Romaine Brooks by Cassandra Langer

Author:Cassandra Langer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-299-29868-5
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2015-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Dressed in a white suit and seated against a backdrop of African American heads and New York piers, Van Vechten wears a grave, introspective expression. It is an imposing portrait full of imagination and originality, and it captures him perfectly. Brooks described him in a letter to Natalie as “the resplendent white king,” and in the same letter she gushed, “The more I know Carl, the more I like him; he is in his way an aristocrat and I hope we shall always be friends.”35

Brooks was, however, quick to take offense when people—male artists in particular—failed to live up to her expectations of them. In Van Vechten’s case, he angered her by failing to believe that her childhood could have been as bad as she described it. He also neglected to make her the center of his attention during her stay in New York City. These feelings of regret at having agreed to give him the painting in the first place led her to write an unflattering letter calling for him to return his portrait to her.36 Brooks never felt good about giving her paintings away, anyway, and Van Vechten proved to be no exception to her general reluctance.

The history of the Muriel Draper commission is somewhat hazy. Perfectly clear is the striking representation of her that remains (figure 25). In the first decades of the twentieth century, Draper lived in London, where her home became a popular gathering place for artists and writers. Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and Eleonora Duse visited often. Draper was also a friend of Gertrude Stein. Her witty memoir of her years in Europe, Music at Midnight, brought her literary notice, and her support of the “Russian experiment” took her several times to the Soviet Union.

When Brooks first painted Draper, she noted that her sitter had delicate New England features, with soft blonde hair and brown eyes married to a large, jutting, ugly mouth. The combination both repulsed and fascinated Brooks.37 Brooks positioned Draper on the left of the canvas, eyes fixed on a distant horizon. Her profile juts out like a streamlined hood ornament with its sweeping aerodynamic forms, sharply defined edges, and nervous energy. Rendered with a few quick contour lines and washes of pigment that suggest Draper’s stark and remorseless character, the penetrating face with its exaggerated red lips and razorsharp profile reveals the calculating brain behind the mask. As art historian Betsy Fahlman suggests, “There is a disturbing erotic charge that destabilizes the image, exposing the evident lack of warmth between the subject and the artist, both emotionally damaged.”38 Moreover, there were difficulties with the sittings. Draper found the artist an impossible taskmaster who expected her to sit as long as needed regardless of human needs. The pose changed endlessly, the lighting presented challenges, and the whole undertaking proved more exhausting than the artist had expected. By the time Brooks completed the portrait, she absolutely loathed Draper.

Figure 25. Muriel Draper, 1938. Oil on canvas, 46 × 30 in., Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

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