roberts, life was meant to be led fiercely and fast. An uncompromising sybarite, the world of the senses was an ants nest of accreting pleasures. What Faun Roberts loved most, even more than making art, were beautiful, sexy women.

Sospiro, oil on canvas, 92 x 40 inches. Faun Roberts, 1929

I strongly feel that had Roberts not crammed herself so deeply within the furrows of her sexuality, had she not indulged herself so wantonly in her erotic appetites she might have competed more credibly with her contemporaries Braque, Derain, the Delaunays and Picasso. She was severely stymied by her subject matter. As beautiful and as elegantly profane as her paintings from the 20's are, one is left with the impression that she never managed to deliver upon her promise.

It was Gertrude Stein herself who described Roberts as one "chained to the islands of the inner-thigh," and I too think a dose of the Diotima might have served her well. I suppose it's another dazzling case of historical 'what-if.'