Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  Isaac Waterman’s millions, in addition to making her financially independent, also gave her an unusual degree of independence from the subjects of her portraits. Indeed, she was usually richer than the sitter and was thus freed from any need to please him or, more often, her. Brooks nearly always kept the finished painting for herself, having learned that “to give a portrait to a sitter is a sure way of making an enemy.” Many of her subjects were lesbian artists and writers and their entourage, some of whom Brooks had affairs with. Her portraits were not unflattering so much as merciless, making no concession at all to the sitter’s self-image. Her notorious portrait of Una, Lady Troubridge amounts to a subtly wicked caricature. The wife of an admiral and the public lover of Radclyffe Hall, Una in her portrait wears male formal attire, the starched shirt flat as a crepe, and a monocle on a black velvet ribbon, which glints opaquely. She poses with her dachshunds, clenching a riding crop in her right hand. Una pronounced herself pleased, though she asked her friends, “Am I really like that?” Yet it was obvious to most of the people who saw the painting when it was exhibited in New York, Chicago, London, and Paris that Brooks’s real subject was the sitter’s absurd air of self-possession.

  From the 1920s on, Romaine Brooks was publicly identified as a prominent member of the international lesbian elite, particularly after her fourth, prolonged stay in Capri, but she rebelled against this group, with its suffocating atmosphere of smug self-satisfaction, as much as she had done against the haut monde that sought her advice about lampshades and cushions. (Of course, the two sets often overlapped.) Radclyffe Hall, who called herself John, was the unofficial doyenne of lesbian society in Europe, having earned the credentials of martyrdom after a British court, in 1928, declared The Well of Loneliness obscene, despite the absence of any sex scenes, and banned its sale. The novel narrates the life of Stephen Gordon, a horsey aristocratic Englishwoman whose sexual inversion is apparent in childhood and follows the pattern described by the most advanced psychological theorists of the day, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who described lesbianism as “the masculine soul heaving in the female bosom, [which] finds pleasure in the pursuit of manly sports.” Havelock Ellis, another prominent sexologist of the era, wrote an introduction to the first edition. Brooks despised the novel, calling it “a ridiculous book, trite, superficial, as was to be expected,” and described Hall as “a digger-up of worms with the pretension of a distinguished archaeologist.”

  Nonetheless, Brooks was fond of Lady Troubridge and maintained a loyal public friendship with her and John. She invited them to visit her in Capri when she returned there, after the war. In 1924, the year that Brooks’s portrait of Una was exhibited, Hall returned the favor in her second novel, The Forge, with a glamorous literary portrait of the artist, à clef. Here, the character modeled after Brooks is pointed out to Susan Brent, a young English artist, a graduate of the Slade art school, at the Bal Bullier, a chic ballroom in Paris:

  Venetia Ford! So that was Venetia Ford, the strange, erratic, brilliant genius of whom she had heard so much in the old days at the Slade. A fellow student of hers had known Venetia Ford in Paris, and the girl had fallen under the spell of this woman’s charm, as did most people whom she admitted to her intimacy … The girl told her that Venetia hated color, that her pictures were all grays and whites and neutral tones—masterly things, subdued and powerful. She had said that Venetia had been begged to sell them over and over again, but had always refused. It was a crank of hers. One portrait, that of an Italian poet, she had parted with to the Luxembourg Gallery …

  Susan remembered other things about Venetia Ford, her American parentage, her wealth that had come to her unexpectedly after years of work and starvation. The girl had told her of innumerable and very ruthless love affairs, on which it was said that Venetia fed her genius. By all accounts, she gave short shrift to love! And now here she was at a Bal Bullier: Venetia Ford, the artistic ideal.

  The key fits the lock exactly, a concise thumbnail biography of Romaine Brooks more than a fictional impression of her, with the possible exception of its characterization of the love affairs, which is difficult to confirm. The record of Brooks’s private life is vague: the main source is her memoir, which is discreet more than secretive. She refers to every one of her female lovers as “my friend.”

