EN VACANCES

 In 1919, a pebble's toss from the crystalline Martian red peaks of the Aiguilles Rouges, Faun Roberts had her Road to Damascus moment. It was there in Chamonix, shortly after the Great War and skiing as sport was returning to the European cascades.

Hollow Persuasion, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1920 (Private collection)

After the canons had been temporarily quelled, the Haute-Savoie became a hotbed of atheism and anarchism. It was in Alby-sur-Chéran where Guillet fled to avoid conscription and where he ultimately completed his masterful Bildungsroman "Le Problème avec les Filles." Antoine Dota, the now forgotten composer of subversive operetti, held court in Présilly, living lavishly in a sumptuous and dilapidated villa he inherited from his reactionary grandfather, Gianmaria Dota. And most famously or notoriously, it was in Marcellaz-Albanais where Rougier, Barnier and Cauvet plotted their failed assassination attempt of Ferdinand Foch.

Ferdinand Foch

 Faun Roberts may of may not have come across these characters, but there is little doubt that on the foot of the French Alps revolutionary change was  flowing as freely as the springs of Évian-les-Bains.

It was quite by accident that the first of Roberts' so-called sapphic paintings was completed in Chamonix.  

Anactória, oil on canvas, Faun Roberts 1919 (Private collection)

Anactória began as a more or less conventional landscape when the famous blizzard of 1919 covered the area around Mont Blanc in a blanket of blinding white. Looking for relief, Roberts enlisted Marie-Claude Bidoni, daughter of the proprietor of Chalet Mercerie to pose for a portrait.

And in a hot flash of libidinous light, Saul became Paul and Faun Roberts found, at last, her subject matter. 

FLESH IS THE NOOSE THAT SWALLOWS THE STING

Faun Roberts would have been amused witnessing the gradual legislative legitimization of the homosexual lifestyle. To her the words 'gay' and 'marriage' were oxymoronic. But such is the hum of time.

To Roberts, life was meant to be led fiercely and fast. An uncompromising sybarite, the world of the senses was an ants nest of accreting pleasures. What Faun Roberts loved most, even more than making art, were beautiful, sexy women.

Sospiro, oil on canvas, 92 x 40 inches. Faun Roberts, 1929

I strongly feel that had Roberts not crammed herself so deeply within the furrows of her sexuality, had she not indulged herself so wantonly in her erotic appetites she might have competed more credibly with her contemporaries Braque, Derain, the Delaunays and Picasso. She was severely stymied by her subject matter. As beautiful and as elegantly profane as her paintings from the 20's are, one is left with the impression that she never managed to deliver upon her promise.

It was Gertrude Stein herself who described Roberts as one "chained to the islands of the inner-thigh," and I too think a dose of the Diotima might have served her well. I suppose it's another dazzling case of historical 'what-if.'

A CHORUS AT THE CLOISTER

Previously unknown watercolor by Faun Roberts provisionally dated 1918 - 1920

Following the steep Apennine escarpments to Romagna, slowly finding my way to the coastal town of Balleria I inadvertently turned a quiet vacation into a caffeinated vigil at the municipal archives.

I can't seem to get away from Faun Roberts.

With rising remorse, I left my boyfriend behind as soon as I realized that Faun Roberts had spent considerable time after World War I in a sanatorium in San Mauro Pascoli. It's funny how coincidence is cousin to fate.

I had packed a light bag for a long weekend of intimacy - a bathing suit, a few t-shirts, a few toiletries and a two historical novels by Antonio Spurcus - and with the best intentions set out to put my work behind me. 

Fortunately destiny delivered a rapturous surprise.

On page 606 of Spurcus's underrated opus "Downsized Phials of Morphine," there is a short aside, referencing "the trifling scribbles of Faun Roberts ... small amusements from her Adriatic confinement."

What "Adriatic confinement" was he talking about!? I had no idea whether this was based on fact or was a novelistic invention, but I was determined to find out.

The long weekend turned into three months and the boyfriend turned into the ex-boyfriend but through the shears of academic detective work I found the Holy Grail.

The details will appear in my book but suffice it to say, I found over 200 gorgeous watercolors that have eluded collectors and historians for close to 100 years!

ORNITHOLOGY

David Schoffman and I spotting a small flock of Red-billed Choughs, l"Isle-Adam, France 2012

On a recent trip to Auvers-sur-Oise researching my book on Faun Roberts I ran into the Los Angeles painter David Schoffman. We have known each other as nodding acquaintances for several years - we share several mutual friends - but this was the first time I spent any significant time with him. I've always heard that he was a pompous, pedantic blowhard and so prior to this trip, even though we live in the same city, I never really made an effort to get to know him.

