Women Together. Women Apart. Tirza True Latimer - Portraits of Lesbian Paris

Women
Together/
Women
Apart
For traits of
Lesbian
Paris
TIRZA TRUE LATIMER

Boston Public Library
Boston, MA 02116
1
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/womentogetherwomOOtirz
TIRZA TRUE LATIMER
Portraits of
Lesbian Paris
Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Latimer, Tirza True.

Women together, women apart : portraits of lesbian Paris /
Tirza True Latimer,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8135-3594-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) —ISBN 0-8135-3595-6
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Lesbian artists —France —Paris —Biography. 2. Lesbians—France—Paris —
Biography. 3. Arts, French —France—Paris—20th century. 4. Paris (France) —
Intellectual life—20th century. 1. Title.
NX164.L4738 2005
704' .086/6430944361 -dc22
2004023479
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the

British Library
Copyright © 2005 by Tirza True Latimer

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Pour Vamour des femmes
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
INTRODUCTION 1
ONE: Lesbian Paris Between the Wars 20

Two: Romaine Brooks: Portraits That Look Back 43
((
THREE: Narcissus and Narcissus": Claude Cahun
and Marcel Moore 68
FOUR: Suzy Solidor and Her Likes 105
CONCLUSION 136
NOTES 145
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 185
INDEX 201
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
his book bears only one signature yet it bears the imprint of many
hands, hearts, and minds. Kindred spirits, close friends, members
of the tribe have urged me forward and accompanied me during
the time it took to complete this work. I appreciate most of all the help
and encouragement I received from this community but prefer to thank
its members individually in person.
As a scholar, I am deeply grateful to the mentors who have shaped my
thinking and played a part in the evolution of this book. To Wanda Corn,
who has never steered me wrong, and to those who served on my disser-
tation committee —Pamela Lee, Richard Meyer, Mary Louise Roberts, and
Peggy Phelan —all of whom have influenced my work and altered my vision,
my thanks and recognition. This project is also beholden to a scholar whom
I consider an honorary adviser: Whitney Chadwick. Additionally, con-
versations with Leah Dickerman, Dianne Macleod, William MacGregor,
Moira Roth, Jennifer Shaw, Abigail-Solomon Godeau, and Alla Efimova
enlivened this investigation as it evolved from a dissertation into a book.
During my several stays in Paris, a number of people offered me their
hospitality, resources, advice, moral support, editorial comments, and the
occasional coup de main, among them Christine Bard, Cathy Bernheim,
Nicole Lise Bernheim, Chantal Bigot, Corinne Bouchoux, Isabelle Cahn,
Mireille Cardot, Catherine Gonnard, Elisabeth Lebovici, Laure Murat,
Evelyne Rochdereux, and Virginia Zabriskie. Francois Leperlier shared
his enthusiasm and his expertise on Claude Cahun. Adrien and Lucette
Ostier-Barbier shared their time, their consideration, their living room, and
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
their collections with me, as did Arlette Albert-Birot. Franôise Flamant

supported this project in countless ways, large and small, from start to finish.
I am indebted to the curators, librarians, and staff members of a num-
ber of institutions for their cooperation and assistance. I name only some
of them here but offer my thanks to those not named as well: to Virginia
Mecklenburg and Katherine Manthorne for serving as my advisers at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and for making
Brooks’s paintings, drawings, and correspondence related to the collec-
tion available to me; to Cecilia Chin and Pat Lynagh, among other librar-
ians at the American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery; to Judy
Throm at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, for greatly facili-
tating the study of Brooks’s papers; to Beth Alvarez, curator of literary
manuscripts at the McKeldin Rare Books Library, University of Mary-
land, for permitting me to consult Djuna Barnes’s papers; to the librari-
ans at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University,
for making my research on Brooks and her circle both pleasant and pro-
ductive; to Louise Downey and Val Nelson at the Jersey Museum, Chan-
nel Island of Jersey, for, on several occasions, sharing their time, their
office space, and the museum’s rich holdings from the estate of Claude
Cahun and Marcel Moore; to the members of the staff at the Chateau-
Musee in Haut-de-Cagnes, where Suzy Solidor’s portraits and papers are
conserved, and especially to Claudie Godelle, whose assistance proved in-
valuable; to the archivists at Radio-France for making tapes of Solidor’s
broadcasts available to me; to those of Solidor’s admirers, proteges, and
peers who shared their knowledge and memories with me: the late Mar-
celle Frass-Routier, Michel Gaudet, Doris Lemaire, Michele Melikov,
and Michele Venture; to Vincent Rousseau, curator of the Musee des
Beaux-Arts de Nantes, who introduced me to the collections there; to the
librarians and curators at the Bibliotheque Municipale de Nantes; to the
librarians and staff members at Paris’s Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, Biblio-
theque Forney, Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Bibliotheque
de l’Opera, Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand, Institut Memoires de l’Edi-
tion Contemporaine (IMEC), and Bibliotheque Nationale, Richelieu; to
the curators of the Natalie Clifford Barney Papers at the Bibliotheque Lit-
teraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, and to Francois Chapon for authorizing
access to Barney’s letters; and to Alex Ross and Peter Blank among the
many librarians and staff members who have facilitated my research at
the Art Library and Green Library, Stanford. To all of you I express my
enduring gratitude and respect.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XI
A series of grants, large and small —all of them generous —enabled my

research both in Paris and in the United States. Early on, I benefited from
the support of the Department of Art and Art History and the Institute
for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. My research on
Brooks at the American Art Museum was made possible by a fellowship
from the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. The George Lurcy Foundation
financed a year of research in France on Cahun, Moore, and Solidor.
My affiliation with the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, and my association with the Berkeley Art
Museum and the Judah F. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, enabled me to
introduce this project into new and transformative forums.
In conclusion, I acknowledge the editorial and production team at Rut-
gers University Press, the anonymous reader who commented so con-
structively on my manuscript, my copyeditor Kathryn Gohl, and espe-
cially Feslie Mitchner, editor in chief, for her commitment to Women
Together/Women Apart; I also recognize my “imaginary collaborators” —
Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and
Suzy Solidor —who provided such rich food for thought.
.
Introduction
Mythology is history.
— Charlotte Wolff,
Love Between Women
his book began as the story of one portrait—Romaine Brooks’s

Self-Portrait of 1923—which has both personal and professional
significance to me (fig. 1). My awareness of alternatives to the sce-
narios of marriage and motherhood that shaped a woman’s destiny when
I was growing up in my sheltered Connecticut suburb owes an enormous
debt to a very limited repertoire of images, images that sparked in me a
sense of recognition, unnamed potential, unimagined horizons of possi-
bility. Brooks’s Self-Portrait is one such image. I first stood face to face with
this near life-scale portrait at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in
Washington, D.C., over thirty years ago, when I was a college student. As
my eyes took in the artist’s daring statement of self—the defiant stance,
the sober costume with its rakishly turned collar, the unyielding set of the
chin, eyes ablaze from the shade of an outsized top hat —I experienced a
shock of recognition: She’s my kind of woman, I said to myself, not need-
ing confirmation from the wall text (which offered none in any event). As
it happens I was reading the visual cues correctly, although I was unaware
at that time of either the complexity or the history of the codes that under-
wrote the portrait’s legibility to me as a statement of lesbian identity, of
autonomy and active desire —and as such, a statement of emancipation from
the bounds of femininity. That was the beginning of my attraction to and
curiosity about Paris of the 1920s. It was also the beginning of my own
ability to imagine myself, to see myself, not just as a woman who loved
women but as a member of a visual (if not always visible) community —
2 WOMEN TOGETHER/WOMEN APART
and thus to participate in a visual culture whose history can be traced

back to the Paris of Brooks’s era.
What Romaine Brooks’s self-portrait meant to me in 1971, and later,
in the 1990s, when I began to study her portraiture within lesbian-feminist
theoretical frameworks, had little to do, however, with what it meant to
her in 1923. What, after all, did “lesbian identity” mean in Paris at that time,
when the closet (a figure central to identity politics movements of the later
twentieth century) and its subjects of enclosure were still under construc-
tion?1 This is only one of many questions we must ask in order to begin
to understand what this portrait signified for Brooks and her audiences in
1923 Paris, London, and New York.
One critic, taking inventory of “the black hat, quite tall, the regard in
the shadow of a brim that advances slightly, the pallid face, lips . . . col-
ored, a little black blazer with a red ribbon on the lapel providing the only
note of contrast,” describes Brooks’s likeness as “a being invisible to our
eyes.”2 Why invisible? The artist, on occasion, introduced her painting as
Fig. 1. Romaine Brooks, Self-

Portrait,1923.
Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Gift of the Artist
INTRODUCTION 3
“un portrait psychologique.”3 What does that mean? At what point do

invisibility and psychology meet? Are today’s categories of identity, with
their contingency on the politics of visibility, useful in an analysis of texts
produced in Paris between World War I and World War II? What sense
does it make to invoke the phrase lesbian identity—even in the format of
a question such as this —in relation to the self-representational initiatives
of Brooks and her contemporaries? What do I mean by lesbian anyway?
Let me address the last question first. By lesbian, I mean, first and fore-
most, the female subject of homoerotic desire. I take erotic desire to mean
both intense physical attraction and passionate emotional investment. While
embracing lesbianism as an identity has been, for women of my genera-
tion, both collectively and individually empowering, the term lesbianism
itself—at once too discursively mercurial, too historically connotative, and
too semantically absolute —fails to do justice to the rich spectrum of erotic
practices and identities that it presumes to describe in a word. Admittedly,
to unite same-sex relationships and cultures of the contemporary era —let
alone those of 1920s and 1930s Paris —under a single rubric is to create
an illusion of coherence and uniformity where inconsistency and diversity
are indicated.
This said, I choose to use lesbian throughout this book as a sort of free-
floating signifier.4 In doing so, I do not mean to imply a singular, historically
or culturally transcendent erotic or affective orientation but the various
alternatives to normative (patriarchal) relational and social models imag-
ined by women together and apart in Paris between the wars. Some of the
women I investigate here would not have described themselves as lesbians,
or would have described themselves as such under certain circumstances
and not others, or at given moments in their lives and not at others. I use
the word loosely, therefore, but not without deliberation, as a rhetorical
device capable of evoking the subject of female homoerotic desire, the
broader if more precarious notion of cultural identity, and the implicit
theme of feminine autonomy.
I prefer lesbian, for its gender specificity, to homosexual—and employ
the word synonymously with period vocabulary such as the more poetic
sappbist (which articulates a cultural heritage as well as an explicit sexual
practice) or the more clinical invert. Although the women-loving women
I discuss typically disdained categorizing labels, those who invented the
descriptive vocabulary of sexual identity (sexologists, psychologists, nov-
elists, poets, journalists, and the like) employed a range of terms more or
less interchangeably. For instance, Havelock Ellis, whose work was praised
by several of the Paris lesbians I discuss, alternately uses the terms lesbian,
female invert, and female homosexual. Ellis, what is more, routinely cited
eyewitness observations, first-person testimonials, expert case studies, and
literary sources from both Europe and America, expanding the vocabu-
lary exponentially.5 Research in this radical new field, what is more, often
benefited from rapid translation and circulated soon after publication
within the international scientific community. German, Italian, French,
Swiss, and American confreres referenced each other’s publications as a
matter of course both to demonstrate erudition and to position them-
selves professionally. The vocabulary of homosexuality that evolved, as a
result, had an international character. French terms like inverti, uranien,
homosexuel, lesbienne, and saphiste had phonetic and conceptual equiv-
alents in other European languages.
If, in this study of the visual culture of lesbian Paris, I draw verbal and
pictorial images of lesbianism from far-flung sources and diverse orders
of representation, I do so to show the extent to which different modes of
expression and sites of interrogation shared a common currency. One
might, indeed, expose the roots of sexological theory in literature, or even
popular culture, but that is not my project. Nevertheless, the migration of
images and ideas from fictional to factual registers—the extent to which
one “contaminated” the other (revealing the representational status of
both) —is so evident in the writings of important theorists like Ellis as to
foreordain an eclectic, thickly descriptive approach.
Like Ellis, sexology’s popularizers in France (Dr. Pierre Vachet, L’In-
quietude sexuelle, 1927; Dr. Henri Drouin, Femmes damnees, 1929), the
authors of erotic novels (Pierre Mac Orlan, La Semaine de Sapho, 1929),
pulp fiction (Victor Margueritte, La Gargonne, 1928), travel guides (Pour
s’amuser: Guide du viveur a Paris), advice books, exposes, and gossip col-
umns (Marise Querlin, Femmes sans hommes: Choses vues, 1931; Maryse
Choisy, “Dames seules,” 1932) employed language that was densely lay-
ered with connotation. The lexicon of terms commonly used to describe
independent, strong, ambitious, or accomplished women, what is more,
overlapped with those insinuating lesbianism and included everything
from the relatively neutral modern woman, to the more colorful amazon,
to out-and-out pejoratives like virago.6 By the late 1920s, few women
who exercised authority in any walk of Parisian public life were exempt
from the perception of lesbianism (or the anticipation of that percep-
tion).7 Journalists such as Maryse Choisy routinely collapsed the eco-
nomic and sexual autonomy of women into a single, global cliche: “In
INTRODUCTION 5
Athens, as in Paris, as in New York, this ‘lesbisme’ [sic] ... is born of the
woman who works, the woman who is no longer a madonna, but not yet
the comrade whose independence men of breeding will respect.”8 Sappho,
described in nineteenth-century French literature as the prototypical les-
bian, was redefined by Choisy and her readers as “the Eve of liberated
women.”9
As must be clear by now, parsing out sapphic signifiers among their
many possible subjects of signification interests me less than the broader
implications of what I identify as the lesbian effect—a phantasm, a limit
case, a constellation of ambiguous visual codes that puts several related
representational systems to the test. The modern Sappho, whose image
saturated Parisian popular and visual culture during the first decades of
the twentieth century, was both a sign and a site of symbolic disruption,
a placeholder for the unnamable, the unheard of, the unthinkable, repre-
senting not just Vamour impossible entre deux femmes but also, and more
importantly, the emancipation of women from the constraints of gender —
and, by extension, the restructuration, or even deconstruction, of West-
ern civilization’s foundational hierarchy.
I begin this investigation by asking how, why, when, and where specific
representations of female same-sex desire achieved cultural intelligibility
and social significance. Taking a leaf out of Valerie Traub’s book The Ren-
aissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, I too ask in this book
“what it means for women to inhabit specific categories of representation
at particular moments in time.”10 Traub demonstrates that, in seventeenth-
century England, the rise of public theater, the secularization of the art
economy, the emergence of illustrated books, and the increase of female
literacy contributed to an efflorescence of representations of sapphic love.
Joan Dejean, in her ambitious Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937, relates
representations of Sappho in French and German literature to period- and
place-specific sexual political regimes. Women Together /Women Apart,
although more modest in scope, considers how the circulation of texts
across national and cultural frontiers during the early twentieth century
enabled the subjects of sapphic representation to imagine and image them-
selves for the first time on an international scale. The vehicles of trans-
mission included corporeal texts, literary and theoretical texts, and —of
particular interest to those of us who, if marginalized, do not constitute
“visible minorities”—visual texts.
I maintain that by marking themselves and their work in ways that cer-
tain observers (contemporary and future) would read as lesbian, artists
like Brooks and her peers willfully engaged in the process of defining new
social, cultural, professional, and relational possibilities for all women.
These artists participated, at the same time, in both the definition of the
neologism lesbian and the elaboration of the visual codes and strategies
that enabled modern lesbians to recognize each other. Choisy might have
had Brooks in mind when she wrote, “There is no point in looking for
Sappho in Mytilene. She is an artist. Therefore she moved to Paris.”11
Paris lesbians helped to shape contemporary ideas about the poles of fem-
ininity and masculinity, about the possibility of intermediary positions,
and about that which eludes or exceeds the implied continuum.
The self-representational statements of lesbian artists working in Paris
between the wars inevitably reflect on, and bear on, questions of national
as well as sexual identity. Even American expatriates like Brooks, who
lived their entire lives in Europe, were shaped if only en creux by national
heritage. Whether they migrated to Paris from abroad or from the prov-
inces, however, Brooks and her contemporaries explored identifications
and attempted to create communities that cohered around something other
than national origin. Some, like Cahun and Moore, yearned for an egal-
itarian society of kindred spirits; others, like Brooks, believed that they
belonged to a “peculiar aristocracy ... of the higher mental and artistic
element.”12 In any case, they were drawn to Paris, and thrived there, in
part because of the capital’s cosmopolitan character.
In the 1970s, lesbians of my generation looked back to Brooks and the
influential population of woman-loving women who converged on Paris
in the 1920s and 1930s for traces of our history, our cultural origins. This
remains important in a context that continues to offer lesbians few positive
models, little affirmation of our existence, and thus renders self-recognition
and self-representation problematic. In the 1920s, the preoccupations of
Brooks and her contemporaries were not entirely different. They too sought
to affirm a notion of genealogy that would empower lesbians in their own
and future generations, and their artistic statements reclaimed specific cul-
tural and historical traditions (the Sapphic legacy, for instance). Yet these
two pivotal moments in the history of both lesbianism and feminism, the
1970s and the 1920s, shaped the initiatives of my generation and those
of Brooks’s generation in significantly different ways.
Obviously, historical and cultural factors also shape our agendas as schol-
ars, our perspectives as students of history, and our faculties as interpreters
of visual culture. In order to penetrate the logic of visual codes forged by
lesbians in an era that Barney dubbed “our belle epoque,”13 it is necessary
INTRODUCTION 7
to turn away from the light of our day and burrow deeply into such
cultural-historical residue as is preserved in libraries, archives, private col-
lections, and the kiosks of vendors specializing in livres anciens et vieux
papiers, with the (admittedly quixotic) ambition of developing a period
eye and cultivating a period mentality.
Although my research plan in France originally entailed tracing a spe-
cific genealogy of twentieth-century lesbian visual culture, the evidence
with which I was confronted indicated that the constraints facing Brooks
and the lesbian artists, writers, decorators, performers, publishers, and
patrons who formed her entourage in 1920s and 1930s Paris related more
narrowly to gender than to sexual identity. “I only wish that to grow up
and become a woman weren’t synonymous with the loss of freedom,” the
juvenile Mireille Havet confided to her journal in 1919.14 Despite the fact
that Paris offered unparalleled educational and professional opportuni-
ties in the arts to women from around the world, French law denied most
civil rights to women. The Napoleonic Code, whose gendered terms
had changed only slightly since its inception in 1804, continued to define
women as “incompetent,” on a par with children and the insane. In 1929,
the magazine Vu devoted a special issue to “the status of woman: what
woman cannot do in France, what woman can do in the world.”15 An
article by Odette Simon, an appeals court lawyer, resumed:
Cannot do: vote in any election, obtain a passport without author-

ization, enter the stock exchange, hold a high bureaucratic position,
leave her husband, dress in men’s clothing (ordinance of 7 Nov.
1800), serve as judge. Without the authorization of her husband, the
woman/wife cannot sign a valid contract [or] make a purchase or
sale. ... It is also impossible for her to accept an inheritance, even
one from her own mother, to initiate legal proceedings or defend
herself legally, to make a charitable donation, to assume financial
responsibility for a dependant, to be a member of a family council
or an executor of a will, without the consent of her husband.16
In sum, the male head of household exercised the authority equally over
his wife and his children. Subordinated in private life, women in 1929 had
little or no official voice in the public sphere under the legal code. In prac-
tice, however, women’s lives had changed considerably since the beginning
of the Great War.
The imperatives of warfare and reconstruction accelerated a shift in the
nature of the country’s economic base from rural/agrarian to urban/indus-