  Hall omits to mention that the Italian poet who was the subject of the portrait bought by the Musée du Luxembourg was Gabriele D’Annunzio, with whom Brooks carried on an intense love affair. A reader with no other source of information than Brooks’s memoir would conclude that he was the great love of her life. Several writers have been called the last Romantic, but D’Annunzio’s claim to the distinction is stronger than most, both because of the florid exuberance of his poetry and his novels of doomed love and specifically because of his parallel career as a man of revolutionary action, in the mold of Byron. Today, D’Annunzio may be just as well-known as the most successful Don Juan of his day, with a catalogue of conquests to rival the canonical 1,003 of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, as for his literary works; yet at the time that Romaine Brooks succumbed to his charms, D’Annunzio was the most influential Italian poet of his era. His intensely romantic novels were international bestsellers, and his historical stage plays, such as La gioconda and Francesca da Rimini, were acclaimed as masterpieces and rapturously received by the public. His posthumous reputation has suffered in part because of his sexual mania, in part because he did not follow the modernist orthodoxy, and in particular because Mussolini embraced him as the national poet of the Fascists.

  The potency of D’Annunzio’s seductive charm was all the more remarkable because his person was, by all accounts, repellent. Liane de Pougy, a celebrated courtesan who eluded his grasp, described him as “a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath, [and] the manners of a mountebank.” Brooks met him at a lunch given by the Italian artist Leonetto Cappiello, where she saw in him “the great lapidé of our times.” One of the principal themes of Brooks’s memoir is her sympathy and identification with heroic individuals who are stoned (lapidé) by the Philistine mob, martyrs for art. “His true personality was all but eclipsed by his notorious reputation,” she wrote of D’Annunzio. “Stoned out of his own country, he was to face even more stoning in Paris.”

  Her admiration for D’Annunzio was electrified when they first met, by a chance remark. Cappiello’s vibrantly colorful posters for Cinzano and Campari were plastered all over Paris, and when he showed his guests some new designs, D’Annunzio whispered in Brooks’s ear, “And to think how much can be expressed without any color at all.” Impulsively, she invited him to come see her paintings. “When he entered the studio,” she wrote, “D’Annunzio, paying scant attention to me, went straight up to my pictures, and after contemplating them he began improvising aloud a dédicace to each in turn. So began my great friendship and admiration for Gabriele D’Annunzio. He changed the world about me and lifted me from a state of deep despondency.” In her letters to him, Brooks expressed her love with an ardent passion untouched by the sardonic wit that dominates her memoir, written many years later. As the relationship was ending, she wrote to him, “I am angry that you never understood my real love for you, how I adored you, how much tenderness I had for you, how much I wanted to protect you. I wanted to serve you with all my strength.”

  She found herself in the unaccustomed position of being the pursuer, with the added humiliation of a rival. When Brooks decided to paint his portrait, they were living near each other in rented villas in Arcachon, a village overlooking a small bay on France’s southwestern coast. She invited him to move in with her while she worked on the painting. While he was trying on costumes for the first sitting, Brooks’s chauffeur, Bird, burst into the room and said that a woman was at the gate, clamoring to be admitted. It was Nathalie de Goloubeff, a wealthy married woman who had been D’Annunzio’s mistress for two years, before Brooks supplanted her in the position. Brooks described h
er as “a beautiful statue whose emotional ego had been quickened by a careless Pygmalion,” so maddened by love “that she emulated successfully the tortured heroines of his books.” D’Annunzio delighted in torturing Madame de Goloubeff. After he dismissed her, she kept a nocturnal vigil on his doorstep, waiting for him to return from assignations with other women, to beg him to take her back. Brooks called her Niobe, because she was always weeping in public about her lost love. Goloubeff was reputed to carry a pistol in her bag, so Brooks ordered Bird to keep her out. “To be killed by a Niobe,” wrote Brooks, “would be too ridiculous.”

