When You Cannot Run, You Cannot Hide: Romaine Brooks Draws (On) the Past

Abstract

When a leg injury in the 1930s caused artist Romaine Brooks (1874–1970) to remain bedridden, the result was a written autobiography and a series of drawings that can also be seen as a form of parallel, although unconscious, autobiography. Presenting newly discovered archival information that substantiates rumours about Brooks’ illegitimate child, I argue that these drawings, with their themes of a haunted past, regret, motherhood, and lack of self-determination, and their uterine and foetal imagery, may be read as a new genre of non-textual autobiography having affinities with surrealism.

Keywords:

• Romaine Brooks
• autobiography
• motherhood
• surrealism
• unconscious
• drawing

Notes

¹ I am basing my information on the Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre dessiné de Romaine Brooks (Chavanne and Gaudichon, 1987: pp. 179–218).

² See, for example, Elliott and Wallace (1994); Chadwick (1990: pp. 262–63); Chadwick and Latimer (2003); Latimer (2005 and 2006).

³ Diana Souhami steers a third course between these two accounts in her 2004 biography Wild Girls. She accepts that Brooks had an illegitimate child and that Phillips was the father, but asserts that the child was not born in Paris. ‘Through a bureau de location [Brooks] found remote country lodgings where she could secretly give birth to the child’ writes Souhami, concluding ‘Romaine had a daughter whom she gave to a convent. Five years later she learned that the baby had died aged two and a half months’ (2004, 99). This account is not supported by the evidence in the official records I have found (see note 5 below).

⁴ According to Diana Souhami, the marriage took place in New York in 1895 (2004, 98).

⁵ Archives de Paris, Etat civil parisien (naissances 1893–1902) 5 Mi 3 2055, entry number 497. Note that Brooks was not living on the avenue de Clichy, the address Secrest gives for her at this time, although the rue Jouffroy opens off the avenue de Clichy.

⁶ Archives de Paris, D4X4 433, dépôt number 5413. See also Archives de Paris, Enfants trouvés 1895–99, 2 Mi 2/63, ‘Répertoire alphabétique des noms des malades, 1896’ and Archives de Paris, Vol. 4914, 1896, 2 Mi 2/61.

⁷ Archives de Paris, D4X4 82 and D5X4 1726, admission number 124223.

⁸ Brooks once claimed that her mother stood between her and life (even — especially — after her mother was dead), a remark tinged with such bitterness that Secrest took this phrase as the title and structuring theme of her biography. It is easy to see Ella Goddard through her daughter’s eyes and judge her a monster, but this is to overlook other perspectives. Françoise Werner, for example, reframes the allowance that Ella gave her daughter not as stinginess (Brooks’ view) but as motivated by practical concerns (Werner, 1990: pp. 84–85).

⁹ Axel Munthe, a sometime resident of Capri and thus a neighbour of sorts to Romaine Brooks, was practicing as a doctor in Paris at the fin de siècle and saw first-hand what became of unwanted children, even those of the well-off who took steps to provide for them. (Munthe, 1937, 210).

¹⁰ Describing the situation in Britain, Alison Light notes that ‘In the 1900s nearly all children from institutions went into domestic service if they were girls, on to farms or into the services if they were boys’ (2007, 88).

¹¹ For a study of the complex relationships that can develop between an employer and a servant, see Light (2007).

¹² According to an official copy of the marriage certificate provided by the General Register Office, England.

¹³ This and other letters referred to in this paragraph are preserved in the dossier in the Archive de Paris cited above: D5X4 1726, admission number 124223.

¹⁴ Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

¹⁵ For an appraisal of Brooks’ drawings, and the illustrations of ‘No Pleasant Memories’ in particular, see Chastain (1996–1997).

¹⁶ See, for example, Waldberg (1965).

¹⁷ The magazine published 48 issues between 1953 and 1968. The founding editor, Eric Losfeld, was an enthusiast of surrealism.

¹⁸ The drawings included in Amazons in the Drawing Room (Chadwick, 2000) have only abbreviated captions. Also, ‘Dead Too Long’ (Chadwick, 2000, 92), discussed below, appears back to front when compared to the image in the Catalogue raisonné. A few drawings are also included in Brooks (1975), but the quality of the reproductions is not good.

¹⁹ Copyright concerns have limited the reproduction of images in this essay, but entering the Internet search terms ‘Romaine Brooks’ and ‘drawings’ offers representative examples of her oeuvre along with some of the specific examples discussed here.

²⁰ In addition to the works that Brooks selected for exhibition, there are a number of ‘miscellaneous’ drawings that Chavanne and Gaudichon place in ‘la fin des années vingt ou des années trente’ (Chavanne and Gaudichon, 1987, 212). What sets these apart is that they were never exhibited or published during Brooks’ lifetime, so they will not form part of the discussion here (with the exception of ‘Dead Too Long’).

²¹ I am following the titles given in the Catalogue raisonné. These are frequently given in both English and French, and are based on annotations made on the drawings themselves, presumably by Brooks herself. In some cases, however, I suspect that errors in transcription have been made by a non-native speaker of English.

²² For more on Ida Rubinstein, see Cossart (1987), Depaulis (1995), and Lucchesi (2000).

²³ This description is admittedly based on the small (4 × 6 cm) illustration in the catalogue. Unfortunately, this is one of the many ‘lost’ drawings (‘localisation actuelle inconnue’), so studying the original is not possible.

²⁴ Bizarre presents ‘La durée’ next to ‘L’orchestre des morts’, which shows a collection of weeping, skull-headed ghouls surrounding a smaller figure in a central, womb-like enclosure, its head also like a skull. The open mouths of the skulls may be seen as singing —the English caption of the drawing is ‘It makes the dead sing’, but they could just as easily be screaming or shouting. This drawing was not part of the 1931 exhibit, and thus figures in a later part of the Catalogue raisonné, as number 280.

²⁵ For more on Brooks’ relationship with d’Annunzio and its importance, see Hughes-Hallett (2013).

²⁶ For criticism that focuses on Brooks’ drawings, see Chastain (1996–97); and Latimer (2006).