trial, and a shift in the character of the labor force as well. By 1929, the
urban sector edged into the majority, accounting for 51 percent of France’s
population. During the same decade, new feminine subject categories
emerged, categories not anticipated by the law or accommodated by the
language (where the word for woman, femme, shares an identity with the
word for wife). Unmarried adult women, celibates, bachelors, lesbians —
in short, women without men —cut an increasingly visible figure on the
urban scene. The wartime decimation of France’s male citizenry threw
this new populace of “single” women into high relief.17 Broadly speaking,
the as-yet-undefined category of women-without-men represented a sort
of gray area, a loophole in a restrictive social, economic, and representa-
tional system. And this loophole opened up new opportunities for women
in all professional spheres in France, including the arts. In one way or
another, the women whom I have chosen to investigate were transformed
by the watershed of the Great War.
For the subjects of my case studies, and many other lesbians working
in Paris during the interwar period, opting out of the heterosexual con-
tract—and with it, received ideas about what it meant to be a woman —
was the precondition of both personal and professional fulfillment.
Natalie Barney claimed to “belong to a category of beings that may flour-
ish once the traditional earthly couple has been definitively discredited, per-
mitting each of us to preserve or rediscover her integrity as an entity.”18
As Barney was well aware, this feminine “society of the future” had yet
to cohere as a social reality.19 Yet lesbians in post-World War I Paris wit-
nessed and contributed to significant shifts in the representation (if not
the experience) of gendered power relations. As a result, Brooks and many
of her contemporaries in Paris believed that they could succeed not de-
spite but because of their lesbianism.20 Lesbianism released them from pre-
determined schemas of femininity and engaged them in a creative process
that Barney described as “perpetual becoming.”21
In Paris of the interwar period, feminine stereotypes stigmatized
women as intellectually limited, morally and physically weak, capricious,
and derivative, while characterizations of lesbians (even by detractors)
often emphasized their exceptional intellectual prowess, independence,
strength, reliability, creativity, and qualities of leadership. The multina-
tional roster of talented lesbians portrayed by Brooks —many of whom
were described in Compton Mackenzie’s best-selling 1928 novel Extra-
ordinary Women —used their “extraordinary” status as self-promotional
INTRODUCTION 9
leverage and parlayed their successes, in a circular manner, into proof of

lesbian superiority.22 “Is it sapphism that nourishes her intelligence, or is
it intelligence that makes her a lesbian?” Jean Royere wondered about the
redoubtable Barney.23
This generation of lesbians created frameworks that offered them, if
not an escape, at least some play within the representational bounds of
femininity. They inscribed themselves within genres such as biography,
autobiography, and portraiture —genres in which the codes of identity
and social status have traditionally taken form. Lesbians modified the
conventions of these genres in radical ways.
A trend that Janet Flanner (thinking of Colette) referred to as “auto-
biographic novelizing,” for instance, gained currency among Paris’s
literati.24 Colette’s Le Fur et Vimpur, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Lone-
liness, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus’s L’Ange et les pervers, Djuna Barnes’s Night-
wood^ H.D.’s trilogy Faint It Today, Asphodel, and HER, Bryher’s two
novels, Development and Two Selves, and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobi-
ography of Alice B. Toklas were all produced between World War I and
World War II and inventoried in bookshops frequented by Paris lesbians
(notably the shops of Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier). “Novelizing”
allowed lesbian authors to articulate previously unspeakable aspects of
their personal and social experience, and to invent alternate versions of
their personal narratives. Perhaps even more radically, autobiographical
novels by lesbian authors memorialized the lives of individuals who
would have otherwise remained without historical profile. A similar claim
could be made about the initiatives of the visual and performing artists I
discuss in this volume, who (whether self-seriously, in parody, or with
cynical calculation) used portraiture as well as autobiographical writing
to “mythologize” their own histories.
Literary studies about writers of lesbian-historical significance have
demonstrated that sexual identity, like gender, is not only what Joan Scott
calls “a useful category of historical analysis” but also a determining fac-
tor in the production and reception of culture.25 In contrast, scholarship
on visual modes of early twentieth-century lesbian cultural production
is at a primary stage of development. Although it is true that the ques-
tion of sexual identity preoccupies contemporary historians of fashion,
performance, and the decorative arts,26 lesbian identity remains largely
uninterrogated within studies (including feminist studies) devoted to tra-
ditional high-art genres such as portraiture.
Feminist art historians privileging gender (and therefore heterosexual
power relations) as an interpretive axis have all but neglected the equally
crucial problematic of sexual identity. Indeed, as Judith Butler has thor-
oughly demonstrated, feminist analysis too often unwittingly reproduces
heterocentric patterns of thought that thwart the recognition of rela-
tional, social, and interpretive alternatives.27 A decade before the publi-
cation of Butler’s Gender Trouble shifted the terms of feminist analysis in
America and Europe, Monique Wittig provoked controversy in feminist
circles by challenging the relevance of gender—a patriarchal construct—
to lesbian experience. “The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual,”
Wittig argued at the Modern Language Association conference of 1978,
“always meant to refuse to become man or woman, conscious or not. For
a lesbian, this goes further than the refusal of the role ‘woman.’ It is the
refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man . . . the
designated category (lesbian) is not a woman.”28 The same logic applies,
Wittig added, to any female who is not personally dependant on a man.
This radical proposition, which animated feminist debates throughout
the 1980s, pivots on a distinction that many lesbians of 1920s Paris tac-
itly acknowledged. Making space for conceptual play within the categor-
ical terms of social subjectivity, as they did (and as I do in my analysis of
their practices), alters the lay of the historical landscape. Unfamiliar fea-
tures stand out upon a cultural terrain already traversed by countless his-
torians of Paris modernism and charted anew by feminist scholars of the
1980s and 1990s, from Shari Benstock (Women of the Left Bank) to Mary
Louise Roberts.29 A decade ago, Roberts could produce an insightful and
apparently exhaustive cultural-historical study bearing the title Civiliza-
tion without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927
without mentioning the word lesbian once in the body of the text. The
fact that a feminist scholar of her stature could take gender politics in
Paris between the wars as a focus and fail to examine the quite prominent
lesbian dimension indicates not a personal blind spot but structural bar-
riers in the operative methodological frameworks.
Since the publication of Roberts’s book, scholars establishing discipli-
nary footholds in the fields of gay and lesbian studies, gender studies,
queer studies, and cultural studies have opened new avenues of historical
investigation, drawing on previously untapped resources and archives.
The parallel elaboration of new approaches to social and cultural analysis
in the 1990s by paradigm-shifters such as Teresa de Lauretis and Judith
Butler contributed to the formation of a constellation known as “queer
INTRODUCTION 11
theory” that literally altered the terms of this investigation.30 Queer theory
challenged prevailing methodologies to expose underlying heterosexist
biases while providing the basis for a profoundly radical critique of dis-
courses that construct categories of normativity and deviance, particu-
larly categories of gender and sexual identity. I have benefited enormously
from these developments, which open new perspectives on my period’s
historical topography. It becomes apparent, for example, that previously
invisible or nonexistent categories of women—women independent of men
(bachelors, celibates, widows, and lesbians) —demarcated the interwar
Parisian scene from the social panorama of preceding decades. From these
perspectives, the enclaves that sheltered Paris’s nascent sexual subcultures,
the itineraries that led Paris lesbians into the visible and discursive world,
become not only visible but difficult to overlook. My emphasis on this
population’s significance distinguishes Women Together/Women Apart:
Portraits of Lesbian Paris from earlier studies. My analysis draws energy
from the tension between feminist theory, which throws the gender biases
of the historical record into relief, and queer theory, which exposes the
representational status of both gender and sex (and thus the instability of
these socially regulatory categories).
The title of the book itself is riven with tension. It evokes the tension
between the historic struggles of women acting together and the necessity
of deconstructing the enabling premise, of taking women apart. It also
refers to the tensions within discourses about gender and sexual identity,
discourses that shaped the self-images of the artists I introduce here —the
tension, for instance, between lesbianism conceived as a coupled identity
(a matter of object choice) and lesbianism conceived as an inherently indi-
vidual orientation (a congenital “condition”). Women together, what is
more, evokes broader discursive frameworks (judicial codes, for instance)
pertaining to women as a class within which lesbians (women apart) rep-
resent exceptions to the rule. Finally, the title, like my case studies,
acknowledges both the collective and individual survival strategies of
modern women in Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, then the capital of West-
ern visual culture.
The problematic of visibility lies at the heart of this book. It is a book
about lesbian self-representation —particularly, although not exclusively,
about self-portraiture. It is a book about self-images projected by a cate-
gory of subjects characterized historically as both invisible and unrepre-
sentable.31 In the process of formulating image-making strategies capable
of both communicating and dissimulating same-sex desire, lesbians of the

early twentieth century confronted a number of interrelated dilemmas
bearing on what Annamarie Jagose has described as “the ambivalent rela-
tionship between the lesbian and the field of vision.”32 Jagose, among
other scholars, maintains that the lesbian —in society, culture, and his-
tory—represents not so much an absence as “a presence that can’t be
seen.”33 Lesbian presence can be seen, of course, but often —and this
certainly pertains to Brooks and her portrait subjects —only by those who
know how (and where) to look.
This “visible invisibility” has played a strategic role in the survival of
lesbian relationships and cultures under historical circumstances that
range from paternalistically hospitable to hostile. Visible invisibility, by
the same token, has played a significant role in the maintenance of sex-
ual hierarchies. Yet out-and-out visibility creates a disturbingly similar set
of dilemmas, as the punch line of a cartoon featured in the trendy 1920s
magazine Fantasio suggests (fig. 2). A couple of women —smoking, sport-
ing the latest fashions, sharing an aperitif at a sidewalk cafe —are
approached by an alluring third party (a women). The cartoon’s heading,
“L’Eternel menage a trois,” identifies the theme, while it’s caption, “Mais
les elements ne sont plus les memes,” comments wryly on the variation.
“But what does it matter,” the satirist seems to ask, “who plays the parts,
as long as the roles themselves don’t change?” On the one hand, as
Martha Gever has shown in a recent study of lesbian celebrity, “visibility
may disrupt or contradict received ideas and accepted beliefs. It may pro-
pose new kinds of social categories or inject new meanings into old ones.
On the other hand, such contests often extend the reach of dominant
forces.” In other words, the theater of the visible is where dominance
premiers and where it casts its subjects.34
Women Together/Women Apart considers the modes and methods
employed by four Paris-based artists who, through various acts of self-
representation, confronted the double binds of visibility and invisibility:
Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and Suzy Solidor. All well
known in their era and all openly avowing erotic relationships with women,
these artists visualized alternatives to the man’s world in which they per-
formed. While each of them lent substance to a social crisis that early
twentieth-century polemicists referred to as “the woman problem,” the four
artists featured here are not “typical” in any way. They represent a range
of artistic practices, a variety of political, social, and cultural profiles.
Brooks —an American heiress, raised in Europe —showed her work in
INTRODUCTION 13
Paris’s most prestigious venues and staked out her turf in the city’s most
elegant neighborhoods. Cahun and Moore, connected by family ties to
Paris’s intelligentsia and by conviction to the city’s artistic and literary
vanguard, hailed from the provincial capital of Nantes, where Cahun’s
father had shaped the character of regional journalism and Moore’s had
practiced medicine. Neither Cahun nor Moore ever had to earn a living,
or stint on the time that they devoted to obscure theater companies, strug-
gling bookstores, political activism, and edgy artistic practices. Solidor, in
stark contrast, was the illegitimate daughter of a Saint-Malo charwoman.
She arrived in Paris penniless after the Armistice, survived by her wits and
her good looks, and fashioned herself into the toast of Parisian nightlife.
L'tTCRNCL ntflA QC A TROli
Fig. 2. Gerda Wegner,

“L’Eternel Menage a
trois.”
Published in Fantasia, ca.
1920
nfllI LEI ELEHEMTI HE IOMT HLU£LEI nEHEI

All four women reinvented identities by adopting stage names, pen

names, noms d’artiste that distanced them from their biological family
origins. All four fled their ancestral homes for Paris, and all four claimed
places at the center of their chosen spheres of artistic activity, while accen-
tuating an underlying sense of displacement with respect to the larger
society. They were, to paraphrase an expression used by Barney, “women
apart.” Yet their dreams, desires, tastes, practices, and itineraries over-
lapped and intersected with those of other women converging in Paris
between the wars to establish the terms of on-going debates about repre-
sentation, sexuality, and the politics of gender.
In the past decade, a number of publications emphasizing visual modes
of cultural production have enriched the fields of art history and gender
studies and effected a rapprochement between them.35 These studies,
which have informed and inspired my own investigation of lesbian iden-
tity formation and cultural production, regard the histories of art and
homosexuality from predominantly male perspectives. My own emphasis
on lesbian artists distinguishes the current project from its precursors in
the field of art history. The focus on visual culture —from the fine arts to
fashion, caricature, and commercial graphics —builds on earlier initia-
tives, such as those I have mentioned, in which questions of identity pol-
itics in early twentieth-century Europe figure. I have particularly benefited
from, and converse with, Laura Doan’s Fashioning Sapphism: The Ori-
gins of Modern English Lesbian Culture, which posits the relevance of
visual culture to the emergence of lesbianism as an axis of social identity
in 1920s England. Vi/omen Together/Women Apart reflects on lesbianism
and visual culture in Paris during this pivotal period and begins to map
the imaginary terrain that Paris lesbians shared with their contemporaries
across the Channel and across the Atlantic.
To this end, I attend closely to the ways in which the artistic statements
of interwar Paris lesbians engage with discourses on gender and sexual
identity in Europe and America at this time. I introduce material from
various domains (including cinema, fashion, decoration, literature, per-
formance, journalism, fine art, advertising, and popular music), reserving
a place of prominence for sexology. This said, I do not deny the persuasive-
ness of recent work that challenges sexology’s primacy within histories of
homosexuality, especially lesbianism. Terry Castle has, for instance, written
authoritatively about literary representations of female same-sex desire
before the emergence of sexology as a specialized field in the nineteenth
INTRODUCTION IS
century.36 Doan, arguing from another position, cautions that nineteenth-

century theories and terminology relating to lesbianism would not yet
have been commonly understood in 1920s England, even among members
of the educated, ruling classes.371 concede that those pursuing knowledge
about same-sex desire between women did not necessarily seek or find
satisfaction in nineteenth-century sexological literature, supposing they had
access to it. Ellis himself recognized that “the chief monographs on the
subject [of homosexuality! devote but little space to women.”38 What is
more, the explanations of lesbianism proffered by Ellis —one of the most
accessible and lesbian-conscious authors in the field—are at best confusing.
Be that as it may, sexologists like Ellis, who drew on research material
submitted by correspondents from across Europe and America, contrib-
uted greatly to the dissemination, homogenization, and popularization of
theories of congenital (male and female) homosexuality. Homosexuals
had implicated themselves in the elaboration and interpretation of such
theories from the beginning, believing in the science’s emancipatory
potential. To wit, Karl Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Carpenter,
Andre Raffalovich, and Ellis’s collaborator John Addington Symonds all
considered themselves authorities in a field of investigation that took their
own sexual practices and psychic attributes as its focus.
Paris lesbians, although never the authors of such texts, were moti-
vated to read, discuss, circulate, translate, critique, and occasionally rid-
icule them. There is little doubt that when, in Ladies Almanack, Djuna
Barnes describes her heroine as a female “developed in the Womb of her
most gentle Mother to be a Boy, . . . [who] came forth an Inch or so less
than this [yet] paid no Heed to the Error,” she meant to mock not only
Barney, the most celebrated lesbian in Paris, but also the canonical works
of sexual science.39 Andre Rouveyre, a writer and illustrator who regu-
larly attended Barney’s salon, published a sketch of his hostess in Mercure
de France that similarly ridicules theories describing the lesbian sorority
as an intermediate species bearing male and female characteristics (fig. 3).
The caricature emphasizes Barney’s flowing feminine locks, which clash
with a contrasting crop of masculine chin whiskers. Both Barnes’s refer-
ences to “the third sex” and Rouveyre’s sketch imply that at least some
of the readers of Mercure, and undoubtedly most of the readers of Ladies
Almanack, were conversant with studies that strove to define sexuality in
congenital terms.
Indeed, discussion at Barney’s salon (which the editor of Mercure,
Rachilde, also attended), and at the literary gatherings presided over by

Beach and Monnier, periodically turned to the latest writings and trans-
lations in the fields of psychology and sexology. Monnier’s ledger marks
the entry of works by Ellis into the inventory of La Maison des Amis des
Livres, and Beach placed her own complete six-volume set of his Studies
in the Psychology of Sex at the disposition of Shakespeare and Company’s
clients.40 These two influential book dealers considered Ellis a personal
friend, and his portrait, sketched by Monnier’s brother-in-law Paul-Emile
Becat, occupied a place of prominence on the wall of Beach’s shop.41
Across the channel, feminist subscribers to the journal Freeivoman (and
its successors, New Freewoman and The Egoist) formed reading groups
in which sexological texts were shared and discussed. They prevailed on
leading theorists (Ellis, for one) to participate in the debates and lectures
for which they provided a forum.42
That the scientific study of sexual behavior had emerged during the
second half of the nineteenth century in step with the first organized fem-
inist movements in France, England, and the United States was no coin-
cidence. Feminist challenges to the so-called doctrine of separate spheres
(domestic/feminine, public/masculine) unsettled the division of labor within
traditional bourgeois family units. This, in turn, put enormous pressure
Fig. 3. Andre Rouveyre, caricature of