  Meanwhile, D’Annunzio came downstairs wearing a hunting costume, a pink coat, riding breeches, and boots. Brooks told him what was going on outside, but he paid her no heed: “He had come down on purpose to be admired; nothing else mattered. To show himself off, he began pirouetting about the room.” Bird returned to say that he had expelled the visitor “and that he had been obliged to detach her hands from the bars when she tried to climb over the gate.” Finally alert to the gravity of the situation, D’Annunzio collapsed on a sofa and remained silent for a long time. Brooks bolted for Paris, motivated, she explained later, by pity for the wretched Niobe.

  Brooks’s portrait of D’Annunzio was not painted until two years later, after the affair had ended. When she exhibited the painting at her studio in the Trocadéro, it was acclaimed as her finest work. Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Poet in Exile, as she called it, poses the subject standing before a stormy sea, with a black cape thrown over a somber vested suit. He lifts his eyes wearily to the gray sky, pressing his lips together in what came to be known as a pli amer, a bitter crease. As ever, the artist makes no concession to the sitter’s vanity: the nearly colorless palette is paler than usual, making the poet look wan, as if the blood has been drained from his body. Nonetheless, it is a profoundly sympathetic portrait. The artist’s intention to portray D’Annunzio as a martyr is radiantly apparent; a pearlescent glow hovers faintly in the sky around his head, like a martyr’s aureole. The Musée du Luxembourg’s purchase of the picture, which is now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, confirmed Brooks in the first rank of the artists of her day. D’Annunzio wrote a long, effusive essay about Brooks for the Italian magazine Illustrazione, in which he called her “the most profound and wise orchestrator of grays in modern painting.” He gave her the manuscript of the piece, which she kept to the end of her life in a carved wooden box, locked by a golden key.

  Around the time of the disaster in Arcachon, while Brooks’s affair with D’Annunzio was at its volatile peak, it became even more turbulent after Brooks met Ida Rubinstein, creating a new love triangle. Rubinstein was a principal ballerina with the Ballets Russes at a time when the roster included Nijinsky and Pavlova. She was not in their league as a pure dancer, for she was much too tall, but her stage presence exerted a potent magnetism equaling that of any performer of her day, Bernhardt included. Born to vast wealth (like all of D’Annunzio’s lovers, and most of Brooks’s) and raised in the Jewish enclave of St. Petersburg, Rubinstein moved in a nimbus of glamour, dressed in fabulous frocks from the House of Worth that she was supposed to have worn just once each, and bedecked with jewels. Robert de Montesquiou was a worshipful admirer. He introduced her to D’Annunzio, who was likewise dazzled. When he asked Montesquiou what could possibly be done with her, the dandy commanded the poet, “Write a tragedy for her!”

  So he did: in 1911, D’Annunzio cast Rubinstein in the title role of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, a mystery play he wrote while he was staying with Brooks at Arcachon. It was an experimental, gender- and genre-bending drama, five hours long, that blended poetry and dance, set to a score by Debussy (which Rubinstein commissioned), with choreography by Fokine and sets and costumes by Léon Bakst. The piece had a chorus of two hundred singers. In one scene, Rubinstein appeared almost completely nude, a remarkable coup de théâtre for a female performer: pantless in a pants role. After the play’s premiere, at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Montesquiou wrote in his review, “I have seen many things, many beautiful things, but in my experience I have never seen anything to compare in beauty with what this artist disclosed to our gaze.” He exalted Rubinstein’s “ivory face with gemlike eyes capable of looking into our hearts, and locks of hair which seem to be the expression of the poet’s phrase ‘cluster of pain.’”

  D’Annunzio’s drama follows standard church hagiographies, infused with the perverse eroticism of pagan myth. Sebastian was a Roman soldier in the third century, conventionally portrayed as a beautiful, epicene youth who secretly practiced Christianity and made many covert conversions. After he was exposed, he was bound to a stake (or tree) and shot with arrows. The scene was a favorite subject of Italian Renaissance painters, because the binding of the saint presented an opportunity to present the male figure in torsion. Partly for that reason, and also because his martyrdom resulted from a secret life, Sebastian has long been identified as the unofficial patron saint of homosexuals. The painting of him often used in church literature is that by Il Sodoma, the Sodomite, the nickname of Giovanni Bazzi, in the collection of the Uffizi. In Death in Venice, published a year after D’Annunzio’s play was staged, Thomas Mann proclaimed that “the figure of Sebastian is the most beautiful symbol” of the spiritual heroism extolled in the writings of his protagonist, Gustave von Aschenbach: “Forbearance of the fact of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.” Mann’s exaltation of forbearance is an approximate definition of Romaine Brooks’s ideal of the lapidé, the source of her devotion to D’Annunzio.

