WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

A loss of faith, in spite of itself, is an expression of faith. Faced with the unfailing fist of mortality, acquitting oneself of the succor of hope is a defiant submission toward fate.

Faun Roberts was that rare early 20th century woman who with an unyielding obstinacy and a mulish instinct for risk defied the dominion of both god and man and declared herself a lesbian.

Sonia Delaunay, Rythme Coloré, 1946

In my extensive research on this long neglected artist I have reached the conclusion that had Roberts made the fateful decision to "pass" she would have entered the annals of art history like her contemporaries Sonia Delaunay and Georgia O'Keeffe.

But she didn't and as a result she remains a footnote, an addendum and a pedantic afterthought followed by an asterisk. 

Her faith in faithlessness is another matter entirely. In 1920's Paris, with the exception of Max Jacob and Paul Claudel few modernists professed any of the prevailing Catholic pieties. In other words, to depict without irony an article of theological confession would be to canonize oneself as a hapless retrograde. And here too Roberts showed herself to be both pioneering and bold.

Without the slightest nod toward what Chalpeux called "the awe of creed" (la crainte de croyance), Roberts managed to marry sapphism with saintliness with her same-sex Pieta paintings.

Credo ergo timorem Domini, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1931

I'm not equipped to argue the relative exegetical merits of painting a female Jesus but I merely wish to point out the audacity inherent in such a pictorial gambit. There is simply nothing by either Picasso or Matisse that can credibly compare with this sort of ponderous imagery.

Maybe Faun Roberts presciently placed her faith in someone like me to excavate her oeuvre from the crypt of obscurity and unjustified eclipse.

Maybe I've finally allowed the fist of mortality to loosen its grip around this important woman and her invaluable contribution to the development of modern painting. 

I hope to God I did!

TRAGEDY THEN FARCE

One of the perks of assistant professorship is free, easy access to JSTOR. For those of you who are not familiar with the sausage making of academic research, JSTOR is to documents what a velvet rope is to a bouncer - or something like that.

Anyway, the other day while I was desperately searching for the original French text of American expatriate artist Faun Roberts' book length unpublished narrative poem The Air That Only Partially Drips In Blood (L'Air qui coule est partiellement sanglante) I stumbled upon something entirely unexpected.

In a 1929 letter Roberts wrote to Sonia Delaunay (inviting her to participate in a forthcoming exhibition at the Trocadero) she uncharacteristically inventoried a comprehensive accounting of all her personal art world grudges.

Picasso was "a prick with a brush" (un pénis avec un pinceau).
André Breton was a "sniveling bolshevik with short-man's disease." 
Gertrude Stein was "a clubby, chubby Jewess" (une juive clanique et graisse).
Diaghilev was "a pimp disguised as a patron."

And the list goes on and on for about 13 juicy pages!

Anti-Semite, sure, but who knew Roberts was such a petty little bitch?
  
Who knew she was even funny?!

Anyway, it suddenly dawned on me that the date of the letter (March 14th, 1929) was the very same date that she completed her epic oil on burlap visual manifesto Why I Hate America!

Pourquoi je hais l'Amérique, oil on burlap, 121 x 115 cm. Faun Roberts, 1929

 It has long been assumed that the figures depicted in this major work were powerful metaphors for the United States and Canada - as if a painting this complex could be reduced to a hockey game. I now suspect that instead of thinking of the work as a parable - an understandable misdirection considering its ponderous title - it may be more useful to think of the work as a literal depiction and critique of the stage and screen actress Mary Pickford.

Still from The Mender of Nets, 1912. Mary Pickford is on the left.

The uncanny similarities of Pourquoi je hais l'Amérique's subtle compositional deviations and G. W. Bitzer's cineamtograhy in D. W. Griffith's The Mender of Nets leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Amérique in question refers to none other than Miss Pickford who was referred to at the time as "America's Sweetheart." 

Even the initials G.W.D.W. can be seen as an encoded clue to the work's ultimate significance.