Natalie Barney.
Published in Mercure de France,
January-February 1913
INTRODUCTION 17
on the conventions of gender and notions of sexual normality. The new

sciences, with their reverse but intimately linked focus on sexual abnor-
mality, created frameworks within which social order could be either re-
established or differently conceived.43
In the 1920s, educated lesbians all over Europe carried on open dia-
logues with the scientific literature on sexual behavior and took positions
in public debates about homosexual rights. Exceptionally, they intervened
from within the professional ranks of the scientific community;44 more
typically, however, they demonstrated their literacy with respect to the
sexual sciences and modified the character of this discourse via their var-
ious cultural practices. Radclyffe Hall, for example, asked Ellis to write a
prologue for her pathbreaking 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, in which
the main character discovers her “true nature” in the texts of Krafft-
Ebing. Ellis’s endorsement boosted the credibility of a book that may other-
wise have been dismissed as a “woman’s novel,” and a perverse one at
that. The censorship proceedings against Hall’s book offer evidence that
the English courts, at least, took the novel seriously. In 1931, the English
heiress Nancy Cunard, founder of Hours Press in Paris, printed an edi-
tion of Ellis’s The Revaluation of Obscenity to protest this censure.45
Cahun, who translated Ellis’s work for publication in French in 1929,
acknowledged in a letter to Adrienne Monnier the impact of the sexolo-
gist’s writings on her own intellectual development.46 Ellis’s Studies in the
Psychology of Sex, which Cahun may well have discovered while volun-
teering at Beach’s bookshop, enriched both the literary and visual dimen-
sions of her oeuvre and inspired her to rethink key concepts (such as
narcissism and transvestism) from a lesbian perspective.
Beyond these urban enclaves of highly motivated readers, access to
research in the field of sexology remained limited, by and large, to a spe-
cialist public in the early 1920s. Ellis, for one, would have liked to see the
work circulate more freely; he made certain publication decisions to this
end, as at least one reviewer noted:
When Mr. Ellis’s book was sent to us for review, we did not review
it, and our reason for this neglect of the work of the Editor of the
“Contemporary Science Series” was not connected with its theme or
wholly with the manner of its presentment. What decided us not to
notice the book was its method of publication. Why was it not pub-
lished through a house able to take proper measures for introduc-
ing it as a scientific book to a scientific audience? . . . We considered
the circumstances attendant upon its issue suspicious. We believed

that the book would fall into the hands of readers totally unable to
derive benefit from it as a work of science and very ready to draw
evil lessons from its necessarily disgusting passages.4
Not surprisingly, Hall, in The Well of Loneliness, represents this kind

of scientific knowledge as privileged, something kept by the learned few
under lock and key, literally. Vita Sackville-West (whose biography was
“novelized” by Virginia Woolf in Orlando) sequestered her own sexolog-
ical literature in a tower room to which she alone had access. Decades
after their original publication, works like Ellis’s Studies in the Psychol-
ogy of Sex circulated principally in academic and professional contexts,
and lay readers often went to what we would today consider extraordi-
nary lengths to procure them.
Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), an important patron of Beach’s Shake-
speare and Company, approached Ellis through Beach’s good offices to
obtain a complete set of the Studies for her personal library. Throughout
a decade in which Bryher produced two autobiographical novels, Devel-
opment (1920) and Two Selves (1923), the film Borderline, and her mag-
azine Close Up (to which Ellis contributed), she corresponded with the
sexologist on the average of twice a month. Ellis tested his hypotheses on
“the puzzling question” of cross-dressing on Bryher and steered her to
related readings by Freud, Rank, Adler, and Hirschfeld. Bryher upbraided
Ellis for discussing women’s travesty in theater, cross-dressing to facilitate
travel or to exercise a traditionally male metier, and lesbian transvestism
in the same breath, earning Ellis’s respect. He repeatedly solicited Bryher’s
point of view on his “little contributions” to this field of knowledge, ask-
ing her to vet several of his essays before submitting them for publica-
tion.48 “If . . . you find any points in them of special interest, I shall be
glad if you can throw any further light on them,” he confessed. “When I
wrote to you in the first place about women disguised as men I was in the
dark as to what you might already know on the subject.”49 Bryher —with
her direct influence on Ellis, and his upon her —represents something of
an extreme example. However, like Bryher, the lesbians whose case stud-
ies form the basis for this book used artistic practice as a platform from
which to inflect the debates about gender and sexual identity that domi-
nated the decades after the Great War.
The arts promised these women something that the realms of science,
industry, and politics still denied them: self-determination. Although the
INTRODUCTION 19
lesbians I discuss here shared little else —certainly no common vision of

what it meant to be either a woman-loving woman or a woman-without-
a-man in the 1920s and 1930s—they shared a set of social, cultural, and
psychological conditions adhering to gender. If, within the web of enter-
prises created by women working in Paris between the wars, lesbian-
ism opened up new fields of opportunity, it was because this identifi-
cation finessed the historical limitations (and historical “privileges”) of
femininity.
ONE
Lesbian Paris Between the Wars
Pour apporter quelque chose,

il faut venir d’ailleurs.
—Natalie Clifford Barney,
Traits et portraits
I WMmmmmmmmmmmMammmmmmmmmMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmffimmfflmmmmmmmmmmmimmmmm
espite the reactionary thrust of campaigns to restore order to

post-war French society in the wake of the First World War, many
of the lesbians who had achieved recognition for their profes-
sional activities during the war years maintained positions of prominence
during the reconstruction period. Adrienne Monnier, founder of La Mai-
son des Amis des Livres, a hub of literary Paris, made the uneasy admis-
sion that women entrepreneurs like herself who had launched businesses
or assumed new vocations between 1914 and 1918 had been “favored by
the terrible Goddess” of war.1 Undeniably, the recruitment of six million
able-bodied French men between 1914 and 1918 had opened unparalleled
opportunities for women in every professional sector. The war raised the
profile of the lesbians whose work provides the focus of this book and
others with whom they interacted.
Suzy Solidor, for instance, escaped a career track of domestic service in
Brittany to become, at the age of seventeen, a mechanic and driver in the
ambulance corps.2 During the same period, Lucie Schwob and Suzanne
Malherbe assumed the gender-ambiguous pen names Claude Cahun and
Marcel Moore, along with a share of editorial responsibility for the cul-
tural pages of their family’s newspaper and literary journal in Nantes.3
The American expatriate Romaine Brooks, already established in the
Paris art world, accepted the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur
for fund-raising efforts on behalf of the Red Cross.4 Her painting La
LESBIAN PARIS BETWEEN THE WARS 21
France croisee of 1914—which depicts a Red Cross nurse against a back-

drop of smoke and flames —promoted a new vision of “the weaker sex”
by putting a feminine face on heroism (fig. 4).
Like Brooks, many lesbians from abroad earned respect for their work,
alongside French women, in the war relief effort. Sylvia Beach was one of
the thousands of Americans who responded to the call for Red Cross
workers. In all, some 25,000 British and American women (expatriates
and temporary residents alike) joined volunteer relief organizations in
France during the Great War. Among them, Gertrude Stein and Alice Tok-
las lent their services (and their Ford automobile) to the American Fund
for the French Wounded (AFFW), dispensing donated supplies to hospi-
tals and distressed civilians behind the lines in Alsace; they received the
Medaille de la Reconnaissance Franâise for these activities. Dorothy
Arzner, the only American woman to achieve prominence as a film director
during Hollywood’s golden era, also took the wheel of an AFFW vehicle.
Fig. 4. Romaine Brooks,

La France croisee, 1914.
Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Gift of the Artist
The American banking heiress Anne Morgan served as the first treasurer
of the AFFW and established a convalescent hospital for French wounded
in the Versailles home that she shared with the other two members of her
so-called triumvirate, Elsie de Wolfe and Elizabeth Marbury. Marbury, an
impresario and literary agent, and Wolfe, an interior decorator, joined the
AFFW corps of volunteer ambulance drivers.5 The designer Eileen Gray
and her companion Evelyn Wyld, a renowned cellist, served as drivers in
a fleet of relief vehicles assembled by the writer and influential patron
of the arts Elisabeth de Gramont. Oscar Wilde’s niece, Dolly Wilde, fore-
swore her vocation as a London debutante to join these legions “of
girls in uniform,” as Natalie Barney described them.6 Barney, a confirmed
pacifist, claimed to be the only American woman in Paris not driving an
ambulance.7
Anne Morgan and her partner, Anne Murray Dike, both previously
decorated, earned promotions to Officier de la Legion d’Honneur for
founding the Comite Americain pour les Regions Devastees (CARD), an
all-women volunteer organization. Morgan and Dike recruited 350 Ameri-
can women to staff a fleet of sixty-five vehicles and conduct civilian relief
operations in Picardy.8 Just behind the battle lines, the “heiress corps”
labored under the same conditions as the troops. “The mud is ten inches
deep here,” one recruit wrote home to Boston, “and after four hours
under my car making repairs, I am literally unrecognizable.”9 Yet the
women volunteers clearly recognized something of themselves in these
active roles for which they knew no historical precedent.
This corps of wartime volunteers attracted what feminists would later
describe as women-identified women, and those who did not conform to
this profile were sometimes targeted by their comrades. Marion Bartol
complained, for instance, that a fellow CARD volunteer, a certain Mrs.
Wilson, was “strictly a man’s woman. I can’t just make out why,” Bartol
puzzled, “she is with the Committee as she does not seem to me the kind
they usually select.”10 “Mrs. Wilson” notwithstanding, the CARDS typi-
cally referred to each other, as soldiers might, by last name —Bartol, Farr,
Van Ressenlaer—or by dashing monikers like Tommy, Kit, and Jessie.11
These daring women, and their comrades in the hundreds of analogous
volunteer organizations that sprang up in France during the conflict, won
voices in the social and cultural debates of the post-war years. As they
returned to England and America from France, they also accelerated the
cross-pollination of the new ideals and images of womanhood forged
within their wartime sorority.
Elizabeth (Bessie) Marbury, in her memoirs of the war years, noted a

widespread fascination among women volunteers “with the idea of in-
venting and wearing uniforms.”12 Mireille Havet had a crush on a woman
whom she described in her journal as “fancy-free, dressed in an elegant
khaki driver’s uniform, embellished with the quite ravishing blazon of the
Croix de Guerre and ensigns honoring her as a wounded soldier. She
wears her hair very short, and, naturally, courts all the pretty women.”13
The khaki uniform, reversing its customary function as a leveling device,
set these women of action apart, made them appear extraordinary.
The wartime appropriation of male vestments by this cadre of women
in active duty heralded trends in post-war fashions. Sylvia Beach recalled
admiring the boyish figure cut by her client Bryher as she perused the
books at Shakespeare and Company turned out in a “tailormade suit-
or what my British friends would call a ‘costume.’”14 Throughout the
1920s, legions of newly empowered women converged upon Paris from
far and wide to assume vocations left in abeyance by the male population
because of the war; a visible minority of these (now demobilized but no
longer immobilized) women adopted the regalia of civilian male author-
ity. Artists, photographers, novelists, journalists, advertisers, and carica-
turists fixated upon “the pseudo-male with starched collar, shaved neck,
and strictly tailored clothes,” the woman with license to take the wheel,
investing her with emblematic status.15 These new female roles were not
only performed but also reproduced by women. In 1929, for instance, the
female editor of the trend-setting German periodical Die Dame commis-
sioned a self-portrait for the magazine’s cover from Tamara de Lempicka,
picturing the fashionable Parisian artist at the wheel of an Italian sports
car (fig. 5).16 The glassiness of the driver’s eyes, the metallic highlights of
her racing costume and vehicle, the compositional stress placed upon her
hand at the wheel, as well as the artist’s monogram inscribed just above
the handle of the driver’s door mark Lempicka’s identification with the
sleek machine. The vehicle’s partiality and diagonal relationship to the con-
fines of frame suggest an excess of power and dynamism, as does the
pilot’s compression within the space of the cab. Such images of female
power and mobility heralded a new species: the so-called modern woman.
The modern woman’s attributes —male haberdashery and accessories,
cropped hair, cigarettes —occasionally doubled as signifiers of lesbian iden-
tity, as the name of Montparnasse’s premier lesbian nightclub, Le Monocle,
suggests. Georges Brassai spotlighted Le Monocle —both the watering
hole and the fashion trend —when, in 1932, he published photos of the
club’s cross-dressing clientele in an album bearing the title Paris de nuit

(fig. 6). Although the lesbians who posed in fancy dress for Brassa'f modi-
fied sartorial codes current in male homosexual culture, donning the cos-
tume of the sailor or the dandy-aesthete upon exceptional occasion, a few
lesbians in the public eye adopted such attire on a habitual basis, sport-
ing, for instance, the monocle as an everyday accoutrement. This hall-
mark enabled readers of Djuna Barnes’s 1928 satire of lesbian Paris, Ladies
Almanack, to identify Una Troubridge as the inspiration for the charac-
ter Lady Buck-and-Balk, who “sported a Monocle and believed in Spirits.”17
Romaine Brooks’s portrait of Troubridge, painted in 1924, features the
monocle as a signifier of both the sitter and her (aristocratic, lesbian)
milieu (fig. 7). Two dachshunds —as equally matched as a same-sex couple —
form the baseline upon which Brooks builds an image of their mistress,
as long and sleek as a dachshund herself. The dog collar through which
Troubridge hooks a restraining thumb rhymes with the man’s stock
wrapped tightly around her own throat, linking conjugal and canine bond-
age: the dogs were a gift to Troubridge from her lover Radclyffe Hall.
Troubridge —with her man-tailored eveningwear, her bobbed hair, her
erect stance, and monocle clenched in a riveting eye —presents a striking
Fig. 5. Tamara de Lempicka,

Self-Portrait, 1929.
© 2004 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/AD AGP, Pans
contrast to the feminine subjects of the portraits exhibited by Brooks

before the First World War, such as La Debutante of 1910-1911 (fig. 8).
Tellingly, the titles of such pre-war portraits tend to evoke the sitter’s fem-
inine costume or feminine role (Le Chapeau a fleurs, 1907; Dame en
deuil, 1910), whereas the post-war portraits bear proper names. Women,
in the interval, had become distinct individuals, personages. And fashion,
once thoroughly imbricated in the system of constraints that kept women
in their place (witness the isolation and immobility of the debutante),
played, during the war and in the decades following the Armistice, a more
liberating role.
“My costume says to the male: I am your equal. ... If those who wear
short hair and starched shirt collars have all the freedom, all the power,
well then! I too will wear short hair and a starched shirt collar,” ex-
claimed the feminist psychiatrist Madeleine Pelletier.18 Nineteenth-century
laws that prohibited women from wearing trousers in public were episod-
ically enforced, and often the women targeted took the opportunity to
defend their transgressions in the press. A journalist quoted the race-car
driver Violette Morris as saying that she looked “less indecent in trousers
than in a dress,” for instance.19 Wearing trousers, though, was for the
Fig. 6. Georges Brassai, untitled

(Le Monocle), ca. 1930.
© Brassai Estate—RMN
daring and/or privileged few, and many career women opted for the com-
promise of wearing a man-styled jacket and tie with a skirt, not pants.
If cross-dressing affected a relative few, boyish hair styles caught on
within a broad cross-section of Paris’s female population. The tresses of
the fin de siecle fell to the floor in households of working-class women
and the wealthy alike, a sign of the changing status of women across the
boards. Paul Morand reports, in his Journal d’un attache d’ambassade,
1916-1917, that “the very latest fashion craze is for women to cut their
hair short. Everyone is doing it: . . . Coco Chanel at the head of this
list.”20 The provocative Claude Cahun appeared in public with her pate
completely shaved (in the manner of a prison or asylum inmate) as early
as 1916. Maryse Choisy, members of her fan club noted, first cut her hair
Fig. 7. Romaine Brooks, Una,

Lady Troubridge, 1924.
Gift of the Artist
in a preliminary bob in the early 1920s and then shaved her head “a la
mode prisonniere” later in the decade.21 Journalists reporting on the film-
maker Germaine Dulac rarely fail to note her cropped hair as well as the
ever-present cigarette and man’s cravat.22
By the late 1920s, Gertrude Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice
B. Toklas that she and Elisabeth de Gramont, the duchesse de Clermont-
Tonnerre,
were the only two women . . . who still had long hair. . . . Madame
de Clermont-Tonnerre came in very late to one of the parties, almost
every one had gone, and her hair was cut. Do you like it, said
Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre. I do, said Gertrude Stein. . . . That
night Gertrude Stein said ... I guess I will have to too. Cut it off

La Debutante, 1910-1911.
Gift of the Artist
[Stein commanded Toklas], and I did. ... I was still cutting the next
evening.23
From our contemporary vantage point, it is tempting to interpret such sar-

torial statements as distinctively lesbian. The fact that a nightclub called
Le Monocle catered to a predominantly lesbian clientele and that a Berlin
magazine appearing under the banner of La Gargonne targeted lesbian
subscribers suggests that European lesbians of the interwar era invested
these fashions with subcultural significance. I agree with Laura Doan,
however, that the mannish fashions of the 1920s may be more produc-
tively viewed as representing something larger, perhaps, as she says, “some-
thing Modern.”24 Certainly, the responsiveness of female consumers in
Paris, London, and Berlin to the tailored suits and no-frills sportswear
pictured in magazines such as Vu, Vogue, Femina, Ladies Pictorial, Die
Dame, and La Gargonne lends credence this claim. The mode gargonne,
cropped hair and mannish clothing, may have provided cover for an
“hommesse” like Stein, but it also proposed new liberties, both literally
and figuratively, to an entire generation of women. Such fashions consti-
tuted “a visual language of liberation” from restrictive conventions of
femininity and, as such, challenged the political and social status quo.25
What I am suggesting here is not that most women wearing man-tailored
clothing or aspiring to positions traditionally held by men were lesbians,
but that the lesbian, like the gargonne, was emblematic of modernity. The
lesbian embodied modernity’s most radical promises (notably, the prom-
ise of feminine autonomy) as well as modernity’s most radical threats
(notably, the threat of feminine autonomy).
The novelist Victor Margueritte, in his best-selling novel La Gargonne
(a title that feminizes the Lrench word for boy), contributed to a mount-
ing debate about these controversial fashions and their social implica-
tions. In 1922, Margueritte introduced the consumers of pulp fiction to
Monique Lerbier, a character who, according to the author, incarnated “a
woman’s right to sexual equality in love.”26 Although Margueritte did not
innovate, he certainly popularized “a new feminine type,” as more than
one reviewer observed.27 His illustrator, the society painter Kees van Don-
gen, gave form to this type, picturing the novel’s jazz-age protagonist
dancing in the embrace of her lesbian lover, oblivious to the regard of
male suitors. The book’s vignettes of trendy impropriety provoked such
controversy that the moral authorities pursued Margueritte for “outrage
aux bonnes moeurs” and had his name expunged from the roles of the
Legion of Honor. “All publicity is good publicity,” according to a capi-

talist maxim, and the controversy caused sales of the book to spike. At a
time when the average print run for a popular novel was under 15,000,
La Gargonne sold 20,000 within the first weeks of its publication, induc-
ing Margueritte to embroider upon the adventures of Monique Lerbier
and her fast-living crowd in two sequels.28 He packaged the set as a tril-
ogy, La Femme en chemin.19
Those who condemned Victor Margueritte misunderstood the over-
arching message of this modern epic: women who wear masculine clothing
and display boyish hairstyles, women who reclaim masculine prerogatives
(including economic and sexual autonomy), are destined to lead unhappy,
unfulfilled, and “barren” lives. Feminism and lesbianism, for Margueritte,
were but waypoints along the same path to perdition. Despite all the war-
time demonstrations of women’s competence and valor, being an indepen-
dent woman in the 1920s remained “a very, very thin line to toe, a very,
very frail wire to do a tight-rope act on,” as Bryher’s lover, the poet H.D.
(Hilda Doolittle), affirms in her fictionalized memoir, Bid Me to Lived0
H.D.’s conclusion—that in the battle between the sexes, “the demarca-
tions remained what they always had been” despite a temporary wartime
retrenchment—strains credibility though.31 Highly publicized censorship
hearings throughout the 1920s provoked public responses from women
of cultural influence. Cahun, Bryher, and Virginia Woolf, for instance,
spoke out against bans on Maud Allan’s revival of Wilde’s play Salome,
sexually explicit films, and Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness, respec-
tively. These controversies dramatized the volatility of post-war sexual
and social relations. Personalities from every walk of life participated in
debates about gender and sexuality, convinced that the future of Western
civilization was at stake. Even the French president Leon Blum (whose
book about marriage is the object of a drawing-room dispute in Mar-
gueritte’s novel) weighed in on the subject.
In the meantime, experts from a range of intellectual disciplines grap-
pled with the turn of historical and evolutionary events that threatened to
advance women to the cultural forefront. Some, such as Otto Weininger,
whose 1903 book Sex and Character was much praised by Gertrude Stein,
interpreted the ascendance of women on the social, cultural, and political
scenes of the new century as an effect of the masculinization of the fem-
inine sector. “A woman’s demand,” he insisted, “for emancipation and
her qualification for it, are in direct proportion to the amount of maleness
in her.”32 The more progressive sexual theorists, though, linked women’s
growing social, cultural, and political influence not to their degree of mas-
culinity but to their independence from men. Both Carpenter and Ellis,
furthermore, acknowledged the feminist movement as a natural site of
lesbian germination, because, as Ellis put it, “the congenital anomaly [of
lesbianism] occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence
who, voluntarily or involuntarily, influence others.”33 Female educational
institutions were viewed by Ellis’s more conservative colleagues as “great
breeding grounds” of lesbianism.34 Indeed, in countries where colleges for
women existed, euphemisms for same-sex relations between women —
such as Wellesley marriage or Newnham friendship —frequently incorpo-
rated the names of women’s schools.35
In reality, the rapport between feminism and lesbianism was problem-
atic. Negative characterizations of “the female possessed of masculine
ideas of independence” that placed the feminist in “the same class [of]
degenerates” with “that disgusting antisocial being, the female sexual per-
vert” caused many militant suffragists in France, England, and America
to avoid public demonstration of solidarity with avowed lesbians.36 Al-
though Natalie Barney preserved the name of Emmeline Pankhurst in her
memoirs, the English feminist did not openly admit to her own connec-
tion with Paris’s outspoken lesbian advocate, for instance. Even feminists
who publicly acknowledged the freedom that they themselves found in
same-sex relationships were often forced by expediency to tone down
their homosocial rhetoric.37
If the arena of political activism did not, in point of fact, lend itself to
the formation of lesbian social identity or lesbian community, the arenas
of higher education and professionalism did. Professionalism in the arts,
more specifically, offered women the symbolic means of self-representation
with which to negotiate their social, sexual, and political emancipation.
The college or professional school, the art academy, the gallery, the por-
trait studio, the illustrated journal, the small press, the book store, the
literary review, the theater, the cinema, the fashion house, the interior dec-
oration enterprise —among other sites —offered women seeking indepen-
dence in the 1920s footholds in a historically man’s world. These sites
were of particular significance to lesbians, though, for within such
enclaves they made not only their livelihoods but their lives.
The ranks of enterprising women infiltrating professional spheres in Paris

