Romaine Brooks
Brooks's art developed to reflect her own personal vision of womanhood. Both her paintings and drawings of eerily sensous female nudes and her compelling portraits of elegant, strong-featured women-often wearing tuxedos or morning coats and tophats-are as stylish, cold, and austere as they are titillating and erotically charged. Painted with a palette of black, gray, and white, Brooks's images, in the classical and Pre-Rafaelite tradition, resonate with psychological symbolism. Her art not only idealizes the androgynous body as the epitome of beauty but celebrates a heroic femininity in physical and psychological terms.