"Great Works Don't Win" was a frequent rallying cry of the Parisian avant-garde at that time. The reference is to the near impossibilty of truly important art ever being accepted by an intellectually atrophied critical and curatorial class. Then as now a prevailing ethos of fear and greed tended to bury whatever art deemed too complicated and hermetic.

And speaking of burying - engraved on Roberts' tombstone in Père-Lachaise underneath the epigraph by Jarry that reads "Les vieillards, il faudrait les tuer jeunes," are the very initials in question,  G.W.D.W!

Mon dieu!! 

THE BODHI BUSH

In the spring of 1924 American expatriate artist Faun Roberts traveled to the north London suburb of Wembley to view the immense British Empire Exhibition. She was part of a larger, informal delegation made up of artists, writers and amateur diplomats.

Her initial interest in the exhibition was negligible but when Dudley Murphy and Man Ray offered to pay her expenses she jumped at the chance. She had been in Paris for ten long years and was dying to get away. Her constant poverty and compromised health made travel both impractical and prohibitive.

The music of Elgar was everywhere and together with the overbearing atmosphere of British triumphalism, the experience seemed more comical than anything else.

The Choingnt Dakini, Tibetan, 16th century

That was until she saw the Choingnt Dakini and her attitude shifted dramatically.

Coming from a strongly Episcopalian Midwestern background Roberts had little prior knowledge of the Eastern religious traditions. Through Soutine and Stein she had a vague idea of Judaism and through Picasso she even flirted with Catholicism but about Buddhism she knew absolutely nothing.

Seeing the voluptuous female deity Choingnt with her rounded breasts and coquettish pose completely redefined for Roberts the meaning of the word sublime. If it wasn't a religious experience it was something damn near close because for the next 13 months Roberts made no less than 75 paintings that referred directly to Esoteric Buddhism's emphasis on gender malleability.

Most of the paintings have been lost for in the spirit of worldly detachment Roberts destroyed all but a few of the works. Those that remained are hard to track down but I was recently contacted by the son of the famous Detroit collector Mont Tehelngut. He had learned of my work through the internet and had contacted me in order to assess the value of the two Roberts' that were in his father's collection.

One was clearly a fake.

The other was this!

The Begging Bowl, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1925

PLEDGE WEEK

Former Secretary of State Henry Stimson famously said that "Gentlemen don't read each others mail." 

What has proven patently false in diplomacy is something of a gray area in art history.

How useful is an artist's personal, biographical narrative in the decoding of their aesthetic and conceptual intent? Does knowing that Degas was a bigoted anti-Dreyfusard inform us at all about his ballerinas and race horses? Is Léger's communism important to his reading of synthetic cubism? Must we scavenge through the diaries and letters of Micah Carpentier in order to reach a clearer understanding of his cryptic paper bag drawings?

Micah Carpentier, 1968

As I write the definitive biography of the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts I struggle with these frustrating questions.

Of course I want to include every deviant detail of this famously nymphomaniac woman. How else would I be able to appeal to the general reader? But would I be betraying my subject and trivializing my work by doing so?

 My publisher assures me that I am well within the acceptable precincts of scholarly practice. What else would she say? She's already negotiating with a few production companies on a cinematic adaptation of my still unwritten book.

Letting the work speak for itself can be a costly wager. The pleasures and rewards of beautiful painting are increasingly inaccessible to the contemporary eye.

Le Sommeil dans le Chagrin, Oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1928

Without the help of a neat little wall label, a clever paraphrase and or pop cultural reference point, visual art, in its static complexities is beyond the comprehension of the average college-educated NPR listener.

And so, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot, I'm inclined to leave a few scraps of meat to quiet the family dog. When I tell my story I'll be sure to include plenty of humid yet irrelevant details about the indefatigable appetites of Faun Roberts.

Who knows - I might get to appear on the Today Show. 