during the interwar years provided an inexhaustible source of copy for
the popular press, including the magazines to which they contributed and
subscribed. Herve Bailie, to name just one of many popular caricaturists

and cartoonists, created a profitable niche poking fun at the harbingers
of women’s liberation: women drivers; women artists; women journalists;
women gaining purchase on the means of production and representation
by entering the workforce, entering politics, taking to the streets. Bailie’s
drawings appeared regularly in 1920s journals such as Femina and Revue
Frangaise, whose subscription departments courted the very readership that
such caricatures mocked. Among the feminine icons that Bailie ridiculed,
the woman driver stands out. In sketch after sketch, from the smallest page
break to the most prominent header, the chauffeuse preens to present her
best profile, dressed to the nines in the garônne style. In one drawing
from a series satirizing “la jeune fille americaine,” for instance, the self-
assured driver grips the wheel in her right hand, waves a cigarette osten-
tatiously with her free hand, and averts her gaze coyly away from the
viewer (and the road) (fig. 9).38 The office worker provided another easy
target, uniformed in Chanel’s revolutionary “little black dress,” elongated
fingers flying over the keyboard of her Underwood as if it were a concert
piano (fig. 10). “Tch, tch,” the illustrators of the women’s pages scold,
with or without resorting to captions, “mustn’t take ourselves too seri-
ously.” These flippant satirical drawings indicate an editorial trend in the
women’s press generally during its emergent period.
In addition to caricaturists, journalists, and pulp novelists, popular
psychologists editorialized on the phenomenon of women in the work-
place. The remarks of Dr. Henri Drouin, the author of Femmes damnees,
a popular study in feminine psychology, shed light on mainstream per-
ceptions of working women: “As a fatal consequence of women’s acces-
sion to careers traditionally reserved for men, a new type has appeared:
the businesswoman. In matters of business, women have demonstrated
that they could go as far as we.”39 Drouin points to the notorious lesbian
femme d’affaire, Marthe Hanau, as a prime example of this “unnatural
type,” even though her nickname, La Banquiere, marks the singularity—not
the typicality —of this particular woman’s accomplishment. The doctor’s
choice of examples, however, makes a more significant point: it links pro-
fessionalism and lesbianism, implying that a woman’s accomplishment in
the professional sphere is symptomatic of an equally disturbing psycho-
sexual disorder.
While Hanau’s success in the world of high finance remained excep-
tional, women pursuing artistic vocations between the wars earned acclaim
in escalating numbers. The visibility of women as both the brokers and
Fig. 9. Flerve Bailie, caricature of “la jeune fille americaine au
volant.”
Published in Revue Franâise, 3 June 1928
Fig. 10. Flerve Bailie, caricature of “la juene fille

americaine.”
Published in Revue Franâise, 3 June 1928
producers of modern culture was indeed one of the period’s distinguish-

ing traits. Drouin described these pioneers, a category of “femmes dam-
nees forgotten by Baudelaire,” as “strangers to their sex” and perceived
“at the basis of their artistic accomplishments, a sensual void.”40 As par-
adigmatic of “this type . . . for whom artistic creation constitutes a refuge
from the disappointments of love,” Drouin offers two examples: first, the
brilliant Mme de Sevigne, who never would have left us her phenomenal
legacy “if she had been fulfilled as a wife and happy as a mother”; and
second, that “insatiable virago” George Sand, whose genius issued, by
Drouin’s reckoning, from sexual frigidity.41
The extraordinary accomplishments of authors such as George Sand,
George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Jane Austin helped to make
literature the “freest of all professions for women,” according to Virginia
Woolf.42 Literary women of Woolf’s generation both effected transfor-
mations to their local cultural environments and enlivened debates about
art, gender, and sexual identity internationally. Lesbians engaged in activ-
ities from writing, journalism, and publishing to book illustration, book
lending, and book selling weave in and out of the origin narrative that I
am in the process of composing, as must by now be apparent.
Parallel to this accommodation within the literary professions, the
interrelated domains of the theater and the visual arts also offered women
economic alternatives to marriage, if not relief from the protocols of
bourgeois gender relations. Although the theater continued to provide
institutional cover for the most conventional of sexual transactions, at
least —as Mary Louise Roberts has shown with respect to Sarah Bern-
hardt—eccentricity in sexual matters was the rule, not the exception,
within this milieu.43 The putatively bohemian society of visual artists,
which engaged with the theatrical community in Paris to their mutual
enrichment throughout the 1920s, attracted its share of lesbian artists and
models. Pursuant to the sexual desegregation of private as well as state-
sponsored academies in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, women from all over France and, indeed, the world had come
to Paris to study. Many —like those providing the focus of this study —
remained to establish careers in the artistic capital. The professional
forums that they created —from galleries like that of Berthe Weill to exhi-
bition societies such as the Femmes Artistes Modernes —introduced a new
cast of players to the international cultural scene.
One visual metier, photography, offered these newcomers the oppor-
tunity to master an emerging technology whose practices and conventions
remained open to elaboration from fresh perspectives. As the interwar

photographer Germaine Krull observed, “the same world, seen through
different eyes, is not exactly the same.”44 Indeed, seeing the world differ-
ently could make a world of difference. When Jean Cocteau exclaimed to
Krull, “you are a reforming mirror. You and the camera obscura obtain
a new world,” he clearly identified the camera as the instrument of revo-
lutionary social vision.45
The redemptive potential of this new technology positioned photogra-
phy in the forefront of the most radical cultural movements of the early
twentieth century. Photography’s ignoble status in relation to the tradi-
tional arts, it’s reputation as “the last refuge of failed painters,”46 made it
attractive to cultural provocateurs and available (by default) to margin-
alized practitioners, including women. Indeed, women entering the field
of photography had a hand in shaping alternatives to existing (predomi-
nantly masculine) profiles of artistic and professional accomplishment.
Berenice Abbott—an American expatriate whose portrait studio attracted,
in the 1920s, an intercontinental clientele—visualized, through the cam-
era’s lens, the feminine face of Paris’s intellectual and artistic vanguard.
Abbott trained her lens almost exclusively, during this phase of her career,
on figures of cultural distinction: Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Janet
Flanner, Djuna Barnes, and Marie Laurencin, among them. Speaking of
her professional investment in the genre of portraiture during the years
between the wars, Abbott claimed that “people were more people then,”
before the post-war social masks had hardened.47
Portraiture, implicated from its inception in processes of social evolu-
tion, experienced a resurgence during the 1920s, when Abbott lived and
worked in Paris.48 This resurgence helped to make people “more people
then.” Photographic portraiture mediated the creation of new social images,
new social subjects, prototypes, alive with an intensity not yet dulled by
the very repetition that photographic technology made possible. Abbott
and others of her generation believed that the camera did not “color the
image it records with remembered images of other times and places.”49
Camera vision could emancipate the eye from habits of sight and the
mind from oppressive stereotypes.
To understand this line of thinking, it is necessary to imagine a world
in which advertising had not yet achieved industrial primacy, a society in
which the photographic image had not yet been definitively enslaved by
commercial interests. In such a world, Lucien Vogel, editor of the photo-
graphically illustrated journal Vu, could boast with impunity of his intention
to “bring to France a new format: [photographically! illustrated coverage

of news from around the world. In the pages of Vu” he emphasized,
“advertising will occupy the place it deserves, in proportion to the place
that it occupies in modern life.”50 Vogel believed that modern technology
and commerce promised a better informed, less brutalized, more demo-
cratic future. Photographically illustrated magazines like Vu and Vogue
constituted an open-ended catalogue of widely accessible visual references
that included new images of women.51
In this world, the movie camera too promised to open vistas for women;
cinema’s potential inspired theatrical personalities such as Colette, Sarah
Bernhardt, Musidora, and Loie Fuller, directors such as Alice Guy, Ger-
maine Dulac, and Dorothy Arzner, and producers such as Bryher, to name
just a few. When H.D. —watching Bryher’s image projected on the motion
picture screen —exclaimed, “You are myself being free,” she captured a
feeling shared by many of her contemporaries.52 A priori, filmmaking, like
photography, represented a gender-neutral practice that enabled women
to visualize a world free of constraining gender prejudices. In the 1920s,
before the “talkies” outmoded the “silents,” the so-called seventh art pro-
vided what Bryher described as “a single language across Europe” and
established a frame of reference that could be shared across cultural and
political borders.53 Bryher’s magazine Close Up, the first international
journal devoted to film, included contributions from correspondents based
in Paris, London, Berlin, Geneva, Flollywood, New York, Moscow, and
Vienna.54 Bryher’s fluency in several languages positioned her to serve as
both editor and translator. Under her direction, Close Up represented
every nation that had been traumatized by the Great War and provided a
site of dialogue in which historical enmities (whether between men and
women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, blacks and whites, rich and
poor, or nation-states) had no place. The title Close Up, like the quintes-
sential^ cinematic viewing angle to which it refers, speaks of this desire
for rapprochement. Neutrality, mutual respect, the free exchange of ideas —
these were the editorial principals to which Close Up adhered, and
according to the journal’s contributors, these very qualities shaped the
character of the new medium.
Not surprisingly, women professionals in the fields of cinema and pho-
tography often balked when asked to discuss their work from a “woman’s”
perspective. In interviews, Berenice Abbott impatiently brushed aside ques-
tions about gender and sexual identity, stressing instead her aesthetic and
technical accomplishments. In this way, she denied representational space,
within the public record, to narratives of victimization (or, for that mat-
ter, favoritism). Professionalism, she believed, held out the promise of
evaluation based uniquely on merit.55
Despite their incursions into new professional territory, however, “in-
dependent women” of the 1920s still had, as the American expatriate
H.D. put it, “no special place on the map.”56 Understandably, lesbians
who had the means (such as H.D. and her lover Bryher) often chose to
expatriate, to live as cosmopolitan nomads, or to retreat to some remote
terrain of exile, beyond the range of family and state. Bryher, for one,
took up residence in multinational Switzerland, leaving her prominent
English family with nothing more than the address of Sylvia Beach’s Paris
bookshop as a point of contact. On the most profound level, of course,
as Virginia Woolf justly observed, this territorial disinvestment character-
ized women everywhere, whether lesbian or not, at this time. As a “Society
of Outsiders,” women of the pre-suffrage era were statutory foreigners
even in their place of birth.57 Although the lesbian seemed a misfit not
only with respect to citizenship but also with respect to kinship, she had
nevertheless been structured by these frameworks. She “is and is not out-
cast, is and is not a social alien, is and is not a normal human being, she
is,” H.D. resumed, “borderline.”58
If H.D. expressed ambivalence about the states of social and territorial
liminality in which she and her lover were destined to live, Bryher took a
more positive stance. Bryher shared Edward Carpenter’s belief that the
borderline position occupied by members of the “intermediate sex” rep-
resented an ideal middle ground —not completely estranged from nor
completely implicated in the prevailing social schema —where polarized
factions (racial, sexual, or political) might be led to make peace. Accord-
ing to Carpenter, “the frank, free nature of the [intermediate! female, her
masculine independence and strength wedded to thoroughly feminine
grace of form and manner, may be said to give [her], through [her! dou-
ble nature, command of life in all its phases, and a certain freemasonry
of the secrets of the two sexes,” which enabled her to function as a “rec-
onciler” and “interpreter.”59
This logic informs a silent movie titled Borderline, which was pro-
duced by Bryher in 1930, with her husband-of-convenience Kenneth
MacPherson operating the camera. Paul and Eslanda Robeson made their
screen debuts in Borderline, attracting the attention of reviewers from
England, Germany, France, and Italy. Bryher cast herself, aptly, in the role
of innkeeper. The inn, a transitional accommodation located on the frontier
between politically neutral Switzerland and Germany, served as the set-

ting for Bryher’s politically and formally progressive film.
For lesbians of this pivotal generation, the question of territory itself
was never neutral though, as Bryher realized. While she and PLD. chose
to settle permanently in Switzerland (the birthplace of the Red Cross
and a haven for conscientious objectors and deserters from both camps
during the First World War), hundreds of their lesbian contemporaries
adopted France as a permanent or long-term homeland. A privileged few
attempted to establish outposts in spots such as Capri, where Brooks
sojourned, or Mytilene, where Natalie Barney and Renee Vivien dreamed
of laying claim to the mythological terrain of lesbian origins.
Terms such as sappbist and lesbian located this originary terrain in the
distant reaches of the cultural imagination. The euphemism amazon, too,
conjured up a race that dwelled, according to stories told well before the
time of Homer, at the borderline of the known world. Classical narratives
pushed the habitat of these women warriors farther and farther to the east
as the ancient world, and its charted territories, expanded.
Had the Amazons been a real matriarchal tribe? Or were they merely
the poetic incarnation of feminine resistance to patriarchal oppression?
Classical scholars, poets, anthropologists, and political philosophers of
the early twentieth century argued this point among themselves.60 “It is
of no consequence,” wrote Charlotte Wolff in 1971, when a new gener-
ation of lesbians resumed the interrogation, “whether the matriarchate
existed as a definite period of history ... or in mythology only. Mythol-
ogy is history.”61 A number of Paris lesbians at the turn of the century
held the same opinion. It was of some consequence, for instance, that
Vivien (nee Pauline Tarn) taught herself Greek to translate Sappho’s verses
for French publication in 1903, just a year after Barney completed her
Cinq Petits Dialogues grecs.62 Vivien and Barney—two native English
speakers whose literary pursuits unfurled and intertwined in French, the
“language of love” —brought Sappho and sapphism together under the
banner of a bilingual cultural movement.63 For these two expatriate poets,
the mythical territory of Lesbos —a settlement founded, according to leg-
end, by Amazons —represented a heritage more legitimate (because freely
chosen) than any determined by bloodlines or national origin. Legends of
Sappho’s reign on the island during matriarchy’s golden era recommended
Mytilene as a modern-day refuge for literary lesbians. Barney’s Cinq Dia-
logues represent sapphism as a unifying literary, spiritual, and sexual alter-
native to patriarchal norms, as the following passage makes plain:
Then the Unknown Woman, persuasive and formidable, terrible and

gentle, says to me: If you love me, you will forget your family and
your husband and your country and your children and you will
come to live with me. / If you love me, you will leave everything you
cherish and the places where you remember yourself . . . and your
memories and your hopes will become nothing more than the desire
for me. . . . / And I answered her sobbing: I love you.64
Barney’s Aegean “colony” foundered, as did her romance with Vivien.

Undeterred, however, she went on to establish an urban Lesbos in Paris,
where she solicited the support of influential comrades. Barney founded
a weekly literary salon in 1909 and thereafter the pavilion on the rue
Jacob, with its enclosed garden, served as the staging ground for a veri-
table Sapphic revival.65 There, the pageants performed, the poetic narra-
tives discussed and recited— penned by Barney herself, Vivien, H.D., and
other writers known to them —celebrated heroines, goddesses, and queens
liberated from the pages of Western culture’s foundational myths. Two of
Barney’s lovers, Colette and Eva Palmer, performed a dialogue extolling
“1’amour grec” written by Pierre Louys in the classical mode. The poet
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus dedicated her 1917 play Sapho desesperee to
Barney. Ida Rubinstein coveted the role, but in the end Delarue-Mardrus
herself interpreted Sappho for the inauguration of the Theatre Femina.66
Such lesbian initiatives glossed a classical revival that had been gather-
ing momentum within male homosexual communities for decades.67 More
broadly speaking, the Sapphic revival claimed space for autonomous
women upon the contested terrain of Western cultural origins while pro-
jecting a new cultural and relational paradigm into the future.
The cover of Djuna Barnes’s sardonic paean to Barney and her salon,
Ladies Almanack, pictures the literary hostess as a modern Amazon.
Astride her steed, sword raised, Barney leads the charge against the patri-
archy at the gallop, backed by a small army of female admirers (fig. 11).
Barnes, in her foreword to the Almanack, locates this lighthearted saga at
“neap-tide to the Proustian chronicle.” The phrase situates the lesbian
Paris known to Barnes and Barney in relation to homosexual society as
viewed by one of its most celebrated male chroniclers, Marcel Proust.68
Proust, in A la Recherche du temps perdu, elaborates on the themes of
territorial alienation familiar in early twentieth-century accounts of sex-
ual deviance. Take, for instance, the woman-loving Albertine (travesty of
Albert, a homosexual chauffer in Proust’s employ); Proust portrays this

lesbian character as “a spy,” who “betrays her most profound humanity,
in that she doesn’t belong to the human community, but to an alien race
that infiltrates this society, hides itself therein, never to assimilate.”69
Ladies Almanack, in contrast, describes lesbianism as an imperious rather
than insidious mode of operation. Instead of infiltrating society (in the
tradition of cross-dressing traitors such as the legendary Chevalier d’Eon),
Barney, identified by Barnes as the queen of Amazon Paris, makes con-
quests, rescues hostages held in marriage, and restores them to “the
shores of Mytilene.”70 Mytilene, in Barnes’s account, is not a land of exile,
an alien territory, but a reclaimed motherland.
Barney, who financed the first edition of Ladies Almanack in 1928,
schematized Paris-Lesbos, this land of promise, for the frontispiece of her
self-published memoirs, Aventures de Vesprit (fig. 12).71 The shifting per-
spectival and representational systems of Barney’s Le Temple de Vamitie
et ses familiers disorient the viewer. Is it a blueprint, a map, a guest list,
Fig. 11. Djuna Barnes,

cover illustration, Ladies
Almanack, 1928.
© The Authors League Fund,
as literary executor of the
Estate of Djuna Barnes
a social register, a genealogy? An interior floor plan artlessly defines a

domestic space within which Barney has scribbled the names of those who
attended her weekly salon: guests of both sexes from a variety of artistic,
social, and geographic climes. The role intermingles still celebrated names —
Colette, Andre Gide, H.D., Sarah Bernhardt, Janet Flanner, Rainer Maria
Rilke, Sinclair Lewis, Louis Aragon, Radclyffe Hall, Rachilde, Marcel
Schwob, Marie Laurencin, Georges Antheil, Greta Garbo, Mercedes de
Acosta, Marguerite Yourcenar, Gertrude Stein—with forgotten ones. The
names, like the guests themselves no doubt, appear grouped by free asso-
ciation, observing no pronounced taxonomy. Brooks occupies a central
spot near the tea table, surrounded by personalities whom history has
since obscured. Here and there we find the names of those who sat for
Brooks’s portraits: Una Troubridge, Elisabeth de Gramont, the novelist
Paul Morand, the pianist Renata Borgatti. A few (illegible) names occupy
a space in the margins, on the perimeter of the salon.
Barney reserves the top of the page for her most honored guests. Upon
this echelon, decadents of the old school—Pierre Louys, Comte Robert de
Montesquiou, Rilke, Edouard de Max, Apollinaire, Proust —rub shoul-
ders with the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, the dancer Isadora Duncan,
and poet Renee Vivien. Before an elevation of the temple consecrated “a
l’Amitie” (focal point of this drawing, Barney’s garden, and her career),
we find Remy de Gourmont, originator of the epithet “l’Amazone des let-
tres,” by which Barney was known.
A fine, meandering line traces the hostess’s trajectory through a parlor
full of guests representing no less than a dozen nations, out the garden
door, and up to the threshold of this Temple of Friendship. Barney labels
the line, like a river on a map, “l’Amazone,” mixing cartographic with
architectural idioms. She adopts this fluvial trope repeatedly in her mem-
oirs, comparing herself, for instance, to an American “tidal wave that
runs against the current of the Seine and jostles the small boats that are
too tightly attached to the banks.”72 Barney’s drawing purposefully rep-
resents an allegorical place —“now a landscape, now a room,” words
once used by Walter Benjamin to describe the city of Paris.73 It evokes the
trajectories of friendships, of love affairs, of rivalries, and hit-and-miss
encounters staged within the semiprivate space of Barney’s salon: a spe-
cial place on the map for independent women.
Like Romaine Brooks’s portrait oeuvre, Barney’s schematic drawing,
and the salon itself, represents the desire for community more than the
fact of community; the characters named here never acted in concert on
the same stage at the same time. Some of them may never even have set
foot on Barney’s premises; others may have done so with reluctance. Rad-
clyffe Hall, for one, viewed Paris-Lesbos as a “no-man’s land—the most
desolate country in all creation,” and neither Barney’s charms nor the
brilliance of her salon changed this perception.74 Renee Vivien experi-
enced her short life in that country as a form of exile, lamenting, “every-
where I go I repeat: do not belong here.’”75 Similarly, the protagonist
of H.D.’s autobiographical novel, Paint It Today, protests that she and
her lover have been “cast out of the mass of the living.”76
Some lesbians, on the other hand, wore their alienated status like a
badge of distinction. “In order to bring something, it is necessary to come
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from elsewhere,” Barney prefaced the collection of literary portraits that

she created of this estranged population.77 Brooks adopted an aesthete’s
stance, that of an artiste who “belongs to no time, to no country, to no
milieu.”78 And those —like Bryher or Cahun and Moore —who decried
chauvinism for its logic of domination, seized on the utopian potential of
alienation.
Whether experienced as an affliction, a strategy, or a distinction, this
lesbian culture of estrangement inflected expatriation in specific ways. As
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have observed, “Neither an emigrant
nor an immigrant, the expatriate defines herself in resistance to both the
first country in which she was born and the second country where she
resides.” The expatriate standing of the lesbians who settled in Paris sym-
bolized the rejection of nation and family as the cornerstones of identity.
The citizens of Paris-Lesbos might well have conceived of lesbianism itself
“as a perpetual, ontological expatriation.”79 Expatriation, by these lights,
equally describes the venture of lesbians who migrated to Paris from the
provinces, many of whom (like Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, or
Suzy Solidor) abandoned their family names en route.
If Paris was, as Barney claimed, “the only city where you can live and
express yourself as you please,”80 this was because those who sought
alternatives there envisioned and lived it as such. By behaving and speak-
ing differently —by articulating what the Ladies Almanack described as
“the anomaly that calls the hidden name”— lesbians of this era aimed to
redefine the boundaries of both the known and the imagined world.81
Two
Romaine Brooks
PORTRAITS THAT LOOK BACK
A new star makes a new heaven.
— Natalie Clifford Barney,