  The reader of Brooks’s memoir must take care to distinguish her serious intentions from her sarcastic wit, which sometimes gets the better of her: in her farcical narrative of Nathalie de Goloubeff’s siege of the villa at Arcachon, Brooks’s description of her lover pirouetting in his hunting costume makes him appear buffoonish, yet there is no doubt that D’Annunzio aroused in her a profound intellectual admiration. The best explanation for the lesbian artist’s passion for the ill-favored poet may be that he seduced her with ideas. Those long summer evenings in Arcachon were not all devoted to playing dress-up: at the same time that D’Annunzio was writing The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, Brooks painted one of her most unusual canvases. The Masked Archer depicts a pale, slender woman bound to a stake; facing her, a dwarf in the costume of a medieval jester, standing on a platform, aims an arrow at her with his bow. The female figure is not a portrait of Ida Rubinstein, yet it is plainly she. The link between the painting and the play is clear. In her catalogue of a comprehensive Romaine Brooks exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in 2000, the art historian Whitney Chadwick wrote, “The violent transformation of Sebastian from warrior to martyr at the hands of ignorant believers and from male to female in D’Annunzio’s imagination is perfectly expressed in Brooks’s cult of the lapidé.”

  The Masked Archer might have been inspired by an incident in Arcachon. When Ida Rubinstein came to visit D’Annunzio, as they were walking in the forest, the sight of pine trees that had been gashed to release their resin reminded him of the paintings of Saint Sebastian he had studied in his research for the tragedy. He asked Rubinstein to shoot the trees with arrows. Sebastian’s speech in the finale of the play resonates with Romaine Brooks’s art: “I come, I ascend. I have wings. All is white. My blood is the manna which whitens sins.” In her drawings, Brooks had adopted as her iconic signature a schematic image of a wing bound by a chain that forms the letter R, analogous to Whistler’s famous butterfly monogram.

  Readers of Brooks’s memoir must also bring a skeptical eye to the chronology it presents of her life. In the Beinecke typescript, she states that she first met Ida Rubinstein after the premiere of Saint Sebastian, yet she exhibited The Masked Archer at her studio ten days before the play opened. It might have been a lapse of memory, or perhaps Brooks was away when Rubinstein visited D’Annunzio in Arcachon. Whenever it was that
they met, Brooks was moved by Rubinstein’s spectral appearance as much as D’Annunzio and Montesquiou had been. Rubinstein, she wrote, “seemed to me more beautiful when off the stage, like some heraldic bird knit together by the finest of bone structure.” She recalled walking with Rubinstein one snowy morning at the Longchamp Racecourse, in the Bois de Boulogne:

  Everything was white, and Ida wore a long ermine coat. It was open and exposed the fragile bare chest and slender neck which emerged from a white feathery garment. Her face sharply out with long golden eyes and a delicate birdlike nose; her partly veiled head with dark hair moving gracefully from the temples as though the wind were smoothing it back. When she first came to Paris she possessed what is now so rarely spoken of—mystery.

  The elements of the triangular psychodrama, which possessed all the libidinal complexity of a play by Arthur Schnitzler, were now in place. Each of the artists was in love with the other two, but in the dominant emotional scenario that emerged, Rubinstein was besotted with Brooks, who was utterly devoted to D’Annunzio, who was consumed by lust for Rubinstein. It was obviously an unstable dynamic, which ended, inevitably, in chaotic disillusionment, but not before Brooks had painted some of her finest works, with Ida Rubinstein as the nude model. In a series of large oil paintings, portraits and allegorical subjects that celebrate Rubinstein’s extraordinary physique, Brooks captures the sense of mystery that had fascinated her.