BUGS BUNNY'S TROPIC OF CONJECTURE

Toward the end of Faun Roberts' life a halo of despair tainted her happiness and tempered her ambition. By the mid 1930's her friends Derain and Braque were flush and famous. Her buddy Picasso had joined the Communist Party and asserted his undying solidarity with the working class by giving his chauffeur a generous raise. Erik Satie who was something of a mentor was dead for nearly a decade and André Breton who treated her like a teacup was showing disturbing signs of paranoiac megalomania.

In a word, Roberts' beloved Paris had changed.

It's tough to sustain the lovely disruption of poverty and if it weren't for her close kinship with Henry Miller she would have enjoyed her penury in private.  

Her work took on a darker cast and while one is tempted to see the change through a psychological prism it would be a mistake to over-interpret an artist as sophisticated and as detached as Roberts.

Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1935

I'm inclined to see this late work as a wistful wand waving waywardly West. It's clear that as an expatriate Faun Roberts was never quite at home among the French. From her letters of that period there are clear indications that she was contemplating a return to the States.

Had she not suffered a fatal heart attack while walking her dog on Place du Châtelet,  Roberts might have played a critical role in the development of mid-century American Modernism.

THE PEN MEEKER THAN HISTORY

Ignored by the press during much of her lifetime the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts enjoyed a late surge of interest shortly before she died.

Mild reviews of her irregular exhibitions began to appear in small independent publications in the late 20's. Critics were fair but patronizing, always pointing out that the artist was a woman.

The implication was, of course, that though the work wasn't as intellectually demanding as Braque's or as inventive as Picasso's or as colorful as Matisse's or as symbolic as Sérusier's it was fairly impressive considering the artist's gender. 

Works by Matisse and Picasso from 1927

The fact that Roberts' work had almost no affinity with these better known men never prevented the press from making sloppy generalizations and misleading comparisons.

Works by Faun Roberts from 1927

Though she lived and worked in Paris her work was not unknown in the United States. In 1928 she was included in the now infamous Terminus/Dormer exhibition in what was then the Brooklyn Navy Yard. For many it was the first exposure to French Modernist painting and the critical reception was rather mixed.

Roberts exhibited the enormous L'adorer à genoux, a work now in the collection of Count Altun de Picar.

L'adorer à genoux, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1926

It's worth noting that many of the artists received less than glowing reviews, nonetheless it seems that Roberts bore the brunt of some of the more personal and mean-spirited attacks.

Here is what noted arts columnist Winslow Pethawthorn wrote for the The Herald:

"Lapping the modernist milk like an obedient Siamese, it never seems to occur to the American expatriate that her sources had gone sour. Continental corruption can take many forms. In her case, absinthe would have been the safer course. Perhaps she should lose her brushes, find a husband and leave the beastly business of easel painting to the boys."

Écoute et répète

The aptitude for love is something learned. The slow sinfonietta of touch, the adagio of the amorous abrasion and the crescendi of frenzied release are the animal instincts that in the right hands could be elevated into an art.

Stretching the metaphor into music is a conceit I cannot claim. The above overwrought description is a paraphrase from the 19th century manuel de l'amour of Don Alphonse de Forcalquier. Its strange title Broyage et de Poussée (too euphemistic to be adequately translatable) says it all. 

When Faun Roberts sailed to Le Havre on the S.S. Gordon Freis she had little or no experience in matters of love. A pastor's daughter from rural Pennsylvania, she was taught at an early age how to quiet the trilling of the heart and the tremor of the pudenda.

Nothing stirs the appetite more lavishly than abnegation and nothing yields more fully to abandon than indulgence deferred. No sooner did Roberts reach Paris when she got spanked into the obvious insight that there were greater pleasures in life than church bingo and pie.

De Forcalquier was all the rage on Rue de Renne and Montparnasse was the place where the kettle of heedless copulation smoldered over the most blistering of flames. If ever there were a textbook on the materials and techniques of raunchy misbehavior it was Broyage et de Poussée and the formally monolingual Roberts was quick to conjugate through its knotty and idiosyncratic prose.