The One Who Is Legion
t i he lesbian society portraitist Romaine Brooks, an outstanding

member of Paris’s growing population of modern women, cut a
striking figure on the European cultural scene during the 1910s
and 1920s. Her dashing fashions, raven hair, pale complexion, and pen-
etrating eyes invested the painter with an aura of romance. Mireille Havet
described Brooks, amid a select group of admirers, as wrapped in “the
perverse and disquieting mystery of her spacious black living room, with
its off-white and vermilion accents, gold cushions, lacquer ware, mirrors,
geometrically patterned rugs, and grand fireplace.” The only natural
touch, “a rude and untamable fire,” threw light on the “admirable, her-
metic face” of the hostess, with her “sad smile, that of a disappointed
child, and an authoritarian and ardent regard that caresses and ques-
tions.” 1 Brooks staged her professional and social interactions within con-
texts, like the mise-en-scene that Havet described, of her own devising.
The artist’s decor, like her demeanor, was of a piece with the dark and
somewhat disquieting paintings that claimed pride of place in the over-
all scheme. “(Ja, c’est moi,” Brooks would declare to her guests, gestur-
ing dramatically toward the 1923 self-portrait. The critic Albert Flament
recorded his impression of this expatriate’s “joyous accent thrown like
a veil over the void of her solitude.” Flament had no sooner stepped
across the painter’s threshold when Brooks introduced him to a “portrait
psychologique” (the 1923 self-portrait) that she had propped on an easel

by the windows. Flament noted the effect of this dual encounter: “‘Un
portrait psychologique’. . . ! In the three-faced psyche glass I perceive the
real face of Mrs. Brooks, who has just made herself up with that ochre
powder she loves so much. . . . And I shift my eyes back to that other vis-
age, severe and pale, a being invisible to our eyes that [the artist] has ren-
dered on canvas . . . , a solitary wanderer, at large within a devastated
habitat.”2 Flament represents the 1923 self-portrait as a sort of uncanny
double, a manifestation of the subject’s unconscious (singular, invisible,
private) essence. Brooks’s early supporter Robert de Montesquiou, in his
article “Cambrioleurs d’ames,” acknowledged the uncanny effect of
Brooks’s portraiture more generally. It was as if, he observed, these paint-
ings had the power to usurp the essence of their sitters, the power to
“steal their souls.”
Montesquiou, model for the neurasthenic protagonist of Joris-Karl
Fluysmans’s fin-de-siecle classic A Reborns (Against nature), recognized
Brooks as a kindred spirit; he called attention to her work on the occa-
sions when she saw fit to release it from her salon for display in exhibi-
tions or galleries. The portraits demonstrated a degree of panache and
savoir faire that some believed ill suited to a woman painter, a wealthy
one who painted only what and when she pleased. A number of critics
remarked that Brooks’s portraits derived their strength from the models
who posed for her more than from the artist herself. Certainly the works
produced by Brooks during the 1920s, in particular, dramatize a sense of
entitlement shared by the artist and her sitters —that is, the upper eche-
lons of Paris’s cosmopolitan lesbian society.
These portraits “look back” in more ways than one. Most obviously,
the independent women represented by Brooks —commanding equal foot-
ing with the artist-heiress —confidently return the gaze of the observer. At
the same time, these portraits revise and revitalize an iconography of dis-
tinction codified in the previous century. Elite figures such as the dandy
and the flaneur, for instance, emerge anew in and through Brooks’s por-
trait oeuvre. Characterized by extreme refinement, meticulous attention to
surface appearances, and indifference to commercial expediency, dandy-
ism offered an alternative to the ethos of masculine sobriety that prevailed
in Baudelaire’s era. Via costume and gesture, the dandy set himself apart
from the sober legions of businessmen and statesmen responsible for build-
ing the great financial and colonial empires of nineteenth-century Europe.
In the writings of Baudelaire and his contemporaries, another privileged
ROMAINE BROOKS: PORTRAITS THAT LOOK BACK 45
male character, the flaneur, also stood apart from the industrious fray of
capitalist expansion to savor the special pleasures of modern urban life.
While, on the one hand, the dandy created a public spectacle of himself,
the flaneur took up the less conspicuous station of an anonymous and
detached observer. Both the figure of the dandy and that of the flaneur
continued to resonate in the 1920s Paris art world and continued to
accrue new social meanings.
Brooks, as recent scholarship demonstrates, elaborated those meanings
in her monograph, memoirs, and letters, in her decorative schemes, her
photographs, her fashions, and, above all, in her portraits of modern
women.3 Brooks’s tour-de-force self-portrait of 1923 offers a striking ex-
ample of the artist’s feminine —and more specifically, lesbian —revision of
dandy-aestheticism and of the figure of the flaneur (fig. 13). With this self-
portrait, and with her fashion and aesthetic choices generally, Brooks not
only envisioned a new kind of elite subject but also contributed to the
resignification of a pastiche of visual cues that enabled upper-class les-
bians to identify and to acknowledge one another.4 In the same stroke,
Brooks tailored the mantle of artistic genius to suit an entirely new pro-
file: that of a woman.
This bifurcated identification (with the flaneur, the observer, and with
the dandy, the observed) was the first solution that Brooks worked out to
two significant problems facing her when she began her painting career
in the 1890s. Both problems related to the larger question of the status
women in European societies, the so-called woman question. First, how
could an artist represent a feminine subject in ways that acknowledged
strength of character, powers of intellect, and the capacity to assume
active roles? Second, how could Brooks, as a woman, represent herself as
a serious (and potentially canonical) artist?
In a survey of French Salon painting of the 1890s, the critic Camille Mau-
clair attempted to come to terms with a new type of female iconography
put into circulation by artists to whom he referred as “the painters of
the ‘New Women.’” He speculated that la femme nouvelle — self-reliant,
educated, and ambitious —would cause artists to rethink the gendered
conventions of portraiture.5 Throughout the nineteenth century, he noted,
the pictorial goals of male and female portraiture had rarely converged.
Feminine portraiture offered the artist an opportunity to demonstrate
technical virtuosity, to craft the decorative surfaces of the sitter’s costume,
coiffure, and body as of one piece with her resplendent surroundings;
portraits of male subjects, on the other hand, allowed the artist to trans-
late individual character and psychic depth into marks of paint. Because
of the emergence of a new kind of feminine subject at the turn of the cen-
tury, Mauclair observed, “a new concept of women’s portraits has begun
to emerge. Her decorative and nonconscious aspects will probably fade.
A new woman is being elaborated, a pensive and active being to which a
new form of painting will have to correspond.”6 If Mauclair had wit-
nessed the arrival, upon his own historical horizon, of a new form of por-
traiture that corresponded to this new kind of feminine subject, he still
imagined that “the painters of the New Women” would be male. New
Women who desired to represent themselves had first to contend with yet
another rhetorical figure, that of the femme peintre.
In the first decades of the new century, an expanding community of
women artists emerged from the professional academies whose doors they

Self-Portrait, 1923.
Gift of the Artist
had forced open in the 1880s and 1890s to expose their work in the pres-
tigious annual Salons. The proliferation of work by women at the Salon
provoked a spate of polemical critical writings about the artistic and pro-
fessional capabilities of the “gentle sex.” Louis Vauxcelles, for instance,
devoted a chapter of his 1922 survey of French art to what he described
as the era’s “copious blossoming” of a new art-world figure, the femme
peintre. The distinctions he made between art produced by women
and art produced by men surfaced time and again in critical responses
(whether supportive or dismissive) to incursions by women into this his-
torically male cultural arena. “What many female painters and sketchers
call art,” Vauxcelles concluded, “is often merely an art of pleasure. . . .
Rare are those women artists who have understood that art is not merely
an agreeable lie, but that through it one should express the most pro-
found, the most intimate part of oneself, the sad and lofty dreams that
one cannot pursue in life.”7
The fashionable Parisian society painter Kees van Dongen chose the
“lady painter” as the subject of a painting he exhibited at the Galerie
Bernheim in 1921 (fig. 14).8 The title Passe-temps honnete encapsulates
the assumptions about women that inform the critical writings of Vaux-
celles and his contemporaries as well as this painting. The cliche of the
“honest pastime” acknowledges, on the one hand, the amateur status of
most women artists of van Dongen’s era and, on the other, the opportu-
nities that women of the post-war generation might have had to indulge
in dishonest pastimes. The title also sets a complicit tone for the dialogue
between the painter and the viewer, a jocular exchange mediated by the
painting itself.
Van Dongen pictures a stylish woman perched on perilously high-
heeled shoes before an easel erected in the middle of her elegantly appor-
tioned living room. The domestic setting tells us just as plainly as the
painting’s title that art is only a hobby for this woman, not a profession.
The dilettante dabbles at her palette while chatting with a fashionably
dressed female companion (perhaps the sitter for the painting within the
painting?), who poses at the cusp of an over-mantel mirror, head propped
up on her elbow to convey a cultivated blend of amusement and bore-
dom. The sheltered, domestic setting, the claustrophobic enclosure of
the two women within the picture’s frame, and the narcissistic circuit of
the feminine gaze framed and reframed here by both mirror imagery and
portraiture-within-portraiture effectively evoke the limited horizons of both
the female painter and the female subject more generally. The woman
painter’s vision, under these circumstances, can be neither “lofty” nor

“profound.” As if to literally materialize the frivolity of this woman’s
artistic pretensions, the printed fabric out of which the painter’s smock is
fashioned features brightly colored circus clowns. Her foolish smock not
only marks her as an amateur but also compensates for her incursion into
the unwomanly sphere of cultural production.
This stereotype of the lady who paints, like all stereotypes, contains a
kernel of truth. Most women who painted at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century were indeed “ladies”—in so far as their backgrounds almost
always assured them financial security, if not independence. Until well
into the twentieth century, art academies in Paris held segregated life-
drawing classes and provided separate studios for female students; female
students paid twice what male students paid for classes and studio space.9
Fig. 14. Kees van Dongen, Passe-temps honnete, 1921.

© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
Under the circumstances, the upper-crust profile of the majority of women

pursuing careers in the visual arts in the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth century is hardly surprising. Class privilege, what is more, often ren-
dered the distinction between amateur and professional somewhat fluid.
Women who wanted to be considered professional necessarily took pains
to safeguard their reputations against the stigma of amateurism —by
avoiding, for instance, media associated with hobbyists (such as water-
colors) or steering clear of lesser genres (such as the still life).
Yet the aspersion of amateurism was, as they well understood, merely
symptomatic of a more fundamental prejudice concerning the innate inferi-
ority of women. The sexologist Guglielmo Ferrero linked the secondary
role played by women in the arts, their inferior aesthetic faculties, to the
peculiar character of their biological imperatives —in particular the puta-
tively whimsical nature of female sexual desire.10 Brooks aspired to the
status of the rare exception with respect to both aesthetics and sexuality.
She refused to be considered a woman painter. As a result, she chose not
to show her work in the all-women shows organized by the association
of Femmes Artistes Modernes, to which several of her colleagues (such as
Marie Laurencin and Tamara de Lempicka) adhered.11 The paternalistic
tone of the critical coverage that these exhibitions received permits us to
understand, if not applaud, Brooks’s position. Guillaume Apollinaire,
writing about the Femmes Artistes Modernes, pronounced that although
work by “les peintresses” was not original or innovative, at least it mar-
ried “good taste . . . with delicacy.” He described paintings by Marie Lau-
rencin (then his lover and a regular contributor to F.A.M. exhibitions) as
“lighthearted” rather than sober, “intuitive” rather than cerebral.12
In contrast, Brooks’s paintings —such as her haunting nude Azalees
blanches of 1910 —garnered more serious consideration. As characterized
by Montesquiou, Brooks seduced the viewer not with innocence and
charm but with a more powerful allure, dark and decadent, “akin to that
of belladonna” (fig. 15).13 In his review “Cambrioleurs d’ames,” Mon-
tesquiou took pains to countermand the presumption of amateurism that
handicapped so many of Brooks’s women colleagues. Without offering a
corrective to this stereotype, he concluded: “In this time of unfettered
amateurism, the quality of her work classes her among those whose prod-
ucts . . . serious, severe, bitter, even . . . have nothing to do (no, nothing
whatsoever) with the trendy art objects we see exhibited annually.”14
From the very beginning of her career, critical responses to Brooks’s work
stressed qualities more typically associated with masculinity, describing
her work as “original,” “innovative,” “vigorous,” “penetrating,” “cere-

bral,” “precise,” “affirmed,” “sober,” “rigorous,” and “masterful.”15
Vauxcelles, although skeptical about the suitability of women to artis-
tic careers generally, seemed to view Brooks’s lesbianism as a distinguish-
ing feature, and one that differentiated her work from traditional patterns
of feminine practice. “The nature of the artist [Brooks] is singular,” he
alerted the reader, “marked by a cold perversity, a bit literary. Her draw-
ing is firm, muscular, the composition always willful.”16 A reviewer for
the Commentator, a London paper, described the aura of Brooks’s paint-
ings as “curious, cold, salty,” “artificial,” “insidious,” and “highly self-
conscious.” “In Mr.—or is it Miss? —Brooks’s art,” this reviewer acknowl-
edged a “touch of decadence” that he found “languorous,” somehow, in
a “rather new, Northern kind of way” and “not wholly unpleasant.”17
These critics were responding to the female portraits and nudes that
Brooks exhibited at her first solo show, organized by Paris’s prestigious
Durand-Ruel Gallery in 1910, and a spin-off exhibition held the follow-
ing year at London’s Goupil Gallery. In works like Azalees blanches, the
expressive distortion of scale, the disturbing lassitude of the figure, the
calculated combination of perspectival systems, and the funereal color
scheme contradicted received ideas about the prettiness of the feminine
Fig. 15. Romaine Brooks, Azalees blanches, 1910.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Artist
artistic sensibility and presented an alternative to the (traditionally fecund

and voluptuous) female nude. With paintings like Azalees blanches, Brooks
began to tackle the questions of how to represent women differently and
how to represent herself as a different kind of woman artist.18
The solution to these interrelated problems did not crystallize, how-
ever, until the following decade —after the war—when Brooks conceived
of the paintings that Natalie Barney labeled a “series of modern women.”19
The series, which Brooks and Barney together took pains to circulate,
redressed the less-dignified images of modern women that proliferated in
the print media internationally during the post-World War I reconstruc-
tion period. The portraits —whose bold outlines, monochromatic colora-
tion, and simplified formal vocabulary facilitated photographic replication—
were so frequently and widely reproduced in publications that Brooks had
to engage no fewer than four clipping services (one in England, one in the
United States, and at least two in France) to keep her 1920s press book
current.
Brooks’s Self-Portrait of 1923, although not the first in this series of
modern women, epitomizes the artist’s post-Armistice project. She chose
to feature the self-portrait on the cover of the exhibition catalogue for a
major solo show at London’s Alpine Gallery in 1925. Reviews of the show
in art journals on both sides of the channel, and indeed on both sides of
the Atlantic, cameoed her self-portrait. The painting was, and continues
to be, the most widely exhibited and widely reproduced of Brooks’s
works, serving, from its inception, as a kind of logo for the painter. In this
self-portrait, Brooks figures the modern feminine subject (herself) as an
entirely autonomous agent. She holds her own within the space of the
painting and within the space we occupy as viewers, leveling her gaze at
us from the shade of that brimmed top hat. The critic Claude Roger-Marx
was struck by the ways in which this portrait played with codes of gen-
der and sexual identity: “This top hat that overshadows a feminine face,
these gloved hands, this virile costume recalls the most daring descriptions
in [Proust’s] A la Recherche du temps perdu, while the melancholy with
which the artist has invested her regard makes one dream of the heroines
so tenderly described by Colette in Ces Plaisirs.”20 Despite Brooks’s adop-
tion of expressive practices (from her palette to her costume) that harked
back to late nineteenth-century aesthetes like James Abbott McNeill
Whistler and Oscar Wilde, critics persistently identified Brooks as an
artist who was, like Proust and Colette, “adamantly of her times.”21
Modifying nineteenth-century conventions (of both gender and repre-

