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.