DIMINISHED BY DENIAL

Few people recognize the inconvenient fact that shortly before she died the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts took communion at the small 13th century Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church in Paris' 5th arrondissement. She had became rather close to the Catholic poet Paul Claudel, brother to the notorious Camille. One is tempted to speculate that Roberts' conversion was the result of a crosscurrent of Claudelian influence - Paul's conservatism and Camille's madness - but there is little evidence supporting this delicious speculation. It seems rather to have derived by a good old fashioned fear of death. 

The Penitent Magdalene, Sir Peter Lely, 1650

The late work of Faun Roberts is replete with exegetical references. The Gospel of Luke for example cites the women who traveled with Jesus from town to village who had been "cured of evil spirits and diseases." These alleged maladies have been understood as referring to the elevated female libido, something the ancients found particularly threatening. Roberts saw herself as a modern personification of the Penitent Magdalene and like Fra Bartolomeo, renounced her earlier work as sinful and sacrilegious. Fortunately for us, no Savonarola was present to preside over a bonfire of vanities (not to mention the fact that the bulk of Roberts' work was safely stored in the maid's closet of Gertrude and Leo Stein's Paris apartment). 

Penitent Magdalene, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1938

It's hard to know for sure whether the relatively weak quality of Faun Roberts' final paintings was due to the typical decadence of Late Style or the result of the programmatic nature of her self-abnegating iconography. It is difficult to deny however that at the height of her wanton, promiscuous, fully expressed female-centric period, her work was an unrelenting firey witness of sensuality and bliss. 

It was man's art world then.

Is it still a man's art world now? 

RED IS THE HOTTEST COLOR

Like Yasser Arafat and Micah Carpentier, the circumstances surrounding the death of Faun Roberts are shrouded in mystery. 

The traces of mercuric chloride found in her bloodstream point to foul play. Could this pestilence be explained by the deep, lush vermilions that characterized her famous series of paintings The Hall of Decrepit Flames? Roberts reportedly would ground powdered cinnabar by hand in order to make her own paint. A precise level of pigmentation and viscosity was as important to her as were her subjects and her motifs.

She also had one or two ardent and unstable enemies.

The ancient Chinese figured out the toxic formula of heating this most gorgeous of minerals. Benvenuto Cellini was hated enough by his adversaries that they slipped him a mickey of this blighted toxin. Though it wasn't strong enough to kill him it did effectively cure him of the clap.

Faun Roberts may not have been so lucky.

Ginny Retarne

In 1934 at La Champmeslé on Rue de Chabanais Roberts met another American expatriate artist by the name of Ginny Retarne. Their affair was a wanton blaze of rapture and jealous recrimination. Diary entries from that period indicate that their turbulent liaison was not short on brutality and even outright violence. 

Ginny was a small girl, fifteen years younger than Roberts. She had a rough manner, a penchant for swearing and a small collection of Shun carving knives. Neighbors often complained to the préfecture of late night arguments bordering on hysteria. 

Though the evidence is circumstantial at best the Parisian press at the time was rife with odious speculation. In the course of writing my monograph on Roberts, my research assistant Patrice Nguma stumbled upon some incriminating (though far from conclusive) evidence.

Et Tu Ginnae, Oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1934 (private collection)

 A recent cleaning of the seminal Et Tu Ginnae revealed that in the subject's (presumably Ginny Retarne) right hand what was once assumed to be a bright orange dildo is in fact a 32 centimeter Kiritsuke carving knife.

Was this prescience, homeopathic magic, wish fulfillment, anxiety displacement, prophecy or was it simply just another a stirring portrait of an idealized lover seen as Joan of Arc. 

Perhaps we'll never know but all the same the tragic premature demise of this dazzling early American modernist leaves all of us who truly care with the wistful question:

 What if ... ?

ACADEMIC PROBATION

In the arcane world of university presses there's little to no advantage in having an original thought. Every day another lushly illustrated meticulously documented study is published which does little more than rearrange the intellectual furniture. When it comes to a radical reassessment of conventional scholarship, you've got a better chance of seeing print had you written a yoga manual.

