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.