If only American students today could learn languages as quickly and as eagerly.

Maybe a textbook illustrated with the works of Faun Roberts would do the trick.   

The Deviating Transcript, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1925

Maybe 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: The taxonomy of change

What drew me at first to the life of Faun Roberts was her humility. Though she traveled through some of the most exclusive artistic and literary circles of the day she never traded upon her connections. Her circle (network) evolved and grew as naturally as barnyard grass and though her friends (contacts) were a pretty classy bunch she never used them to promote her paintings (visual assets) among influential collectors (business-to-business market penetration).

She met Breton through her friend Proust, got to know Appollinare through Max Jacob and befriended Alice B. Toklas through their mutual acquaintance Sarah Bernhardt (like).

It was the time of gazettes, pamphlets and manifestos (aggregation) and one could conceivably present oneself (social media) as being aggressively avant-garde (emotional branding). Instead she quietly pursued her work and developed her ideas (content) while others were busy building their images around frolic and public dissipation (top-of-mind awareness).

She died before she found professional redemption (went viral) and it remains a mystery why her reputation was so thoroughly eclipsed.

Gentle Atthis, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1922

Could it be that someone important had stabbed her in the back?
(Could it be that someone important had stabbed her in the back?)

THOSE WHO CAN DO - THOSE WHO CAN'T WRITE AUTHORITATIVE MONOGRAPHS

As a scholar and an academic I rarely venture far from my desk. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I don't really engage in much physical activity. There's a nice gym here at the Université Paris CM-3 but I never find the time to use it.

Ever since I began my research on the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts I've been consumed and obsessed to such a degree that I've excluded everything else from my life.

Leaning over my laptop from early morning to the wee hours of the night I have silently presided over the softening of my midriff and the slackening of my sinew. Despite the French insistence on turning meals into rituals I have maintained my American habit of treating food like fuel.

I wish I could embody the temperament of Faun Roberts who came to Paris in 1920 and fully acclimated to Gallic culture. She spoke a mellifluous, idiomatic French, became something of an epicurean with an especially discerning palate for fine wines and cognac and consigned the month of August to convivial respite and unproductive relaxation.  

I remain, much to the amusement of my local colleagues, a tiresome and predictable workaholic. 

Of course, none of these colleagues will ever win a Prix Goncourt, a Pulitzer or an Akademi Internationale but then again, none of them seem to care. It's life's quality that interests them, the pursuit of meaningful friendships, delicious food and the luxury of leisure time.

To them 'stress' is not a badge of honor but rather a serious malady in need of redress. To my colleagues who fought valiantly for the 37 hour work week, 'taking the job home' is the stuff of chumps, imbeciles and les grosse crétins.

Alas, if I assume the attitude of the French I may never do justice to my research much less meet the deadlines of my publisher. Tenure is harder to get these days, especially for women and my girlfriend Tessa who started out at the same time as I did just got a Guggenheim only months after receiving a Fulbright.

Do the French actually have a word for ambition? 

LA SOURCE

I've often puzzled over the creative practice of the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts. Part sybarite part recluse one can only speculate on the complexities of her motivation considering the absence of any major physical evidence.

Of the few letters she wrote, most were either lost or destroyed. There are several extant photographs of her but none that show her working in her studio. The one clue that bares witness is a 1930 article in the Belgian periodical Trésors du Cervelet that documented the stages of one of her seminal paintings "My Ghost Came To My Bed, 1930."

What's remarkable about the photos (taken by a young Dora Maar) is seeing the degree to which Roberts was ready to retool, revise and completely rejigger a work in progress.  

By now it is nearly impossible to assert definitively the motives behind Roberts' radical revisions. Some scholars - though I do not by any means count myself among them - read confessional and autobiographical undertones in the shifts and shimmies of Roberts' pictorial tropes.