It turns out that we have two important things in common. The first being Faun Roberts.

Schoffman, through some fluke (his version) or through some marginally legal series of transactions (my version), owns two paintings by Roberts. Princes Polyxena from 1926 and the recently authenticated extremely large Victims Demand Allegiances, also from '26. 

Victims Demand Allegiances, oil on canvas, 120 x 84 inches. 1926 (collection of David Schoffman)

Princes Polyxena, distemper on panel, 1926 (collection of David Schoffman)

Schoffman claims that his affinity for Roberts dates back to his student days in Paris. His classmate at l'Académie, Currado Malaspina was an avid enthusiast of modern expatriate painters such as Stanley Wm. Hayter, Patrick Henry Bruce and Max Weber. In the process of searching private collections for long forgotten works they unexpectedly came across a few small drawings by Faun Roberts. Malaspina has always diminished the importance of this discovery referring to Roberts as "une amatrice agaçante" but Schoffman, I was pleasantly surprised to learn, felt otherwise.

Upon returning to L.A. I visited David's cramped Culver City apartment and lo and behold, hung crookedly on single rusted nails, in a room that serves inefficiently as both pantry and office, side by side as if waiting for a tram are the two stunning Roberts' !!

I still find Schoffman pompous and pedantic but he does have a few redeeming attributes.

Oh, and the second thing we have in common?

Birdwatching.

from David Schoffman's birdwatching sketchbook #103

A TERRACE OF CONCEPTS TOO LONG IGNORED

My Cathedral, Faun Roberts, Oil on panel, 1925

Faun Roberts braved the treacherous early twentieth century seas to redefine herself both as an artist and as a woman in a radically laicized France. 1902 Paris was still the Paris of La Belle Époque, a vibrant city where a 31 year old Marcel Proust was translating John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens and Rainer Maria Rilke was under-employed as an amanuensis for Auguste Rodin.  Roberts soon enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and studied with, among others Jacques-Émile Blanche and Walter Richard Sickert. (Among her fellow students were Hans Hoffmann and fellow American expatriate Dennis Strairchild).

An aspect of early 20th century modernism that has been unjustly neglected is the profound influence of what was known at the time as "littérature fessée" or "flagellation literature." Newly published books like George H. Stock's  The Magnetism of the Rod and Jean de Villiot's La Femme et son Maître were widely read in artistic circles and young Faun Roberts was no exception in her avid (and dare I say puerile) interest. 

Books like these, published in a stridently secularized Paris gave visual artists the "permission" and the legitimate opportunity to explore more explicitly a new vocabulary of erotic imagery. What is clear however is that long before her male counterparts expressed their libidinous ideas in paintings and prints, Faun Roberts did so in a manner that was both shockingly frank and brazenly autobiographical.

War Finds Peace at Last, Faun Roberts, Oil on canvas, 1924

Silenced Beast

Hearts, Sustenance, oil on panel, Faun Roberts 1922

The vivid pudenda - four emphatic brushstrokes holding an illusion aloft like winded sheaves - was something Faun Roberts' male contemporaries either clumsily obscured or childishly mocked. Picasso treated female genitalia like jujus or at best like grinning mascots, the silent trophies that were his droit du seigneur. Lesser artists avoided the subject entirely. Faun Roberts was the very first visual artist to take female sexuality as a primary subject and to treat it with a proud, unambiguous dignity.

My research into the life and work of Roberts, an uncharted slag heap of prevarication, gossip and venomous volumes of male condescension, continues to be a glorious revelation. Her unfailing strength, her stirring determination and her sheer unparalleled talent is simply staggering. The constellation of women that surrounded and supported her - Joelle Mony, Gertrude Stein, Filida Doro and Mary Cassatt, to name just a few - were the twigs upon the branch of an immeasurable vision.

That vision is precisely what has paved the path for generations of women artists to come.

YOUNG FAUN ROBERTS

Ma Jolie, Faun Roberts, Oil on burlap, 1923

Faun Roberts was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1882. Her father, Arthur Canon Roberts was a famous Pentecostal pastor who was fond of fasting and had a propensity for eschatological visions of fires, floggings and midtribulation rapture. Faun, who at an early age developed a healthy skepticism regarding her father's glossolalic growls and mutterings was characterized by her kin as "difficult." A scrawny, introverted poetry writing teenager, young Faun recognized in herself early on, a strong, passionate attraction to women.

In 1902, Faun Roberts boarded the SS La Touraine for Le Havre and never set foot in America again.