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| Ma Jolie, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1922 |
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.
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