They see allusions to French symbolist poetry, the speculative science of the fourth dimension and the Theosophical doctrine of cyclic change. They impose upon her imagery Mallarmé's assertion "Oh! rien que lieu commun d'une esthétique." They try to pin the artist down with Poincaré's "successions of different perspectives." And most unlikely of all, they cite Madame Blavatsky's theory of the oversoul to explain the awkward addition of contorting figures struggling in space.

I see it all in formal terms. Faun Roberts was the consummate colorist. She drew with a regal certainty that could rival a Picasso or a Matisse. Her decisions were clearly at the service of design. She was at heart an abstractionist who used, like Balthus, the pretext of sexuality as a means to structurally analyze the rectangle's potential. Her flawless modulations of solids and voids gave her work the concrete presence that was often lacking in her male contemporaries. 

Then again, I don't think that thing in her hand is an electric toothbrush.

DIMINISHED BY DENIAL

Few people recognize the inconvenient fact that shortly before she died the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts took communion at the small 13th century Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church in Paris' 5th arrondissement. She had became rather close to the Catholic poet Paul Claudel, brother to the notorious Camille. One is tempted to speculate that Roberts' conversion was the result of a crosscurrent of Claudelian influence - Paul's conservatism and Camille's madness - but there is little evidence supporting this delicious speculation. It seems rather to have derived by a good old fashioned fear of death. 

The Penitent Magdalene, Sir Peter Lely, 1650

The late work of Faun Roberts is replete with exegetical references. The Gospel of Luke for example cites the women who traveled with Jesus from town to village who had been "cured of evil spirits and diseases." These alleged maladies have been understood as referring to the elevated female libido, something the ancients found particularly threatening. Roberts saw herself as a modern personification of the Penitent Magdalene and like Fra Bartolomeo, renounced her earlier work as sinful and sacrilegious. Fortunately for us, no Savonarola was present to preside over a bonfire of vanities (not to mention the fact that the bulk of Roberts' work was safely stored in the maid's closet of Gertrude and Leo Stein's Paris apartment). 

Penitent Magdalene, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1938

It's hard to know for sure whether the relatively weak quality of Faun Roberts' final paintings was due to the typical decadence of Late Style or the result of the programmatic nature of her self-abnegating iconography. It is difficult to deny however that at the height of her wanton, promiscuous, fully expressed female-centric period, her work was an unrelenting firey witness of sensuality and bliss. 

It was man's art world then.

Is it still a man's art world now? 

RED IS THE HOTTEST COLOR

Like Yasser Arafat and Micah Carpentier, the circumstances surrounding the death of Faun Roberts are shrouded in mystery. 

The traces of mercuric chloride found in her bloodstream point to foul play. Could this pestilence be explained by the deep, lush vermilions that characterized her famous series of paintings The Hall of Decrepit Flames? Roberts reportedly would ground powdered cinnabar by hand in order to make her own paint. A precise level of pigmentation and viscosity was as important to her as were her subjects and her motifs.

She also had one or two ardent and unstable enemies.

The ancient Chinese figured out the toxic formula of heating this most gorgeous of minerals. Benvenuto Cellini was hated enough by his adversaries that they slipped him a mickey of this blighted toxin. Though it wasn't strong enough to kill him it did effectively cure him of the clap.

Faun Roberts may not have been so lucky.

Ginny Retarne

In 1934 at La Champmeslé on Rue de Chabanais Roberts met another American expatriate artist by the name of Ginny Retarne. Their affair was a wanton blaze of rapture and jealous recrimination. Diary entries from that period indicate that their turbulent liaison was not short on brutality and even outright violence. 

Ginny was a small girl, fifteen years younger than Roberts. She had a rough manner, a penchant for swearing and a small collection of Shun carving knives. Neighbors often complained to the préfecture of late night arguments bordering on hysteria. 

Though the evidence is circumstantial at best the Parisian press at the time was rife with odious speculation. In the course of writing my monograph on Roberts, my research assistant Patrice Nguma stumbled upon some incriminating (though far from conclusive) evidence.