After futilely submitting my completed manuscript, Faun Roberts, The Forgotten Founder of Modernism to no less than thirty publishing houses I have decided to edit my book in an attempt to cater to more commercial tastes.
 

A Senate of Screams, Faun Roberts, 1921

The deeply heretical proposition that an unknown LGBTQ woman of extraordinary talent was one of the principal progenitors of 20th century painting was apparently too much for the self-appointed sentinels of scholarship to bare. That a woman had a hand in shaping art history seemed too unlikely to the austere doyens of conventional academia. How, they wondered, could a lesbian with no less of an appetite for deviance than the pallet skipping Picasso or the omnivorously opiated Cocteau lure such rare beauty from desperate, self-destructive dissipation?

Orestia Shestov, 2009

So I'm taking matters into my own hands and I can assure you they'll be a lot more than fifty shades of lechery in this new and improved edition. At this point I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Serious high-mindedness has been dying a slow death for at least a generation and I might as well wake up and smell the fiber optics. When professors blithely boast of binge watching Breaking Bad, you know that Oprah has buried Oxford by any measure of power and significance.

My new working title:

Fondling Faun and the Forbidden Pleasures of Early 20th Century Painting.

Yes, I know it needs work ...

PALPITANT TO PASSION

After five full years, a Fulbright and two generous research grants I think I know more about the early modernist painter Faun Roberts than I know about myself.

I had no idea when I started this biographical project that I would grow so intimate with my subject. Poring over her letters, her diaries, her paintings and drawings has immersed me in a strange, deviant world that both shocked me and filled me with awe. What I did not anticipate when I began this intellectual journey was that I would ultimately grow to truly despise the object of my inquiry.

Gertrude Stein

Roberts was petulant, petty, insecure, vindictive, narcissistic and shamelessly dishonest. The more I learned about her the harder it became to find anything redeeming about her. She may have influenced Picasso but it was with an oily, hubristic disregard. She undoubtedly fed the imagination of Max Jacob but her cruelty nearly drove him mad. Even Gertrude Stein was repelled by her character and I believe that is precisely why she was buried by history and had remained obscure until I rediscovered her.

However, the most disconcerting aspect of this whole enterprise has been my relationship with Roberts' work. After a prolonged period of absolute veneration and wonderment I have reluctantly come to the realization that Roberts was tediously repetitive, redundant, shallow and shrill.

 

The Queen of Cyprus no. 16. Oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1919 (Private collection)

To my horror, what I formally found thrilling I now find utterly repellant. What initially seemed transgressive now seems like formulaic, recycled sapphic scenarios of delicately restrained sexuality. 

 After the initial jolt at discovering early 20th century homoerotic imagery I slowly came to realize that Roberts was merely appropriating 2000 year old Attic vases and Pompeian frescoes. Stein saw this, was mildly amused, purchased a few small drawings but ultimately realized that it was merely a fleeting infatuation. Roberts lacked the rigor of Picasso, the range of Matisse or the graphic brutality of Braque.

After five long years of research I regretfully confess that I have devoted my energy to nothing more that an historical footnote.

MAL COMPRIS

Ma Jolie, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1922

"Je suis seulement la taille de mon lit." (I am only the size of my bed).

Faun Roberts never quite mastered the French of Racine and Flaubert but she had an operable command of the argot of Montparnasse. Her circle included expatriates like Modigliani (whom she detested), Gris (whom she pitied) and Pascin (whose talent she envied but eventually learned to love).

Like most of the voluntarily exiled Roberts was drawn to the margins of society and the freedoms that were found there. Paris in the 20's had a thriving burlesque scene and one of the most popular nightclubs was Le Coup de Fouet owned by the legendary Vibescu Mony. On any given night one could watch circus animals waltzing with transvestites, midgets balancing full beakers of absinthe on their noses while marching in military formation, short salirophilian operettas performed by young men wearing mud-smeared nun's habits and fake mustachios or high stakes omorashi tournaments that typically included actors, writers and politicians.    

There's no denying that Roberts had a taste for the deviant. Her work definitely speaks to her obsessions but neither glorifies nor fetishizes them. A woman in a leather corset was merely a pretext for the formal analysis of a bare, white rectangle of canvas. 