sentation), Brooks aimed to establish her lineage as a notable artist while
visualizing new social and cultural horizons for women of her disposition
and standing. In this portrait of the artist, among other works, Brooks
renegotiates a heavily coded geographical and social space. She poses on
what appears to be a balcony or terrace —a transitional space linking the
interior (perhaps of the artist’s studio or home) to the outside world, a
world in ruins. The balcony also links innovations in the realm of por-
traiture to past conventions of feminine representation, situating the artist
at the threshold of a promising new era. In sharp contrast with the “girl
wistfully wondering at life,” as one critic described the subject of an ear-
lier balcony portrait titled La Vie passe sans moi, the feminine subject
represented by Brooks in 1923 does not wistfully overlook a world to
which she has only limited access.22 Instead, Brooks appears to dominate
the cityscape behind her. Her form breaks the horizon, cutting a black sil-
houette against the troubled sky. In the background, the facade of a
ruined building doubles the artist’s silhouette like a haunting leitmotif.23
The windows of the hollowed-out building, like Brooks’s own introverted
regard, seem to simultaneously invite and ward off visual access.
While balcony portraits like this one by Brooks from the 1910s deploy
representational strategies used by impressionist-era painters to map the
constraints of bourgeois femininity onto the architecture and geography
of the modern city, the 1923 self-portrait presents a radically different
model of feminine subjectivity.24 The feminine subject here takes on the
aspect of a flaneur, a subject identified with, rather than “sheltered” from,
the city. Indeed, the balcony seems to figure the flaneur’s gaze, overlook-
ing not a literal place but an allegorical city, like the city evoked in the
contemporaneous writings of Walter Benjamin.25 The artist’s perch does
not overlook the Champs de Mars at the heart of Paris, which provides
a backdrop for another one of Brooks’s earlier balcony portraits, Jean
Cocteau a Vepoque de la grande roue (Jean Cocteau in the era of the Fer-
ris wheel) of 1912. In contrast to the quintessentially Parisian spectacle
that Brooks associates with Cocteau, she has chosen to situate herself
within a less identifiable urban geography —it could be Paris, it could be
Whistler’s London —where land and water interpenetrate in the half light.
Before our eyes, as before those of the flaneur described by Benjamin,
“the city dilates to become landscape.”26 The misalignment of the archi-
tectural and topographical features bracketing the subject contributes
to the troubling ambiguity of this setting. Unresolved but evocative, the
ROMAINE BROOKS: PORTRAITS THAT LOOK BACK S3
background seems to formalize the artist’s own liminal status as an expa-

triate, a woman artist, and representative of the so-called intermediate
sex. Like the flaneur, she poses “on the threshold, of the city as of the
bourgeois class. Neither has yet engulfed [her]; in neither is [she] at
home.”27
Elisabeth de Gramont, femme de lettres, describes Brooks in terms that
affirm this image of the artist as a privileged outsider, above the fray,
“indifferent to honors and testimonials of recognition” and destined “to
remain a stranger wherever she goes.”28 Echoing Baudelaire’s romantic
notion of the poet, Gramont pictures Brooks as a painter who, by dint of
her marginality (sexual marginality included), remains completely free, at
home both nowhere and everywhere, “like a roving soul in search of a
body” (and entitled to take any body she chose).29
This sense of entitlement shapes the image that Brooks presents in her
self-portrait. Striking a proprietary pose vis-a-vis the urban scene behind
her, she directs her attention away from the exterior public world, toward
the private interior, where she situates the viewer. In so doing, she herself
remains remote while identifying the viewer not as a member of the wider,
outside public but as an intimate, an “insider.” Before this invitee, the
portrait subject stands slightly torqued and perfectly erect at the very limit
of the picture plane, impinging upon the viewing space that she has
defined, as if, “emancipated from coteries and human society in general,
it pleases her simply to observe those around her.”30
Just as the portrait figures a subject who commands the space behind
(metaphorically, the past, away from which she pivots) as well as what
lies ahead (in both time and space), it presents us with a feminine subject
who masters her own representation. The worked-over surfaces of the
portrait subject’s face and garments, in contrast to the relative sketchiness
of the setting, establish the primacy of this subject, while the expressive
brushwork celebrates and memorializes the artist’s hand. The asymmetry
of the composition, the reduction of form, the deft outlining, signal the
painter’s modernity and visual sophistication. The half circles underscor-
ing the eyes emphasize her appraising gaze, while the shadow cast by
the hat fends off the searching eyes of the viewer. Vauxcelles, struck by
the intensity of this effect, remarked, “Madame Brooks does not paint the
eyes, but the regard”31 —in this case, the artist’s self-regard, her regard for
others, and the regard of others for her all come into play.
If this emphasis on the shaded eyes suggests a privileged subject who —
like the flaneur—observes without being observed, the emphasis also
entwines the aesthetic experience with that of desire. Benjamin could have
had this painting in mind when he wrote, explaining the charismatic power
(or “aura”) of the original art work, that “the painting we look at reflects
back at us that of which our eyes will never have their fill. What it con-
tains that fulfills the original desire would be the very same stuff on which
the desire continually feeds.”32 In attempting to exchange regards with the
painting, the viewer experiences a pleasure in desiring —the simultaneous
sensation of fulfillment and lack that constitutes the peculiarly intimate
thrill of aesthetic experience.33 Yet the gender dynamics of desire set in
play here do not conform to normative (subject/object, male/female) bina-
ries. This painting (this woman) not only looks back; she looks first. In-
deed, we find it impossible to return her gaze. Our eyes are turned away,
disregarded; deflected downward by the vertical line of the portrait sub-
ject’s nose, they come to rest on a pair of startlingly red lips.
The bright lip rouge and thickly powdered face mark the portrait sub-
ject as a woman, and a fashion-conscious one at that, despite her male
attire. The vermilion lipstick calls forth the only other touch of color in
the painting —the hero’s ribbon that adorns the artist’s lapel —to invoke a
feminine subject who, like the Baudelairian artist, is both modern and
heroic.34 The artist has highlighted the musculature surrounding the por-
trait subject’s mouth, suggesting a capacity for expression that the sealed
lips pictured here belie. We might linger upon these lips, trying to read
meaning into the impassive set of this mouth and jaw, were it not for the
arrowlike white collar and throat that lead our eyes away, down the
button-line of the subject’s jacket (which buttons man-wise, right to left).
The jacket gaps slightly to receive the thumb of a gloved right hand. The
subject’s forearm, nearly perpendicular to her torso, cuts off our eye’s
descent and invites us to pause and appreciate her articulated and articu-
late hand: the painting hand.
The subject’s glove —its turned-back cuff, its seams, its suggestive posi-
tion-invites exegesis. As an attribute, the glove has a long history in vis-
ual representation. In feminine portraiture (such as La Femme au gant,
1869, by Brooks’s one-time instructor Carolus-Duran) the glove—dropped
like a hint in the woman’s wake—participates in a coy mise-en-scene of
heterosexual seduction. In masculine portraiture (Velazquez’s portraits of
the Spanish nobility, for instance) the glove serves, instead, as a marker
of aristocratic privilege and authority.35 A central visual prop of diplomacy,
the glove removed signals a disposition to negotiate, the glove thrown
down, a provocation. From the seventeenth century forward, breviaries
outlining the rudiments of genteel behavior informed aspiring bourgeois

gentlemen that the removal of one glove indicated genuine “ease.”
What does it mean that Brooks, in this self-portrait, has not removed
one glove? Is this a way of indicating, in dialogue with the breviaries on
genteel comportment, that she is somehow not entirely at ease? Not quite
genteel, pas vraiment gentil—not quite nice? Or is it that she is not dis-
posed to negotiate? Or does the fact that she retains both gloves suggest,
in defiance of the conventions of feminine portraiture, that this subject is
not sexually available to men? In any or all cases, Brooks, like her male
dandy predecessors, clearly deploys fashion here as a means of engaging
critically with the social codes of rank and gender.
The most famous of these predecessors, Beau Brummell, made the glove
a fetish, securing its position of prominence in the iconography of the
dandy. According to legend, Brummell engaged three different specialists
to fashion his gloves: one for the palm, one for the fingers, and one for
the thumb.36 Robert Dighton’s 1805 portrait of Brummell pictures this
prototypical dandy, with one arm akimbo, one glove removed, and hold-
ing a top hat and stick in his bare hand (fig. 16). He holds the hat by its
brim, displaying a deep, silk-lined interior. Here, the top hat, like the
dandy himself, seems to figure both the male and female poles of sexual
subjectivity, hinting broadly at the possibility of self-generation.37 As Rhonda
Garelick observes, the dandy “longs to recreate himself as an emblem of
complete originality, with no progenitors save other dandies.”38 The soci-
ety of dandies, this implies, reproduces, renews itself, through emulation
as opposed to procreation.
Brooks’s top hat (in contrast to Brummell’s) signifies androgyny (and
autochthony) not so much by its formal ambivalence as by its simultane-
ous reference to both male and female sartorial codes. The top hat, in
addition to its status as an emblem of the masculine elite, had assumed
preeminence, in the 1920s, as a feature of la derniere mode feminine
(fig. 17). A spread in the Parisian periodical Femina showcases a confec-
tion closely resembling that of Brooks and identified as “the Brummell
top-hat.”39 Unlike Dighton’s Brummell or Whistler’s Comte Robert de
Montesquiou-Fezensac (fig. 18) (to name a painting with which Brooks
would surely have been familiar), the dandy pictured in the 1923 self-
portrait displays no cane, no crop, no maulstick, not even a tightly furled
umbrella. Her right hand, instead, lightly fingers the gap in her jacket. The
phallus apparently does not figure into the economy of this image, yet the
portrait remains intelligible within the tolerances of the dandy genre.
When Marius-Ary Leblond, in his 1901 essay “Les Peintres de la femme

nouvelle,” identified the aesthetic idioms best suited to the articulation of
the modern feminine subject, he anticipated the rapprochement between
aesthetics and subjectivity that Brooks effected in her portraiture of the
1920s: “The new woman is not beautiful. She looks rather like a boy, and
illustrates more than anything the expression of a firm character, a serene
soul, a robustly harmonious body. . . . They are no longer women of plea-
sure and leisure but women who study, of very sober comportment. And
nothing suits them better than heavy and somber colors . . . that express
firmness, . . . roughness, and decisiveness.”40 Brooks’s somber, mono-
chromatic palette distanced her from female colleagues, such as Marie
Laurencin, whose pastel tones played to and with prevailing notions of
feminine sensibility and taste.
Period criticism often describes the tonalities of Brooks’s palette as
“Whistlerian.”41 Montesquiou, careful not to characterize Brooks’s work
as derivative, nuanced this comparison: “Just as [Whistler] bragged that
Fig. 16. Robert Dighton,

Beau Brummell, 1805.
he never set foot in the museum of Madrid [to study the portraiture
of Velazquez], Madame Brooks proclaims that she never set foot in
Whistler’s atelier; she is none the less —and I compliment her on it—one
of the most curious and most sincere students of this master, whom she
has studied, understood, and whose mode she has continued according to
her own fashion.”42 The decadent poet Gabriel D’Annunzio, an intimate
friend of Brooks whom she represented in two portraits, also compared
her to Whistler, dubbing her “the cleverest color symphonist in modern
art.”43 Her works hung adjacent to Whistler’s famous Arrangement in
Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist's Mother at the Exposition des
Artistes Americains (Musee du Luxembourg, Paris, 1919), where critics
compared her “symphonies in grey, white, and black” favorably with
those of her compatriot.44
Brooks solicited the comparison to Whistler in a number of ways.45 In
the manner of Whistler, she used harmonious tonalities to unify her paint-
ings internally and simultaneously to negotiate an artful liaison with the
surrounding decor. As Barney observed, “no component finds its place
unless it makes sense in relation to the whole.”46 Like Whistler, Brooks
designed picture frames for her works that served to integrate the paint-
ings with the surroundings. As a result, her paintings seemed to at once
blend in to the environment and stand out from it. In the case of her 1923
self-portrait, for instance, the frame’s width and low, gently rounded pro-
file smooth the transition between the represented space of the painting
and the real space of the viewer. The frame’s silver-leaf finish harmonizes
with and reflects the surroundings, yet the black form of the portrait
Fig. 17. Illustration from Femina, 1924, picturing the “Brummell” top hat.
subject commands full attention, emerging from a field of halftones as if

coming into view through a thick fog. Montesquiou praised at length the
shades of black and gray that dominated Brooks’s palette and her “man-
ner of disposing them, not only in her paintings, but in her apartments
and studios.”47 In her memoirs, Brooks describes the totalizing aesthetic
that she strove to create, one that could override both the physical and
disciplinary bounds of painting to transform the environment according
to its own dictates. The organizing aesthetic principles that she articulates —
“to make my surroundings coincide with some disturbing significance
within my artist’s brain” —are those of nineteenth-century aestheticism.48
Yet she puts her own stamp upon this legacy.
If Brooks contrived to situate herself in the lineage of aesthetes like
Whistler, she took equal pains to distinguish herself—lest she be perceived,
like so many of her women colleagues, as an imitator. In her unpublished
Fig. 18. James Abbott McNeill Whistler,

Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac,
1891-1892.
© The Frick Collection, New York
memoirs, “No Pleasant Memories” (whose vitriolic character recalls

Whistler’s memoir The Gentle Art of Making Enemies), Brooks both
acknowledged and set herself apart from this predecessor: “Of all the
painters of that period, I of course admired Whistler most. I also criticised
him long before I was able to express my own personality in painting. I
wondered at the magic subtlety of his tones but thought his ‘symphonies’
lacked corresponding subtlety of expression. There was no surprise, no
paradox. No complexity. His was a painter’s perfect technique expressing
delicate visual beauty. My own disturbed temperament was to aspire to-
wards more indeterminate moods.”49 Here she suggests that her “disturbed
temperament” (the temperament of a neurasthenic, the temperament of an
invert) enables her to perceive the world with a greater subtlety, to appre-
ciate its “indeterminate” nuances, to achieve not mere technical mastery
but true genius.50
Critics, too, typically viewed the painter’s response to Whistler as one
of recognition, not emulation. Roger-Marx noted, for instance: “Madame
Brooks appears completely in accord with her own self, faithful to her
own aspirations, concerned above all with her own character. Her res-
olute independence and tenacious will make her impervious to all influ-
ence. She only approaches Claude Debussy and Whistler to the extent that
she finds herself in them.”51 Some latter-day Brooks scholars have char-
acterized her work as backward-looking, behind the times, because of her
apparent debt to nineteenth-century trends. Yet Brooks’s contemporaries
clearly saw things differently.52 Flament praised Brooks as “a painter of
curious talent, very rare, original. ... A woman who has managed to
avoid enslavement to the taste of her era.”53 For Brooks and her admir-
ers, the name Whistler evoked not only a still-viable and even vital aes-
thetic project but a particular set of values figured by the dandy-aesthete.
If dandy-aesthetes like Whistler and Montesquiou embodied this ethos at
the fin de siecle, Brooks positioned herself, in the new century, as their
successor.
In critical writings of the period, the names cited in association with
Brooks include not only Whistler, Debussy, and Proust but also Poe, Ver-
laine, Baudelaire, Mallarme — and, above all, Wilde.54 While these references
to the “decadent school” introduce Brooks, by association, into a pantheon
previously reserved (like the status of genius itself) for men, the identifi-
cation with Wilde inducts her into an explicitly homosexual canon. Wilde’s
condemnation, in 1895, for “acts of gross indecency” collapsed his sex-
ual, social, and artistic transgressions into a single category —a category
bodied forth by the now less ambiguous figure of the dandy-aesthete. In

her memoirs, Brooks honored Wilde —along with Whistler —as a “fellow
lapide” (literally, a victim of stoning).55 This epithet (for Brooks, a trib-
ute) overlaps with Romantic cliches of tormented artistic genius as well
as certain period representations of homosexuality. A. T. Fitzroy’s 1918
novel Despised and Rejected, to cite just one example, represents homo-
sexuals as “the advance-guard of a more enlightened civilisation.”56 Brooks,
who shared this view, must have been pleased when a critic noted that her
work displayed the exquisite subtlety of “a page from Wilde.” Her sar-
torial and artistic choices pay undeniable homage to the martyred dandy
who, like Brooks, affected to heed only his own counsel, indifferent to
public opinion.57 To be great, as Wilde once wrote to Whistler, was to be
misunderstood.58
If we did not take into account what was happening in the elite male
homosexual circles with which Brooks and her milieu intersected during
the 1920s, the artist’s evocation of Wilde would seem like yet another ref-
erence to a bygone era, on a par with her citations of Whistler. Yet in the
1920s, a new generation of homosexuals —born in the twentieth century
and coming of age in the aftermath of the Great War—rallied to revital-
ize the cult of Wilde.59 During this period —when Brooks divided her time
between Paris and London (where she maintained a studio close to those
once occupied by Whistler and Wilde) —dandy-aesthete youths held sway
in some of the most prestigious cultural venues of both capitals. The the-
ater, which Brooks attended with some regularity, was one of the public
spaces to which homosexuals gravitated; it provided a pretext for the sar-
torial display upon which homosexual visibility was largely contingent.
The promenoirs and upper galleries of theaters such as Paris’s Gamier
Opera and London’s Coliseum served, throughout the 1920s, as rallying
points for homosexual men. Cocteau (made up with lipstick and rouge)
felt sufficiently cbez lui at Gamier, for instance, to hail friends espied from
afar in falsetto or to scramble over intervening rows of seats to join them.60
And why not? After all, the reigning impresarios —Sergei Diaghilev of the
Ballets Russes and Rolf de Mare of the Ballets Suedois—were confirmed
homosexual dandies themselves.61
Critical accounts of the London ballet seasons to which Brooks sub-
scribed in the 1920s characterized the habitues of the galleries as “highly
sensitized beings” and “small-talk aesthetes.”62 Herbert Farjeon, writing
for Vogue, wrote that the youthful dandies who overran the ballet theater
seemed “to recline on art like Madame Recamier on her couch and to
regard the dancers and decor as a kind of personal adornment. Indeed, they
might be said to wear the Russian Ballet like a carnation in their button-
holes.”63 An Etonian balletomane recalled his classmates Brian Howard
and Harold Acton in precisely such terms. The pair, he reminisced, would
stroll into the stalls “in full evening dress, with long white gloves draped
over one arm, carrying silver-tipped canes and top hats, looking . . . like
a couple of Oscar Wildes.”64 In the box seats, the lesbian elite also held
its own in the realm of style. With her lady friend in tow, for instance, the
painter Gluck (portrayed by Brooks in 1923 as Peter, a Young English-
woman) distinguished herself by attending the Russian Ballet costumed in
a Cossack hat, plus fours, and high-top boots.65 Radclyffe Hall appeared
at premieres resplendent in her signature broad-brimmed hat, a high col-
lar, man’s stock, and black military cloak.66 Not be upstaged, her lover
Una, Lady Troubridge (whom Brooks also painted while she was in Lon-
don), shouldered a full-length leopard-skin coat and sported her hallmark
monocle for such occasions.
Given this context, it is not surprising that many of the era’s leading
specialists in the field of sexology continued to view costume, a key sig-
nifier of gender, as a symptom of gender inversion. Ellis, for instance, who
had contributed to the codification of a figure known as the “mannish
lesbian,” debated the psychic implications of cross-dressing with his cor-
respondent Bryher throughout the 1920s.67 Ellis had rehearsed the already
well-established premise that a feminine subject dressed in male attire
represented a “man trapped in a woman’s body” (a member of the “inter-
mediate” or “third” sex) in his pioneering book Sexual Inversion,68 This
work, first published in 1897, became accessible to sufficiently motivated
lay readers in England and France in the 1920s. Subsequently, Ellis’s
theories became a focus of discussion by Paris’s lesbian literati. Among
others, Monnier, Beach, Cahun, and Bryher cultivated personal or pro-
fessional relations with the author in the course of this decade.
To suggest that Brooks —who frequented Beach’s bookstore, corre-
sponded with Bryher, and enjoyed an intimate alliance with Paris’s most
provocative literary hostess —would have been aware of Ellis’s work
hardly strains credibility. I argue that Brooks, in the 1923 self-portrait, con-
figures her body by means of makeup and costume in ways that disavow
any symptomatic relationship between costume and gender, outward ap-
pearance and inner “truth”—and thus the biological explanations of sex-
ual identity advanced by sexologists such as Ellis. Yet Brooks too put great
stock in the radical signifying power of costume. Unlike Ellis, however,
she appears to have shared the opinion of aficionados from Wilde to Ben-
jamin, who held that “fashion stands in opposition to the organic.”69 At
the very least, she most certainly believed that fashion could be deployed
strategically to enhance her personal and cultural authority.
To wit, she designed an entire wardrobe of costumes (ceremonial robes
of intellectual and spiritual leadership, riding habits, smoking jackets, and
heroic capes) appropriate for the personage of social and artistic stature
whom she aspired to become. She modeled these fashions in the photo-
graphs that she took or commissioned for diffusion in the press. On her
fiftieth birthday, for instance, she posed in a photographer's studio cos-
tumed as she had painted herself in the self-portrait completed a year ear-
lier (fig. 19).70 Here, she strikes an erect three-quarters pose, averting her
gaze slightly from the camera as if to take a longer view. Every inch the
dandy, she fingers the fine velvet lapel of her frock coat with a manicured
hand and pivots her chin toward the upturned collar that frames her face.
Lest her haughty bearing and gentleman’s redingote not suffice, this por-
trait provides a few supplementary cues: the white carnation in the but-
tonhole, the kerchief peeking out of the breast pocket, and the top hat
clasped lightly in one hand identify her as a dandy (with a twist). “Never
have I had such a string of would-be admirers fall for my black curly hair
and my white collars,” Brooks boasted to Barney in a letter from London
during this era. “They like the dandy in me and are in no way interested
in my inner-self or value.”"1 Her comment, like the self-representation that
she had recently crafted in oil on canvas, implicitly dismisses theories of
sexual subjectivity that deduce inner character from surface characteristics.
Brooks’s penchant for haberdashery, then, was willful, strategic, and
theatrical —not, in her own opinion, the involuntary expression of her
invert’s soul. And while her clothing and coiffure may well have attracted
a number of sexually adventurous women, the fashions that she favored
would not have seemed especially exotic to her worldly suitors. As we
have seen, by the time Brooks executed her 1923 self-portrait, la mode
gargonne circulated widely in Lrench fashion magazines, and at the fash-
ion’s extremes, dandy chic had found favor with certain lesbians in Lon-
don as well as in Paris and Berlin. Within post-war debates about gender
and sexual identity, the garônne style was alternately described as a
symptom and a cause of feminism, lesbianism, and, by the same logic,
of the demise of the patriarchal order. The travesty mode embraced by
Brooks —as a cause rather than a symptom—carried the symbolic weight,
in other words, of a widespread social crisis concerning gender roles.
Oscillating between feminine and masculine codes, post-war fashion fig-

