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.