Weeping Doxies is presumed to be the last painting Faun Roberts completed before her death.
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| Weeping Doxies, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1934 |
It's a lament of sorts, a requiem for a lifetime of painful obscurity. A tearless dirge in party pinks, queenly greens and powder blues.
It's also a fake.
After consulting with two leading experts on early 20th century modernism, Phyllis Chaver and Amité Ahoova, both scholars of impeccable bona fides, I have concluded that the Doxies, long thought to be Roberts' magum opus, is in fact a counterfeit.
This in no way diminishes the power and originality of the work, it only means that it is worth considerably less than the $410,050 sticker (or sucker) price recently paid by an anonymous collector.
These revelations have thrown an inconvenient wrench in my work. It has forced me to re-examine my entire thesis concerning Roberts' true place in the canon of art history. Paintings that I have spent countless hours examining and evaluating may in fact be by someone else.
This development is almost as important as the questions surrounding the authentication of works by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Carpentier.
But let's get back to the Doxies.
To my eyes the key lies in the handling of the breasts. Roberts used exclusively what was once called "full figured" women. There are neither wisps nor waifs among her models, only the buxom, fleshy and voluptuary met her stout standards for inclusion. Put another way, Faun Roberts' gaze was that of a daydreaming frat boy.
It could very well be that Faun Roberts as we know her never really existed at all. It has been plausibly speculated that another gay American expatriate by the name of Roberta Krief of Creeph also lived in Paris in the 20's and 30's and was also an intimate of Gertrude Stein and Picasso. This Krief or Creeph (scholars differ on her real last name) circulated among the Romanian Dadaists and may have created the character of Faun Roberts in order to manufacture some sort of comic myth. If she did, in fact, invent this fictional épateuse and then walked away anonymously to enjoy her jest at a distance, my twelve years of punishing research has all but been in vain.
My heart has grown weary from the deception.
I am so skeptical of my sources. I see libraries and archives as colonies of sly perjurers and sociopathic grifters. Museums are brothels merchandising our culture and trading in our ignorance. We are all complicit in this charade and now, because of the flagrant duplicity by this alleged Dadaist my work has been rendered irrelevant.
I am now shamefully reduced to a broken bluestocking groping like a lightheaded bantamweight in the academic dark.
It's also a fake.
After consulting with two leading experts on early 20th century modernism, Phyllis Chaver and Amité Ahoova, both scholars of impeccable bona fides, I have concluded that the Doxies, long thought to be Roberts' magum opus, is in fact a counterfeit.
This in no way diminishes the power and originality of the work, it only means that it is worth considerably less than the $410,050 sticker (or sucker) price recently paid by an anonymous collector.
 |
| Two paintings from the 1920's formally attributed to Faun Roberts |
These revelations have thrown an inconvenient wrench in my work. It has forced me to re-examine my entire thesis concerning Roberts' true place in the canon of art history. Paintings that I have spent countless hours examining and evaluating may in fact be by someone else.
This development is almost as important as the questions surrounding the authentication of works by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Carpentier.
But let's get back to the Doxies.
It could very well be that Faun Roberts as we know her never really existed at all. It has been plausibly speculated that another gay American expatriate by the name of Roberta Krief of Creeph also lived in Paris in the 20's and 30's and was also an intimate of Gertrude Stein and Picasso. This Krief or Creeph (scholars differ on her real last name) circulated among the Romanian Dadaists and may have created the character of Faun Roberts in order to manufacture some sort of comic myth. If she did, in fact, invent this fictional épateuse and then walked away anonymously to enjoy her jest at a distance, my twelve years of punishing research has all but been in vain.
My heart has grown weary from the deception.
I am now shamefully reduced to a broken bluestocking groping like a lightheaded bantamweight in the academic dark.
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