A Symphony in Grey: Romaine Brooks and the Aesthetics of Queer Androgyny
Beatrice Romaine Goddard Brooks (1874–1970), known professionally as Romaine Brooks, was a pioneering figure in early twentieth-century art, renowned for her restrained grey tonal palette, psychologically intense portraiture, and depictions of women who subverted traditional gender expectations. Through austere, symbolist-inflected compositions, Brooks offered a visual language for queer and androgynous identities at a time when such representations were largely obscured or pathologized (Chadwick 11; Langer 3–4).
Born in Rome to wealthy but troubled American parents, Brooks’s childhood was marked by abandonment and trauma. Her father deserted the family, her mother was emotionally unstable, and her brother suffered from mental illness, creating a volatile domestic environment (Secrest 14–18). After a period of fostering and abuse in a convent school, she fled to Capri and eventually Paris, where she trained as an artist despite limited resources. The inheritance of her mother's estate in 1902 afforded her full financial independence and enabled her to pursue her creative ambitions without constraint (Langer 42).
Although Brooks’s early work was marked by vivid color, around 1904–1905 she transitioned to a muted, tonal palette influenced by James McNeill Whistler and Walter Sickert. She later described her approach as a “symphony in grey,” a deliberate divergence from the chromatic radicalism of contemporary Fauvism and Cubism (Chadwick 21). During her time in St. Ives in 1904, she developed the monochrome aesthetic that would define her mature style, emphasizing tonal gradation over coloristic expression (Chastain 29).
Portraiture became Brooks’s primary mode of artistic expression and self-articulation. Her figures, often women in masculine attire, exuded quiet defiance and psychological depth. Her 1910 debut at Galerie Durand-Ruel included thirteen paintings, notably White Azaleas and La Jaquette Rouge, whose aloof, turned-away subjects invoked comparisons to Goya and Manet but eschewed erotic display in favor of introspective symbolism (Chadwick 31–33).
Brooks’s 1914 painting The Cross of France, a depiction of a resolute Red Cross nurse, earned her the French Legion of Honor and invoked allegorical precedent, particularly Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Chadwick 55; Langer 77). Her 1923 self-portrait, in which she dons a top hat and tailored coat against a grey architectural ruin, presents a coded visual vocabulary of gender resistance: the only splashes of color are her red lipstick and the Legion of Honor ribbon (Doan 88).
Brooks’s life and work were deeply embedded in queer and artistic circles in early twentieth-century Paris. In 1915 she began a lifelong romantic relationship with writer Natalie Clifford Barney, with whom she shared a home and social network that included other lesbian creatives such as Lily de Gramont and Una, Lady Troubridge (Souhami 125). Brooks often painted her friends and lovers, as in her portrait of Gluck (Peter: A Young English Girl, 1923), which features British painter Hannah Gluckstein, heir to a catering empire who adopted the genderless professional name Gluck, in masculine clothing, shirt, tie, and tailored coat (Doan 91).
These portraits formed a symbolic lexicon through which Brooks explored and affirmed lesbian identity. By representing gender-nonconforming women with gravitas and dignity, she redefined femininity and expanded the visual field of queer representation (Doan 89; Chadwick 46–48).
During the 1930s, Brooks retreated from the public art world and turned to drawing and photography. Her continuous-line drawings, often automatic and dreamlike, reflected a shift toward interiority and are now seen as proto-Surrealist (Smithsonian American Art Museum). Concurrently, Brooks composed a reflective autobiography, No Pleasant Memories, which remained unpublished but offered insight into her emotional and intellectual life (Brooks).
Her photographic work, particularly a series of self-portraits and double portraits with her lover Ida Rubinstein, utilized mirrors, multiple exposures, and performative staging to explore identity and lesbian desire (Chastain 35; Souhami 127). These images engaged with visual tropes of fragmentation and duality, challenging heteronormative narratives and offering coded declarations of intimacy.
Although respected during her lifetime, Brooks’s realist technique was eventually eclipsed by the formal innovations of the avant-garde. Beginning in the 1980s, feminist and queer scholars initiated a reevaluation of her contributions. Whitney Chadwick’s landmark exhibition Amazons in the Drawing Room reframed Brooks’s oeuvre in terms of gender transgression and modern identity politics (Chadwick 9). Cassandra Langer’s biography, Romaine Brooks: A Life, further deepened this reassessment, integrating psychological theory, archival material, and queer cultural analysis (Langer 4–5).
Laura Doan has argued that Brooks developed a unique lesbian visual code by employing masculine aesthetics, spatial detachment, and the erotics of the gaze to make queer subjectivities legible to those within the community while eluding mainstream detection (Doan 92–94).
Brooks relocated permanently to Italy in the late 1930s. During World War II, she and Barney lived in Florence, and while her public presence declined, she remained artistically active. Notable later portraits include those of Carl Van Vechten (1936) and Muriel Draper (1938) (Secrest 213–215). Her final years were marked by increasing paranoia, isolation, and a growing suspicion of the outside world. She died in Nice in 1970 (Langer 212).
Romaine Brooks crafted an enduring visual language of queer resistance through subdued tones, symbolic portraiture, and gender subversion. Her portrayals of androgyny, same-sex desire, and lesbian autonomy created a radical counter-narrative within early modernist art. Long overshadowed by more overtly experimental contemporaries, Brooks has rightly been reclaimed as a seminal figure in the history of queer aesthetics; her work a quiet but powerful assertion of identity, resilience, and artistic sovereignty.
References:
Brooks, Romaine. No Pleasant Memories: Autobiography. Unpublished manuscript.
Chadwick, Whitney. Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks. University of California Press, 2000.
Chastain, Catherine M. Romaine Brooks: A New Look at Her Drawings. Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, Fall 2001–Winter 2002, pp. 28–35. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1358461.
Doan, Laura. The Emergence of Lesbian Visual Codes in Interwar Paris. Seeing Queerly, 2006.
Langer, Cassandra. Romaine Brooks: A Life. University of Wisconsin Press, 2016.
Secrest, Meryle. Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks. Doubleday, 1974.
Smithsonian American Art Museum. Framing the Art of Romaine Brooks. Eye Level, 22 Nov. 2016, americanart.si.edu/blog/eye-level/2016/22/306/framing-art-romaine-brooks.
Souhami, Diana. When You Cannot Run, You Cannot Hide: Romaine Brooks Draws (On the Past). Romance Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, 2016, pp. 121–133.
Stunning. Thank you for introducing Romaine Brooks, a ground-breaker as we all must be - going forward without fear. Especially at this moment we have to stand up against propaganda.