Et Tu Ginnae, Oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1934 (private collection)

 A recent cleaning of the seminal Et Tu Ginnae revealed that in the subject's (presumably Ginny Retarne) right hand what was once assumed to be a bright orange dildo is in fact a 32 centimeter Kiritsuke carving knife.

Was this prescience, homeopathic magic, wish fulfillment, anxiety displacement, prophecy or was it simply just another a stirring portrait of an idealized lover seen as Joan of Arc. 

Perhaps we'll never know but all the same the tragic premature demise of this dazzling early American modernist leaves all of us who truly care with the wistful question:

 What if ... ?

ACADEMIC PROBATION

In the arcane world of university presses there's little to no advantage in having an original thought. Every day another lushly illustrated meticulously documented study is published which does little more than rearrange the intellectual furniture. When it comes to a radical reassessment of conventional scholarship, you've got a better chance of seeing print had you written a yoga manual.

After futilely submitting my completed manuscript, Faun Roberts, The Forgotten Founder of Modernism to no less than thirty publishing houses I have decided to edit my book in an attempt to cater to more commercial tastes.
 

A Senate of Screams, Faun Roberts, 1921

The deeply heretical proposition that an unknown LGBTQ woman of extraordinary talent was one of the principal progenitors of 20th century painting was apparently too much for the self-appointed sentinels of scholarship to bare. That a woman had a hand in shaping art history seemed too unlikely to the austere doyens of conventional academia. How, they wondered, could a lesbian with no less of an appetite for deviance than the pallet skipping Picasso or the omnivorously opiated Cocteau lure such rare beauty from desperate, self-destructive dissipation?

Orestia Shestov, 2009

So I'm taking matters into my own hands and I can assure you they'll be a lot more than fifty shades of lechery in this new and improved edition. At this point I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Serious high-mindedness has been dying a slow death for at least a generation and I might as well wake up and smell the fiber optics. When professors blithely boast of binge watching Breaking Bad, you know that Oprah has buried Oxford by any measure of power and significance.

My new working title:

Fondling Faun and the Forbidden Pleasures of Early 20th Century Painting.

Yes, I know it needs work ...

PALPITANT TO PASSION

After five full years, a Fulbright and two generous research grants I think I know more about the early modernist painter Faun Roberts than I know about myself.

I had no idea when I started this biographical project that I would grow so intimate with my subject. Poring over her letters, her diaries, her paintings and drawings has immersed me in a strange, deviant world that both shocked me and filled me with awe. What I did not anticipate when I began this intellectual journey was that I would ultimately grow to truly despise the object of my inquiry.

Gertrude Stein

Roberts was petulant, petty, insecure, vindictive, narcissistic and shamelessly dishonest. The more I learned about her the harder it became to find anything redeeming about her. She may have influenced Picasso but it was with an oily, hubristic disregard. She undoubtedly fed the imagination of Max Jacob but her cruelty nearly drove him mad. Even Gertrude Stein was repelled by her character and I believe that is precisely why she was buried by history and had remained obscure until I rediscovered her.

However, the most disconcerting aspect of this whole enterprise has been my relationship with Roberts' work. After a prolonged period of absolute veneration and wonderment I have reluctantly come to the realization that Roberts was tediously repetitive, redundant, shallow and shrill.

 

The Queen of Cyprus no. 16. Oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1919 (Private collection)

To my horror, what I formally found thrilling I now find utterly repellant. What initially seemed transgressive now seems like formulaic, recycled sapphic scenarios of delicately restrained sexuality. 

 After the initial jolt at discovering early 20th century homoerotic imagery I slowly came to realize that Roberts was merely appropriating 2000 year old Attic vases and Pompeian frescoes. Stein saw this, was mildly amused, purchased a few small drawings but ultimately realized that it was merely a fleeting infatuation. Roberts lacked the rigor of Picasso, the range of Matisse or the graphic brutality of Braque.

After five long years of research I regretfully confess that I have devoted my energy to nothing more that an historical footnote.