And that, I insist, is the true genius of Faun Roberts. Despite her loaded subject matter she was essentially an abstract painter. Her ability, as the critic Orpheus Eglantine described it at the time, to "lure lyric from the lurid" was indeed her greatest strength. That she is known today simply as "l'artiste Américaine qui était une obsédé sexuelle" is a travesty of scholarship and a myopic rendering of a deeply complex and intellectual painter.

CYTHEREA OF THE CARREFOUR VAVIN

I must confess that despite my unqualified enthusiasm for the idea of Faun Roberts - the thoroughly delectable notion that as early as the nineteen twenties there was a strong, revolutionary female artist working confidently and courageously within the School of Paris - sometimes certain individual works are simply too outrageous, too provocative and downright too smutty, even for me. I have to constantly remind myself that Roberts was a woman who was not content to merely wallow under the shadow of Picasso and Matisse but stubbornly insisted on operating on a parallel and equal level with them.

This ineluctable fact may go a long way in explaining the highly charged and contentious series of small works with the intoxicating title, Onanisme Profonde.

Troisième Onanisme Profonde, Oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1924

These are twelve paintings corresponding to the twelve apostles, each graphically depicting a method of self-gratification. The image above represents a more or less conventional approach toward the task while the other eleven are of increasing ingenuity and include, unsurprisingly, elements of still-life as well.

These pictures were meant to shock and they did.

Deuxième Onanisme Profonde, Oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1924

I believe what Roberts meant to say with these works was that capturing the concupiscent in paint was not the exclusive bailiwick of her male contemporaries. The monopoly of the male gaze was as yet uncontested and an unspoken, painterly Droit du seigneur was suffered by even the most accomplished women of the day.

Faun Roberts was a pioneer, a brave baptizing broad who dared to bare her vagina dentata at the Montparnasse boys club and managed to produce some of the most disturbing modernist images of the early twentieth century.

We owe her a tremendous debt.

QUIETING THE DULL VOICES OF SKEPTICISM

Many of my colleagues have questioned my obsession with the dubious legacy of Faun Roberts. Some remain thoroughly unconvinced of her merit as an artist. Others see my advocacy as a form of special pleading, promoting a thesis of questionable virtue in order to enhance my own career, (full disclosure: I am up for tenure). There are even some who suspect that through Roberts' work I am enacting a vicarious, sexual displacement, using the unsung artist as an erotic proxy, a kind of surrogate strumpet or an inaccessible id. This last accusation is the most enervating as it assumes I suffer from some sort of poverty of prurience or an irreconcilable deficit of ardency and desire.

I can assure you, nothing could be further from the truth (and perhaps more on that in a future post).

What draws me to the life and work of Faun Roberts is the swooning clarity of her vision. She was a pure, unfiltered vessel of indignation. In the few short years that she lived in Paris she erected in paint a sacred sibylline shrine to a form of sexual expression that was still, at the time, very much of a taboo. That she did so in a pictorial idiom that was in its nascent state of conceptual development makes her work even more extraordinary and even more revolutionary.

L'Oubli du Blasphème, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts, 1929 (private collection)

One could easily depreciate Roberts' mechanical mastery or even her formal dexterity, seeing her idiomatic visual lexicon as evidence of inadequate facility or clumsy execution but it would be a gross miscarriage of judgement to ignore the unequivocal concrete nature of her artistic point of view. Each one of her works is a categorical manifesto for shameless, libertine, wicked female transgression. There is simply nothing even remotely like it within the entire canon of early Modernist history.

So to my leery, incredulous colleagues who remain agnostic at best and distrustful at worst, I have only this to say:

In the Paris of the 20's and 30's, the instruments of innovation were available almost exclusively to men. Rivalry and perfidy were as rampant as syphilis and equally malevolent. As a gay woman Faun Roberts stood courageously alone within this cauldron of wrinkled revolution. With a clear, coherent and beautiful vision she created some of the most forceful images reflecting our fluid and troubling time.

Even in the antique light of retrospect, her legacy echos with the undying dignity of courage, prescience and unbridled genius.