ured (and figured in) a redistribution of social, cultural, economic, and polit-
ical power. For lesbians, masculinized fashions —whose history included
interdiction under the French law of 1801 and pathologization in the lit-
erature of sexology —articulated a double liberation: liberation from con-
ventional strictures of femininity and from those of heterosexuality.72
Given the symbolic charge of man-tailored feminine fashions, it is
intriguing that Brooks’s portraits of cross-dressing women provoked so
little negative commentary. Indeed, the reviews of her work that appeared
in respected publications such as Le Figaro, L’Art Vivant, Vogue, and In-
ternational Studio ranged from ambivalent to favorable. A critic review-
ing the Salon des Independants of 1925 called Brooks “a refined spirit
who remains troubling for the conception of her models, chosen from an
elegant but terribly equivocal milieu.”73 This critic’s choice of words im-
plies that while elegance and class did not erase the “troubling” implica-
tions of Brooks’s portraiture, an aura of aristocratic decadence mitigated
against the threat that her “models” posed. Certainly Brooks enjoyed a
Fig. 19. Romaine Brooks

modeling her fashions, 1924.
National Collection of Fine Arts
research material on Romaine
Brooks,-1874-1969, Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution
degree of tolerance for her eccentricities thanks to the exemptions that her
personal fortune afforded her. In the public contexts in which Brooks
exposed her work, the costumes, props, poses, and aesthetic choices that
may have signaled deviant sexuality to the knowing eye dovetailed neatly
with more ancient codes of aristocratic privilege for some, while others
wrote off these trappings as contemporary fashion statements or the
whimsies of a woman from an alien culture (and also an alien subculture).
Barney wrote, in a poem about Brooks and her ilk: “they arrive like des-
tiny, without cause, / without reason, without consideration, without pre-
text, they / are there, with the rapidity of a flash of lightning, / too terrible,
too sudden, too / convincing, to ‘other’ to be / even an object of hatred.”74
Brooks’s status as a foreigner (in both her rejected homeland and her
adopted one) inflected critical responses to her work from France to Amer-
ica, differences in the various sites of reception notwithstanding. American
critics viewed her “outlandish” paintings as disturbingly un-American. A
critic writing for the Boston Evening Transcript, for instance, described
her work as a “transplanted American effort,” a hybrid, French art by an
American artist.75 Barney glossed this perception, describing Brooks’s as
an artist who, like the poet Walt Whitman, belonged “to no time, to no
country, to no milieu, to no school, to no tradition.” For Barney, Brooks
represented the purest product of “a civilization in decline, whose char-
acter she was able to capture.”76
Such characterizations suggest the extent to which Brooks occupied the
center of Barney’s own representational project. From their first meeting
in 1915 forward, Barney lobbied to secure for her companion some guar-
antee of lasting recognition.7- Barney played a behind-the-scenes role in
8
the painter’s induction into the Legion of Honor, for example, in 1920.
She saw to it that Brooks’s paintings were documented photographically
and that her exhibition catalogues were not only meticulously produced
but also distributed to the painter’s best advantage. Barney repeatedly
arranged, through her network of social contacts, for favorable coverage
of Brooks’s work in the press.79 She campaigned for close to forty years
(from the 1930s to the 1970s) to secure for Brooks’s paintings and draw-
ings a place in a national collection in either France or America —finally
prevailing upon the institution now known as the Smithsonian American
Art Museum.80 A slim, elegantly appointed monograph, Romaine Brooks:
Portraits, tableaux, dessins, published in 1952, survives —thanks to Bar-
ney’s efforts —in major library collections as tangible evidence of the cou-
ple’s shared desire to make history. Although indexed under the author
name of Romaine Brooks, this book was created by Natalie Barney. In a

letter from Nice, where Brooks took up residence after the Second World
War, the artist acknowledged, “I’ve just received your book . . . very well
done as a whole. . . . Thanks to Nat Nat’s efforts it is all very successful!
. . . I haven’t read the preface yet,” she admitted freely (revealing the
extent of her detachment from the production process), “All love from a
grateful Angel.”81 The booklet’s cover, printed on thick gray paper, fea-
tures a photogravure of the artist’s 1923 self-portrait (fig. 20). From the
outset, this iconic cover image colludes with the monographic format to
reproduce the model of artistic genius that Brooks had fashioned thirty
years earlier with the original portrait —a model that reconciled the
painter’s status as a cosmopolitan expatriate lesbian with her status as a
visionary artist.82
On the back cover of the monograph we find a list identifying Brooks’s
sitters (fig. 21). The subject of the monograph herself, “L’Artiste Romaine
Brooks,” tops this honor roll, under the heading “Personnages d’une
Fig. 20. Front cover,

Romaine Brooks: Portraits,
tableaux, dessins, 1952.
National Collection of Fine Arts
research material on Romaine
Brooks, 1874-1969, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian
Institution
Epoque.” Eighteen faces, thumbnail details from a selection of the portraits

reproduced in this volume, frame the roster elaborated beneath the artist’s
moniker. Represented here we find, among others, the Italian poet Gabriel
D’Annunzio; the Russian ballet dancer Ida Rubinstein; the French liter-
ary celebrities Elisabeth de Gramont, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Morand; the
American decorator Elsie de Wolfe; the reigning hostess of Paris-Lesbos,
Natalie Barney; the Italian pianist Renata Borgatti; and the Princesse
Lucien Murat, author of La Vie amoureuse de Christine de Suede, la reine
androgyneP This register, like that of Barney’s salon and her Academie
des Femmes, constitutes what Edward Carpenter called “a peculiar aris-
tocracy . . . representatives of the higher mental and artistic element,” the
vast majority of whom were homosexual. Some of the personalities mem-
84
orialized here had literal claims to aristocratic status by blood, by alliance,

or both; their noble titles set the tone for Brooks’s gallery of portraits. Yet
it was the sensibility shared by the members of this pantheon, the mono-
graph seems to suggest, that united these artists and patrons in a circle of
cultural empowerment, for the gifts that distinguished them could not be
transmitted via bloodlines or legal bonds of alliance. Aristocrat, artist, or
Fig. 21. Back cover, Romaine

Brooks: Portraits, tableaux,
dessins, 1952.
National Collection of
Fine Arts research material on
Romaine Brooks, 1874-1969,
Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution
a fortuitous combination of both, these sovereign figures —like the fla-

neur, the dandy-aesthete, the wealthy expat, or the elite homosexual —in-
habited and enriched the privileged margins of their society.
Gramont, upon whom Barney prevailed to compose an introduction to
the monograph, concluded, “These portraits may well be the last witnesses
of our contemporaries.”85 A celebrated author and an intimate friend of
both Barney and Brooks, Gramont undoubtedly chose her words with
care, aware of the fullness of their meanings. The portraits, she implies
here, witness (see) and bear witness to (affirm) a category of elite subjects
whose visibility, historically, has been problematic. For these portrait sub-
jects, marginality (eccentricity, deviance, class privilege) was a credential
identifying them as exceptional. Whether one considers homosexuality a
precondition of artistic sensibility, as many homosexuals argued at the
time, or whether the artistic vocation simply accommodated homosexu-
ality more graciously than other metiers, “being other than normal” freed
the members of Brooks’s circle from certain social constraints and gave
them, in Barney’s words, “a perilous advantage.”86
THREE
“Narcissus and Narcissus "
CLAUDE CAHUN AND MARCEL MOORE
Le feminisme est deja dans les fees.
— Claude Cahun,
Aveux non avenus
ike the gallery of amazon geniuses immortalized by Brooks in her

portraiture of the 1920s, the photographic work generated by
J
Claude Cahun and her lover Marcel Moore during this period
takes the politics of gender and sexual identity as a central problematic.
In a 1921 text, “L’Idee-maitresse” Cahun describes her sexual “creed” as
“the guiding principle” to which she adhered. “‘The love that dare not
speak its name’. . . lies like a golden haze upon my horizon,” she
declaims,” ... I am in her; she is in me; and I will follow her always,
never loosing sight of her.”1 Cahun embraced same-sex desire, this “idee-
maitresse,” as her Muse, the matrix of her personality, and “the inde-
structible crown” of her every act.2 Cahun’s statement of belief recycles
Wilde’s famous courtroom recital of a line penned by his lover Alfred
Douglas about same-sex devotion (“the love that dare not speak its
name”). Cahun shared with her own lover Moore, as well as with Wilde,
the “dreadful mania” of citation —a rhetorical turn that too often ob-
scured her literary statements or burdened them with pretension.3 The
camera (itself endowed with the ability to cite, to repeat, to reconstrue)
turned Cahun’s incursions into an inherited, and fundamentally hostile,
representational field into a more playful and more legible practice that
could be shared with a partner or partners.
Roland Barthes has likened photography to theater, which strikes me
as a useful disposition to adopt with respect to Cahun and Moore, whose
photographic work has more typically been described as “self-portraiture.”4
CLAUDE CAHUN AND MARCEL MOORE 69
To assume, as I do, that Moore performs the photographer’s role is to

interpret these photographs as a production of two people acting to-
gether—a performer (typically Cahun) and a director (typically Moore)
adhering to the same “guiding principle.” Ample evidence, both formal
and archival, justifies the claim of coproduction.5 Let us consider one per-
suasive visual clue, an ex libris designed by Cahun, emblazoned with the
initials L.S.M. (fig. 22). The crowning monogram —or rather duogram —
merges L.S. (Lucy Schwob) with S.M. (Suzanne Malherbe). It pivots upon
a shared sign: S, a self-complementing flourish that turns singular to plu-
ral. “Elies s’aiment,” the letters pronounce. They love each other. But who
are they? A composite body, that of L.S.M., intrudes, as if to answer this
question: a pair of lips inscribed “Lucy Schwob,” from which a gauntlet
stretches skyward, signaling, balanced upon an eye, an “I,” of the same
proportions whose iris spells “Suzanne Malherbe.” The entire construct
rests upon a well-turned ankle, a foot modeling a high-heeled shoe, posed
near the ground line of the enclosing heraldic frame. The division of emo-
tional labor here is clear: if Lucy Schwob reaches for the sky, Suzanne
Malherbe both balances and grounds her. Lucy Schwob reposes upon,
depends upon, Suzanne Malherbe. The division of artistic labor is equally
clear: Lucy Schwob speaks (writes, performs); Suzanne Malherbe visual-
izes. The crudeness of this drawing, what is more, reveals Cahun’s limi-
tations as a visual artist, while accentuating the ad hoc character of the
composite represented here —a bricolage scrapped together from key sig-
nifies of agency, each partner giving her best.
Golda M. Goldman, a Paris correspondent for the Chicago Tribune,
interviewed these two “radical daughters of conservative families” in
1929 and described Cahun’s literary, theatrical, and musical promise in
her column “Who’s Who Abroad.” Goldman explains: “as she is the niece
of that well-known Lrench writer, Marcel Schwob, Mile. Schwob chose
. . . the pen-name of Claude Cahun for her poetic work, so as to gain
nothing from her relative’s reputation.”6 In a separate article devoted to
Moore, Goldman applauds the graphic artist’s “mastery of line both del-
icate and strong, . . . pictorial effectiveness, and . . . beautiful use of
color.” She praises Moore’s “very clever black and white illustrations for
books, some the poems of her half-sister Claude Cahun. ... At present
the artist is engaged in making a series of distorted photographs of her
sister, which probably will be used to illustrate the volume Aveux non
avenus. . . . Entirely printed by herself, these photographs are something
quite new in the field.”7
Fig. 22. Claude Cahun, untitled (“duogram”), ca. 1919.
Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Trust Collection
Moore’s partnership with Cahun dated, like the earliest photographs

in the oeuvre referenced by Goldman, from the first decade of the twen-
tieth century, when the two schoolgirls met in Nantes.8 The collaboration
evolved continuously and generated hundreds of rolls of film over a
period of four and a half decades. The last of these picturing Cahun date
from 1954, the year of her death.9 These rolls of film, whose pockets
alternately bear the name of one and then of the other partner, preserve
images of both Cahun and Moore taken in the same settings, indicating
Moore’s involvement, start to finish, in the production of photographs
featuring Cahun and the reverse. Acknowledging this complicity, Cahun
described herself more than once as Moore’s fabrication; “Je suis l’oeuvre
de ta vie,” she wrote as early as 1914.10 Many of the photographs that
the pair produced thematize or formalize the joint character of this ven-
ture. The photographer’s shadow that intrudes episodically upon the fore-
ground of pictures featuring Cahun (and also some featuring Moore)
clearly marks the collaborator’s presence.
One early photograph pictures a baby-faced Cahun striking a pose that
has particular significance within homosexual culture (fig. 23). The pho-
tograph glosses Jeune Homme nu assis au bord de la mer, figure d’etude
(1836) by Hippolyte Flandrin, a painting that, since its acquisition by the
French state in 1857, has engendered numerous responses from artists
and has circulated far and wide in reproductions. An engraved reproduc-
tion by Jean-Baptiste Danguin (fig. 24), for instance, was commissioned
by the state in 1887 and printed by the thousands. Flandrin’s Figure d’e-
tude garnered, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a large
homosexual audience thanks in part to Danguin’s print. As Michael
Camille has demonstrated, “mechanical reproduction was crucial to the
appropriation of this body as an icon of various identities in the century
that followed.”11 Flandrin’s male nude fills the frame, perched like a
statue upon a rocky pedestal overlooking the sea, the picture of stasis and
self-containment. The nude’s self-embracing posture (knees drawn to the
chest, head tucked, eyes closed) allows the viewer to scrutinize his face-
less form unobserved, without apology. This dynamic of objectification,
more common in art of the female nude, invests the image with a (homo)-
erotic charge.
The subject of this study —a male figure that could be described as self-
absorbed, passive, alienated —undoubtedly contributed to the persistence
of certain homophobic cliches. At the same time, Camille points out, the
mass circulation of lithographic and photographic prints freed the flow of
Fig. 23. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, untitled (after Flandrin),
ca. 1911.
Fig. 24. Jean-Baptiste Danguin, 1887 engraving after Hippolyte Flandrin,

Jeune Homme nu assis au bord de la mer, figure d’etude, 1836.
previously unique and sequestered homoerotic images like Flandrin’s

painting into “a multitude of new public and private places, including the
bedroom, and into new subjective sites of subcultural identity. Repro-
ductions of artworks,” he concludes, “ . . . played an important part in
constituting certain ‘tastes.’”12 Reinterpretations of Flandrin’s nude by
turn-of-the-century art photographers such as F. Holland Day and Baron
Wilhelm von Gloeden assured the figure’s on-going currency within gay
male communities of the 1910s and 1920s.
Moore’s photograph of Cahun enters into this representational fray.
The deviations from the visual source, Flandrin’s painting, change the
disposition of this icon in a number of important ways. Although Cahun,
like Flandrin’s nude, perches on a rock at the shore, knees drawn to the
chest, spine bowed, she has rotated the original position 180 degrees,
bookend-wise, profiling the left rather than the right side of her body. The
reversal signals the critical function of this work, alerting us to attend to
other points of divergence. It is surely significant, for instance, that Cahun
poses clothed in a modest bathing costume, while Flandrin’s model
exposes his naked body, posed upon an idealizing swath of silken drap-
ery, to the viewer’s scrutiny. If calm seas, a vast sky, and flat horizon con-
tribute to the serenity and timelessness of Flandrin’s scene, the ragged
granite boulders crowding in on Cahun in this picture make her flesh
seem palpably mortal. Cahun’s head, not bowed like that of Flandrin’s
sitter, turns to face the observer —whom she fixes with unblinking eyes.
While the feet of Flandrin’s figure taper off the edge of his rocky perch with
a statuesque indifference to the surrounding abyss, Cahun’s feet tense as
if to acknowledge another human presence very close at hand: the pres-
ence of Moore, the photographer. Moore’s close presence takes the form
of a silhouette —a shadowy index traced upon the photograph in the lower
right-hand corner, a space typically reserved for the maker’s signature.
This mise-en-scene reworks the history of both social and artistic repre-
sentation in sophisticated and highly conscious ways.13 The adaptation of
Flandrin’s painting offers a lesbian critique of an important male homo-
sexual reference while demonstrating solidarity with male communities.
Tike Brooks’s lesbian revision of the iconography of dandy-aestheticism,
the send-up of Flandrin’s Figure d’etude “lesbianized” a male homosex-
ual icon. By the same token, like Brooks, Cahun and Moore sought to
create alternatives to dominant-culture representations of women. An-
other photograph from the 1910s makes the feminist dimension of the
couple’s photographic project explicit (fig. 25). This snapshot pictures a
girlish Cahun seated at her writing table, a camera box to one side and a
leather-bound tome titled LTmage de la femme positioned with its lettered
spine toward the viewer. The book, an 1899 survey by Armand Dayot,
catalogues images of feminine beauty from classical statuary to portraits
of great ladies throughout the ages (fig. 26).14 The choice of props here —
the archive of feminine role models (over which Cahun pours like a dili-
gent student) and the camera (with which Cahun and Moore will produce
alternatives) —announce a career of resistance to the cultural heritage that
unites the feminine specimens singled out by Dayot under the reductive
title “the image of woman.” Perusing the vacuous faces portrayed here,
one grasps the motivation for updating and correcting this repertoire:
images of professional, intellectual, political, artistic, or physical accom-
plishment appear nowhere in the survey. Moore’s photograph of Cahun
surveying L’lmage de la femme could be taken, then, as a sort of mission
statement.
Shortly after crafting this photographic manifesto, its authors assumed
the pseudonyms by which they are still known. Choosing the gender-
ambiguous “Claude” and masculine “Marcel,” they extended a tradition
of dissimulation by women aspiring to the professional echelons of cul-
tural production. Such pseudonyms, a literary form of travesty, affirm a
time-honored feminine career strategy while renouncing patriarchal notions
of lineage —that is to say, the reproduction and preservation of the father’s
name. In the case of both Cahun and Moore, the alliterative initials C.C.
and M.M. reproduce themselves (initiating self-generation, as it were)
while investing each name with the character of a pair, a double pair —
pair of lovers, pair of sisters.
When the Paris correspondent for the Chicago Tribune represented this
couple as “sisters” in her 1928 newspaper article, she was not (or not
only) speaking in euphemistic terms. In 1917, Cahun’s divorced father,
Maurice Schwob, had married Moore’s widowed mother, Marie-Eugenie
Malherbe, making Cahun and Moore (already in the eighth year of their
romantic and artistic partnership) stepsisters. This event undoubtedly
facilitated the couple’s joint ventures to some extent, providing cover for
their intimacy, but it also reinforced the institutional framework of the
nuclear family —a framework at once legitimating and constraining.
The Schwob family, as it happened, exercised considerable influence in
the spheres of literature and journalism at the beginning of the century, and
the earliest works by Cahun and Moore appeared in family publications.15
Moore’s fashion designs for modern women —like the one reproduced
IHP: If
:
ill:
Fig. 25. Claude Cahun and
Marcel Moore, untitled
(Cahun reading UImage de
la femme), ca. 1915.
Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage
Trust Collection
Fig. 26. Title page,

