ACADEMIA IS NO STROLL IN THE TUILERIES

If the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts had been a bit more famous the scholarly journals and the doctoral dissertations would be rife with speculation as to who served as her models.

But unfortunately the subject never comes up.

While every two-bit alternative art journal editor can identify Marie-Thérèse Walter and Giacometti's Caroline is as recognizable as a George Washington postage stamp, Roberts' subjects continue to be wrapped in an unnecessary enigma.

And while the universities continue to endow prestigious chairs in their ever-expanding Gender Studies departments, the historical focus continues to be that of feminist grievance rather than female genius.   

I continue to be amazed how my research is being constantly  eclipsed by fancy critiques of Western hegemonic axes of psycho-symbolic, patriarchal narrative structuralism.

You would think I invented this character of Faun Roberts out of whole cloth!! 

Here is a wonderfully lyrical early 20th century modernist painter, living in Paris and hobnobbing with all the heavy hitters and to the academy its as if she never existed!

Well here's a bombshell for you.

Untitled, oil on Canvas, Faun Roberts 1929

In the course of my research I found on the back of this small oil painting from 1929 an inscription that if you hold it up to the light it unmistakably reads: "La Maison des Amis des Livres: AM SB"

That's right sports fans, Adrienne Monier and Sylvia Beach!  

Can I have tenure now!!??

BURNT TOASTMASTERS

The bridge chair and the conference room are bound together by an arranged marriage brokered by an accountant. It's a loveless relationship that owes its endurance to simple self-evident utility.

The conference room is typically too cold and redundantly illuminated by a crisp metallic sheen of humming fluorescents. The bridge chair speaks for itself, evoking the provisional informality of a card game and the necessary link between buttock and floor.

Together with the podium, the clip-lamp and the Powerpoint, the academic symposium is a bloodless anti-aesthetic crucible that can lull even the most ardent insomniac into a growling torpor. 

I've attended my fair share of these snooze-fests, most recently the annual Albuquerque Conference on the Ontological/Phenomenolgical Aspects of Modern Art History. Speaker after speaker presented conclusive evidence to the truth of Karl Kraus' observation that "stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match." My colleague, Currado Malaspina calls it "the passionate restatement of the obvious ... albeit with footnotes."

I was there to deliver a paper of my own: Faun Roberts and the Kierkegaard Revival and I can assure you I was the sharpest knife in that dull southwestern drawer. 

It's not that my paper was terribly interesting or original - I basically wrote it on the plane from Cambridge to New Mexico -it was simply the clever way in which I delivered it. So much has to do with facial expression and body language. I practice by staring into the mirror, deadpan with folded arms and then parsimoniously dispense a few well-timed smiles just to keep it human.

When I speak I project, almost barking at times. It never really matters what one says so long as it's said loudly. Sometimes I practice by reading the owner's manual of my parents 1982 Volvo station wagon.

It's all about projecting authority and conviction, everything else is gilding the lily.

The Master Class, Faun Roberts, 1931

The proof of it all is that I focused my talk on Faun Roberts' relatively weak 1931 painting The Master Class. I argued that the work was influenced by Roberts' friendship with the poet Georg Trakl and their collaborative Gedanken Gedichte that was published in the literary journal Der Brenner. People came up to me afterwards and gushed about how inspiring I was, how fluidly my argument was reasoned and how I turned a dissonant conclusion into a brilliantly inevitable denouement.

The only problem with the whole thing was that I found out later (through Wikipedia) that Georg Trakl died of a cocaine overdose on in 1914 ... the year Faun Roberts turned 15!

Oops!

HOBSON'S CHOICE: PERISH OR PERISH

Ulterior motives and pressing publishing deadlines are the choke-holds of academia. So much sloppy solipsistic drivel is churned out yearly, one can only marvel at our tolerant capacity for intellectual sewage. But just when you think you've seen it all some new artifact of high-minded onanism finds your mandible plunging like a gavel.

A certain professor by the name of Min T. Teerapat from Humber College in Toronto has recently offered a new and eccentric interpretation of the origins of American expatriate artist Faun Roberts' iconic imagery. Published in the Canadian periodical Mardi, professor Teerprat mentions me by name and cites, rather mockingly, some of my well-known (and thoroughly researched) conclusions.

Prominent among his hysterical hobbyhorses is my claim that Roberts' radical reversal of the "male gaze," so destabilized conventional avant-garde expectations that there was a concerted effort among French cultural critics to suppress her work. 

Wicked Illuminations (Rome version) Faun Roberts, oil on linen, 1931

I have always maintained that the influential taste-makers of the time felt threatened by Roberts' overtly empowered sensuality and saw it as an aggressive refutation of their neat, linear, heterosexual rendering of Modernism's relentless macho march.

Treepath somehow finds this thesis laughable. He dismisses it without so much as a shrug and offers in its place a simplified depiction of a cross-cultural anxiety of influence. He trots out a little known 19th century northern Japanese calligrapher by the name of Hidesada Yukidoke who supposedly compiled a small compendium of caricatures in a notebook, known until now only to specialists.

Hidesada Yukidoke, ink on rice paper, 1885 (Courtesy of Gakuin Women's College Manuscript Archive)

He seems to think that the entire Left Bank knew all about Yukidoke's work and that Roberts' injudicious imitations are, in his words "merely trifling simulacra." 

That this professor Teapot has a job, much less gets published, is just more evidence of white male privilege!

Needless to report, Mardi rejected my rebuttal so I'm once again reduced to whistling in the rain.

LONG DIVISION FOR AN IMPERFECT POLYMATH

Weeping Doxies is presumed to be the last painting Faun Roberts completed before her death.

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. 

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. 

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.

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