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.