Unpacking the Contradictions of Artist Romaine Brooks

Lila Shermeta, C’25, spent the bulk of her senior year devoted to Romaine Brooks, a complex and controversial artist whose murky politics stood in juxtaposition to the queer content of her paintings. 

Shermeta, who majored in art history and minored in creative writing, became fascinated by Brooks early on during her time at Penn, mostly because of the contradictions Brooks represented. She was a lesbian and a woman artist at a time when both were major barriers to having a career—Brooks was born in the late 19^th century and worked well into the next before dying in 1970. But she was also wealthy with conservative leanings that veered toward fascism.

Those conflicting identities are at the heart of Shermeta’s thesis, advised by Associate Professor of Practice Jonathan Katz, whose own background heavily focuses on queer art history. In recognition of her work, Shermeta received the Lynda S. Hart Undergraduate Award from the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and the Penn Program on Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. 

In a recent conversation with Omnia, Shermeta shared insights into her research, the bridge between writing and art history, and how she became obsessed with a little-known artist. 

What nurtured your passions, and how did that translate to your time at Penn?

My mom is a multimedia artist, and I grew up in a creative and eclectic home. But the first time I realized there was a real place for me in academia was my first semester at Penn, in Jonathan Katz’s Introduction to Queer Art class. I was immediately enamored with the field, and I followed Jonathan throughout college, collecting almost enough classes with him to get a minor! 

I also interned at the Netter Center and worked with an outreach program for LGBT Philly School District students during my first and second years at Penn. I went to public high school in Philly, so this was a special experience. Beyond that, I got involved with the Kelly Writers House, where I worked as the Brodsky Gallery Curator, curating four original shows a year. It remains my favorite place on campus. 

All of these experiences culminated by spring semester of my junior year, and I was set on creating a thesis in queer art history with Jonathan as my advisor. At the time, however, I was unsure of what to focus on; the breadth of choices excited and overwhelmed me.

How did you land on Romaine Brooks?

During my first class with Jonathan, he showed us her art and taught us about her complicated character. Her paintings hold a darkness and weight that haunted me, and her depictions of lesbians and butch women are so captivating. They had little precedence during her time, but her wealth gave her the ability to break artistic boundaries because she never had to sell a painting. It allowed her to paint queer content without censorship, but it also shaped her politics.

That first semester, I wrote my final paper on her piece Chasseresse (“The Huntress”) and connected it to both her lifestyle and to the lesbian separatism movement of the 1970s in the United States. It’s interesting how surface-level that analysis feels now. At the time, I feared highlighting her fascist leanings would take away from her revolutionary expression of queerness. But eventually, questions around those contradictions morphed into my thesis. 

Many of the topics you broached in your thesis still resonate today. How did that factor into your work?

For my research, I tried to stay in the politics of her time: the devastation of the unprecedented violence of the First World War, the period of queer, artistic expression and feminist growth in Paris between the wars, and the absolute fear and destruction wrought by fascism in the Second World War. But it was impossible to keep our current government and political climate out of my mind. It surprised me but made sense how relevant and recurrent my research was to our contemporary situation. 

Brooks’ multimillion dollar inheritance—more than $300 million in today’s economy—allowed her to paint butch lesbians and play with the gender expectations of viewers in the 1920s. It also allowed her to live in a community of queer women. She didn’t need to use politics to fight for the rights of women or queer people, because her money allowed her to live a life of free expression. 

My research illuminated the cyclicality of history, of attempts to turn groups of people into villains. And now, we live in a time where research is under attack. My work taught me to question authoritarianism and division, and it proved why historical research is necessary for understanding our current situation. I am grateful that Penn continues to support research like mine.

Were there any revelatory moments during your research process?

At the end of fall semester senior year, art history thesis candidates present their thesis research in front of the department for critique. After I finished my presentation, [Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th Century European Art] Andre Dombroski remarked, “You need to believe Brooks less.” That was a big “aha” moment for me. I was putting a lot of faith in Brooks’ own retelling of her life and explanations of her art.

From that point on, I leaned more on my own interpretations, as well as the context I had gathered from historical research and the voices of other people in Brooks’ circle. Shifting away from relying so much on Brooks’ view of herself and more on external views helped make my argument stronger and closer to the truth.

What are the most significant things you’ve learned and what’s next? 

Art historians have to interpret pieces of art and their history through writing to convince others of art’s precedence, in both form and content. I’ve always been a big fiction reader, and I was the teaching assistant for Modern and Contemporary Poetry with [Kelly Family Professor] Al Filreis last fall. I spend a lot of time reading and writing creatively, and that helps me refine my ability to turn images into text. 

I’m taking a gap year to apply to grad school and eventually I hope to work in the art or literary world. I don’t think I’ll ever stop researching Brooks. I was able to see three of her paintings in Jonathan’s exhibit “The First Homosexuals,” at the Wrightwood 659 Gallery in Chicago, and it made me want to get right back to writing.