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.