THE PEN MEEKER THAN HISTORY

Ignored by the press during much of her lifetime the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts enjoyed a late surge of interest shortly before she died.

Mild reviews of her irregular exhibitions began to appear in small independent publications in the late 20's. Critics were fair but patronizing, always pointing out that the artist was a woman.

The implication was, of course, that though the work wasn't as intellectually demanding as Braque's or as inventive as Picasso's or as colorful as Matisse's or as symbolic as Sérusier's it was fairly impressive considering the artist's gender. 

Works by Matisse and Picasso from 1927

The fact that Roberts' work had almost no affinity with these better known men never prevented the press from making sloppy generalizations and misleading comparisons.

Works by Faun Roberts from 1927

Though she lived and worked in Paris her work was not unknown in the United States. In 1928 she was included in the now infamous Terminus/Dormer exhibition in what was then the Brooklyn Navy Yard. For many it was the first exposure to French Modernist painting and the critical reception was rather mixed.

Roberts exhibited the enormous L'adorer à genoux, a work now in the collection of Count Altun de Picar.

L'adorer à genoux, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1926

It's worth noting that many of the artists received less than glowing reviews, nonetheless it seems that Roberts bore the brunt of some of the more personal and mean-spirited attacks.

Here is what noted arts columnist Winslow Pethawthorn wrote for the The Herald:

"Lapping the modernist milk like an obedient Siamese, it never seems to occur to the American expatriate that her sources had gone sour. Continental corruption can take many forms. In her case, absinthe would have been the safer course. Perhaps she should lose her brushes, find a husband and leave the beastly business of easel painting to the boys."

Écoute et répète

The aptitude for love is something learned. The slow sinfonietta of touch, the adagio of the amorous abrasion and the crescendi of frenzied release are the animal instincts that in the right hands could be elevated into an art.

Stretching the metaphor into music is a conceit I cannot claim. The above overwrought description is a paraphrase from the 19th century manuel de l'amour of Don Alphonse de Forcalquier. Its strange title Broyage et de Poussée (too euphemistic to be adequately translatable) says it all. 

When Faun Roberts sailed to Le Havre on the S.S. Gordon Freis she had little or no experience in matters of love. A pastor's daughter from rural Pennsylvania, she was taught at an early age how to quiet the trilling of the heart and the tremor of the pudenda.

Nothing stirs the appetite more lavishly than abnegation and nothing yields more fully to abandon than indulgence deferred. No sooner did Roberts reach Paris when she got spanked into the obvious insight that there were greater pleasures in life than church bingo and pie.

De Forcalquier was all the rage on Rue de Renne and Montparnasse was the place where the kettle of heedless copulation smoldered over the most blistering of flames. If ever there were a textbook on the materials and techniques of raunchy misbehavior it was Broyage et de Poussée and the formally monolingual Roberts was quick to conjugate through its knotty and idiosyncratic prose.

If only American students today could learn languages as quickly and as eagerly.

Maybe a textbook illustrated with the works of Faun Roberts would do the trick.   

The Deviating Transcript, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1925

Maybe 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: The taxonomy of change

What drew me at first to the life of Faun Roberts was her humility. Though she traveled through some of the most exclusive artistic and literary circles of the day she never traded upon her connections. Her circle (network) evolved and grew as naturally as barnyard grass and though her friends (contacts) were a pretty classy bunch she never used them to promote her paintings (visual assets) among influential collectors (business-to-business market penetration).

She met Breton through her friend Proust, got to know Appollinare through Max Jacob and befriended Alice B. Toklas through their mutual acquaintance Sarah Bernhardt (like).

It was the time of gazettes, pamphlets and manifestos (aggregation) and one could conceivably present oneself (social media) as being aggressively avant-garde (emotional branding). Instead she quietly pursued her work and developed her ideas (content) while others were busy building their images around frolic and public dissipation (top-of-mind awareness).

She died before she found professional redemption (went viral) and it remains a mystery why her reputation was so thoroughly eclipsed.

Gentle Atthis, oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1922

Could it be that someone important had stabbed her in the back?
(Could it be that someone important had stabbed her in the back?)

THOSE WHO CAN DO - THOSE WHO CAN'T WRITE AUTHORITATIVE MONOGRAPHS

As a scholar and an academic I rarely venture far from my desk. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I don't really engage in much physical activity. There's a nice gym here at the Université Paris CM-3 but I never find the time to use it.

Ever since I began my research on the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts I've been consumed and obsessed to such a degree that I've excluded everything else from my life.

Leaning over my laptop from early morning to the wee hours of the night I have silently presided over the softening of my midriff and the slackening of my sinew. Despite the French insistence on turning meals into rituals I have maintained my American habit of treating food like fuel.

I wish I could embody the temperament of Faun Roberts who came to Paris in 1920 and fully acclimated to Gallic culture. She spoke a mellifluous, idiomatic French, became something of an epicurean with an especially discerning palate for fine wines and cognac and consigned the month of August to convivial respite and unproductive relaxation.  

I remain, much to the amusement of my local colleagues, a tiresome and predictable workaholic. 

Of course, none of these colleagues will ever win a Prix Goncourt, a Pulitzer or an Akademi Internationale but then again, none of them seem to care. It's life's quality that interests them, the pursuit of meaningful friendships, delicious food and the luxury of leisure time.

To them 'stress' is not a badge of honor but rather a serious malady in need of redress. To my colleagues who fought valiantly for the 37 hour work week, 'taking the job home' is the stuff of chumps, imbeciles and les grosse crétins.

Alas, if I assume the attitude of the French I may never do justice to my research much less meet the deadlines of my publisher. Tenure is harder to get these days, especially for women and my girlfriend Tessa who started out at the same time as I did just got a Guggenheim only months after receiving a Fulbright.

Do the French actually have a word for ambition? 

LA SOURCE

I've often puzzled over the creative practice of the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts. Part sybarite part recluse one can only speculate on the complexities of her motivation considering the absence of any major physical evidence.

Of the few letters she wrote, most were either lost or destroyed. There are several extant photographs of her but none that show her working in her studio. The one clue that bares witness is a 1930 article in the Belgian periodical Trésors du Cervelet that documented the stages of one of her seminal paintings "My Ghost Came To My Bed, 1930."

What's remarkable about the photos (taken by a young Dora Maar) is seeing the degree to which Roberts was ready to retool, revise and completely rejigger a work in progress.  

By now it is nearly impossible to assert definitively the motives behind Roberts' radical revisions. Some scholars - though I do not by any means count myself among them - read confessional and autobiographical undertones in the shifts and shimmies of Roberts' pictorial tropes.

They see allusions to French symbolist poetry, the speculative science of the fourth dimension and the Theosophical doctrine of cyclic change. They impose upon her imagery Mallarmé's assertion "Oh! rien que lieu commun d'une esthétique." They try to pin the artist down with Poincaré's "successions of different perspectives." And most unlikely of all, they cite Madame Blavatsky's theory of the oversoul to explain the awkward addition of contorting figures struggling in space.

I see it all in formal terms. Faun Roberts was the consummate colorist. She drew with a regal certainty that could rival a Picasso or a Matisse. Her decisions were clearly at the service of design. She was at heart an abstractionist who used, like Balthus, the pretext of sexuality as a means to structurally analyze the rectangle's potential. Her flawless modulations of solids and voids gave her work the concrete presence that was often lacking in her male contemporaries. 

Then again, I don't think that thing in her hand is an electric toothbrush.

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 ... ?