LTmage de la femme by
Armand Dayot, 1899.
. .7
here picturing a trousered woman walking in her own shadow (fig. 27) —
found favor in the “women’s pages” of the family-controlled newspaper,
Phare de la Loire, while Cahun’s byline appeared in the theater and liter-
ary sections. Even after the couple moved from the Schwob compound in
Nantes to an apartment in Paris in 1920, Cahun’s cultural reportage con-
tinued to enliven the paper’s pages. Cahun’s writings (including her 1918
report protesting legal actions against Maud Allan’s revival of Wilde’s play
Salome in England, as well as her reconfigured fables “Heroines”) also
appeared in Paris’s elite literary journal, Mercure de France, which her lit-
erary uncle Marcel (the author of Vies imaginaires) helped to found.16
Mercure first ran the verses titled “Vues et visions,” which Cahun
would publish in 1919 under separate cover, with pen-and-ink images
executed by Moore in the decadent style of Wilde’s illustrator Aubrey
Fig. 27. Marcel Moore, fashion

design, ca. 1915.
Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Trust
Collection
Beardsley.1 This allegorical work, by the twenty-five-year old Cahun and

her twenty-seven-year-old partner, was the couple’s first public coproduc-
tion. Cahun dedicated the publication to Moore. “I dedicate this puerile
prose to you,” she wrote, “so that the entire book will belong to you and
in this way your designs may redeem my text in our eyes.”18 The inter-
lacing of possessive articles here, like the interlacing of text and images in
the book, leaves little doubt about the intimacy of the collaboration. Vues
et visions, an exercise in double vision, consists of twenty-five pairs of
prose poems, each framed by a drawing. One page describes a mundane
“view,” elevated by way of fantasy to the status of a “vision” on the fac-
ing page. Each view transpires in a real location (the Brittany seaport of
Le Croisic, where Cahun and Moore vacationed) and in real time; each vi-
sion transpires on the mythic terrain of classical antiquity—Piraeus, Rome,
Hadrian’s villa.
The adoption of antiquity as a point of reference, while redolent of
mainstream high culture and the interwar rappel a I’ordre, would also
have resonated within Paris’s gay subcultures, where influential women
and men of letters contributed to homophile reconstructions of antiquity
from the turn of the century until the Second World War.19 John Adding-
ton Symonds published a social history of pederasty titled “A Problem in
Greek Ethics” as an appendix to Ellis’s sexological treatise Sexual Inver-
sion, for instance. Plato’s Symposium, a text that explores in some depth
the question of love between men, served as a reference for Symonds and
other homosexual authors of the period —including Wilde (who penned
lines of poetry in Greek), E. M. Forester, Edward Carpenter, Andre Gide,
and even Cahun. Cahun borrowed Symposium from Adrienne Monnier’s
lending library in January of 1918, as Moore began work on the illus-
trations for Vues et visions, and refers to this canonical text more than
once in her “Les Jeux uraniens.”20 The classical revival took a specifically
Sapphic turn in the first decades of the twentieth century, propelled by
the enthusiasm of Renee Vivien and Natalie Barney, as discussed in chap-
ter 1. Barney’s sapphic reading list would have included —in addition to
literature produced by female admirers from Vivien to Lucy Delarue
Mardrus —an homage from a male sympathizer, Pierre Louys, who dedi-
cated his Chansons de Bilitis to “the young women of the future soci-
ety.”21 Louys’s “little book of love in antiquity,” a “translation” of love
songs composed by a Sapphic courtesan of his own invention, reworked
the foundations upon which new cultural identities (and, he imagined,
new societies) would be constructed. Louys’s volume became a reference
for generations of lesbians and helped to shape the literary scene within
which Cahun and Moore imagined heroines like “Sappho the Misunder-
stood.”22 Indeed, Cahun held the book in high enough esteem to try her
hand at an English translation.
Against the backdrop of this homophile reconstruction of antiquity,
the paired scenes in Vues et visions—which raise commonplace events
(two fishing vessels passing in the port of Le Croisic) to the level of
metaphor (two women of pleasure brushing past each other in a Roman
plaza)—create an intertext that reverberates with homoerotic double
sense. One diptych makes the relationship of Cahun and Moore’s book
to other contemporary affirmations of homosexual cultural identity par-
ticularly clear: a set of illustrated texts opposing “La Nuit moderne” to
“La Lumiere antique” (figs. 28 and 29). On the waterfront of modern-
day Le Croisic, two intertwined figures, cloaked in shadows, disappear
into the obscurity of the night, “feeling their way in the darkness toward
the unknown.”23 Moore’s engraved illustration, which frames the text in
the manner of an illumination, represents the two androgynous figures at
once embracing and bracing each other against a troubled nature: an agi-
tated sea, a “somber and heavy” sky, pitch darkness penetrated by a few

Marcel Moore, “La Nuit
i,e Croisic. — 1,’estacude noire, tout usee; ca moderne,” from Vues
et hi quekjues incurs vertex. U> ciel sombre ft
lourd. A Hmrizori, tine vague lumiere blanche,
et visions, 1919.
hst-ee h- eiel, est-ce ia tner, est-ce ia tnori*
esi-ce... ? on ne salt pas.
Private Collection, Paris
Au bout ik> l'esfaeade, act-nude, je reve.
Vers ia dark* blanche, scute espersmce, unique
iiu tie cette nuit obscure, le long du t-hemin
sombre A peine indique par les feux verts qui
vacillcnt, tleux ombres s'avancent, enlaeees. Elies
s cn vont vers Jo met* do tit les vagttes ia-bas se
heurtent et gibnisseut ; elles s'en vont plus loin
petti-et re, vers 1 inconnu, A nitons dans robs*
curite.
vague streaks of light on the distant horizon. What is the source of this
light? Ms it the sky, is it the sea, is it death, is it ... ? one does not know.”
But on this light, “the only hope, the only possible finale to this noctur-
nal obscurity,” the two lovers set their sights.24 Their faces, inclined one
toward the other, glow like pale apparitions in the blackness that domi-
nates the scene.
In contrast, in the drawing for “La Lumiere antique,” Moore imposes
only the sparest marks of black upon the pristine whiteness of the page.
The composition here, like the composition of the text, mirrors and trans-
forms the previous image. The picture again foregrounds two embracing
lovers, apparently a man and boy. In opposition to the shadows that cloak
modernity’s lovers, a “golden haze” illuminates those of classical antiq-
uity. The lovers approach (rather than flee) the settlement (the Greek port
of Piraeus), “where the rooftops sparkle with the first rays of sunrise.”
These dwellers of antiquity, like their modern analogues, also set their
sights on a destination beyond the horizon of visibility, “toward the un-
known,” but this time they go “in the light and in joy.”25 The seas in the
background are placid, the sky buoyant with white, billowing clouds —
and imbued, according to Cahun’s text, with a “subtle rose-colored light.
x.
Marcel Moore, “La Lumiere
antique,” from Vues
he 1‘tree. f’erkirs. — !.,n jetce blanche, tonic
et visions, 1919. octree ; fit et la quelqucs laches ti'tiiubre. !,<■
cid ttoconncux et Wane. A I'horizon, one vague
Private Collection, Paris hmmVre rose. Hst-ce Ic soldi levant, esbee tin
Eros sans flee hr >, vine vie nouvcllc, est-ee... ? on
no sail pas.
Au bout tie la jetee, aeeowle, je reve.
Deux formes blanches passed et s'doiguenl,
eon font! ties thins une brume tloree. Elies s’en
vont vers la vjHe. (ionI les toils scintillent aux
premiers rayons tie I'attrore. dies ,s’en vont plus
Into peut-ctrc, vers t'ineonnu, tianx la lutnid-c
et thins hi joic.
Is it the rising sun, is it Eros without arrows, a new life, is it ... ? one
does not know.”26 Whether by inversion (night/day, obscurity/illumination,
death/life) or by transposition (modernity/antiquity, Le Croisic/Piraeus),
the text and illustrations work in tandem to transform a stark reality into
an ideal that affirms the authors’ affection for each other and the legiti-
macy of their bond.
This volume’s publication could be viewed as Cahun and Moore’s
artistic coming out, since it undoubtedly raised their public profile as a
couple while making their homophila glaringly apparent to those aware
of the codes invoked. It was at this point that Cahun and Moore came
out of reclusion and opened the doors of their Left Bank atelier to a
dynamic population of intellectuals, artists, and political activists. Their
address book from this fertile period traces the cultural and intellectual
parameters of interwar Paris, containing, among others, the names Pierre
Albert-Birot, Louis Aragon, Natalie Barney, Georges Bataille, Andre Bre-
ton, Sylvia Beach, Roger Caillois, Pierre Caminade, Jean Cocteau, Rene
Crevel, Salvador Dali, Robert Desnos, Youki Desnos, Paul Eluard, Max
Ernst, Leon-Paul Fargue, Paul Fort, Alberto Giacometti, Jane Heap, Aldous
Huxley, Jacques Lacan, Georgette Leblanc, Pierre Mac Orlan, Man Ray,
Henri Michaux, Mops, Marguerite Moreno, and Gertrude Stein. These
names, barred one by one as internal divisions and external forces shat-
tered the possibility of community, register not only the richness but
also the violence of the decades between the two world wars.2- However
fragile, this eclectic community constituted the audience for Cahun and
Moore’s second major collaborative work, Aveux non avenus (disavowed
confessions), published in 1930. The book, a literary mosaic assembled
by Cahun, features photocollage illustrations that Moore composed from
the store of pictures she had taken of her lover. Whereas the earlier pub-
lication, Vues et visions, had created an inhabitable, if more or less covert,
literary space for conventionally unrepresentable subjects (homosexuals),
the more mature work functioned quite openly as provocation.
Like Virginia Woolf’s nearly contemporaneous Orlando (a “fictional
biography” of her lover Vita Sackville-West), Aveux non avenus radically
transforms both the structure and discursive function of the biographical
genre.28 It is no coincidence that feminist writers gravitated toward this
genre —which has traditionally served, like portraiture, to naturalize
hierarchies of social subjectivity by “preserving” the histories of note-
worthy men. In Orlando, Woolf’s skepticism about the historical author-
ity of real names, actual events, established chronologies —in short, the
traditional mainstays of biography —enables her to construct a new kind

of biographical subject within a new set of parameters (while wrecking
havoc on the old ones). Several geopolitical itineraries, four centuries of
personal-cultural-social history, and two genders (the “odd, incongruous
strands” of Sackville-West’s psyche) intertwine to render Woolf’s hero/
heroine Orlando.29 Woolf’s Orlando takes heroic biography on an unex-
pected turn, glossing Thomas Carlyle’s notion that history “is the essence
of innumerable biographies.”
Aveux non avenus takes issue more specifically with the artist’s mem-
oir—a genre privileged by Brooks (as well as Barney) and also exploited
(somewhat more surprisingly) by key members of the surrealist milieu
in which Cahun and Moore had begun to circulate.30 The artist’s mem-
oir typically employs diaristic strategies to permanently unite the artistic
persona with “his” oeuvre under the banner of genius via the device of
the artist’s signature.31 The book produced by Cahun and Moore sets out
to dismantle both a literary genre, autobiography, and its subject —the
authoritative self whom the artist’s signature authenticates. The artist’s
signature (whether or not pseudonymous) launches the work of art into
the capitalist as well as the symbolic economy.32 As a general rule, when
a male artist (Man Ray, for instance) signs a work with his nom d’artiste,
he constructs an artistic persona at the intersection of the “real” historical
world and the fantasy world of the commodity, where objects trade roles
with subjects.33 The pseudonym often performs a very different function
in the career of a female artist. In the interests of self-commodification,
Man Ray may have refashioned his name (and the choice “Man” is not
without significance), but he never disavowed his patriarchal birthright.
The pseudonymous signatures of Cahun and Moore, on the other hand,
served to falsify the already “disavowed” testimony that constitutes their
“confessions.” The false signatures not only detached the authors from
paternal structures of kinship; they disarticulated the speaking subjects
from the ideological operations of realism. In this way, the inauthentic
signatures reverberated with the self-canceling title “disavowed confes-
sions” to set the paradoxical dynamic of the book in motion.
There are several ways to translate the title Aveux non avenus, and no
single option proves adequate in and of itself. Aveux may be translated as
“avowals” or “confessions” (I prefer the latter for reasons that I will make
plain). The untranslatable phrase non avenus indicates that which has
“not happened.” This concept I translate loosely as “disavowed,” which
contains both “avow” and its negation, and thus has the ability to signify
the slippage of fixed meaning toward ambiguity —away from narrative

sense. The cover graphic of the book prepares us visually for the project’s
critical thrust, creating out of the contradictory title a canceling X —with
the palindrome NON reiterated at its crux (fig. 30). This logo engages with
more than one modernist preoccupation, most evidently: the poetics, pol-
itics, and aesthetics of negation. Cahun cited Henri Bergson on this
subject in her writings: “Negation differs . . . from affirmation properly
speaking in that it is an affirmation in the second degree,” she quoted.34
Certainly one could view the assertive NON at the center of this book as
a statement of (self) affirmation, since every “no” creates the space for a
“yes” to something else. Goldman, in her Chicago Tribune article on
Cahun, translates the title Aveux non avenus as “Denials” (at Cahun’s sug-
gestion? Moore’s?).35 Certainly “denials” (as in “no”) sums up the way in
which serious publishers tended to respond to “women’s writing,” stigm-
tized for its putatively confessional character. But even more pointedly,
denial offered a backhanded way of affirming the literary and personal
choices that had marginalized women writers generally, and Cahun speci-
fically, with respect to Paris’s literary society. Cahun nevertheless sought
the “sympathy” of this society upon occasion.36
“There are times,” she confessed to Adrienne Monnier, “when I suffer
so much from this isolation, of which my nature and all kinds of other
circumstances are the cause, that . . . ,” her words trailed off, tellingly,
into silence.37 Ironically, Monnier (a publisher herself) pressed Cahun to
adopt the impossibly burdened and not particularly valorized confes-
sional genre. Cahun’s response?
You have told me to write a confession because you knew only too
well that this is currently the only literary task that might seem to
me first and foremost realizable, where I feel at ease, permit myself
a direct link, contact with the real world, with the facts. . . . But I
believe that I have understood in what manner, in what form you
envision this confession (in sum: without deceit of any sort).38
“Don’t get your hopes'up,” Cahun added.39

Two years later, in 1928, she presented Monnier with the manuscript
of Aveux non avenus, which in no way resembled the journal intime that
Monnier had counseled her to write. Would Monnier consider publishing
the book? Would she write the preface? Both requests met with adamant
denials. “What ever I may do, never could I avoid your objections, too
profound, which address the very essence of my temperament,” Cahun con-

ceded to the woman whose recognition she had sought.40 No, she would
never write her confessions. Reveal her secrets to the mirror, yes. Publish
her “meditations,” yes.41 But confessions? Confess to what? To whom?
“Denial,” then, describes both Monnier’s rejection of Cahun and Cahun’s
response to Monnier—as well, perhaps, as the psychic defense that would
enable Cahun to transform the interdiction “no” into a sort of “yes.”
CLAUDE CAHUN
Ai
V
E
U
X
4 %
N
AVEUX NON AVENUS
EDITIONS DU CARREFOUR
M C M XXX
Fig. 30. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, front cover, Aveux non
avenus, 1930.
The word confessions recurs with emphatic frequency in the short ex-
change of letters between Monnier and Cahun. Redolent of Catholic rit-
ual, criminal interrogation, psychoanalysis, and the tabloid press, the word
confessions also harks back to the very origins of the autobiographical
genre. The modern figure of the author, as Barthes reminds us in “Death of
the Author,” emerged in France in the eighteenth century, along with ration-
alism’s emphasis on the nobility of the individual. In Enlightenment-era
texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, the author reigned as
the text’s unique point of origin —“as if it were always in the end, through
the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single
person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.”42 Rousseau’s title, from which Aveux
non avenus pointedly departs, invokes (in addition to absolution) the
author’s absolute representational authority.
On the first page of his autobiography, Rousseau declares:
The purpose of my initiative —which is not only without precedent

but also inimitable —is to display to my kind a portrait of a man that
is in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be
myself. . . . My unique self [Moi seul]. ... I am made like no other
man that I have seen; I dare to believe that I am made like none who
exists. If I am worth no more, at least I am distinct. If nature rightly
or wrongly broke the mold in which I was cast, one can only judge
after having read me.43
Rousseau’s text claims to record, in a manner he describes as “true to

nature,” the “real world” that Cahun disclaims in her letters to Monnier.
Rousseau not only presents the author as a unique and sovereign subject,
he collapses —with the injunction to read “me”—any separation between
the self and its representation.
The “I” in Aveux non avenus, in comparison, has no distinct outline,
no clear referent. The mercurial narrator, who addresses an equally in-
definite “you,” inhabits a number of avatars.44 Cahun, having already
posed as a whole cast of characters before Moore’s camera and performed
on the stage of two of Paris’s experimental theaters, the Theatre Eso-
terique and Le Plateau, adapted the principles of travesty to a literary
mode throughout this book.45 Here, as with the photographic oeuvre,
failures of illusionism, particularly gaps in the text, participate in the sig-
nification process. “What pleases me above all in your incomplete and cir-
cular enterprise,” Cahun confided in her partner, “are the places you have
had the sense to leave empty.”46 Indeed, empty spaces —the interstices
between textual and pictorial images, the lapses that occur “between the
acts” of representation —shape the poetic character of Aveux non avenus.
The conceit of an unnamed, ungendered narrator, has particular signifi-
cance. This resistance to determination, as Teigh Gilmore notes, creates a
break in the “signifying chain of identity,” which itself “coheres through
the progressive, motivated, and linked signification of sex, gender, and
sexuality. Autobiography not only depends on this signification, it seems
to prove its reality.”47 Aveux non avenus — with its syntactical lapses and
its narrative indeterminacy —emphasizes the failures in this self-ratifying
evidentiary chain. The gap itself could be interpreted as a placeholder for
illegitimate subjects —homosexuals and women, for instance —within the
larger system of social signification.48
Unlike Rousseau’s Confessions—which unfolds in numbered para-
graphs, chapters, and volumes along a chronological timeline —this anti-
autobiography presents what Barthes would have called “a tissue of
quotations,” snippets from variously dated sources (letters, poems, medita-
tions, parables) cited out of context.49 And unlike the speaker of Rous-
seau’s Confessions, the narrator here makes no claim of authority. “I
make a copy of this exercise (which my partner wrote . . . with my own
hand),” the writer notes, “in order to demonstrate how we seek to deter-
mine the boundaries of our characters.”50 Yet in fact, such statements
make it mind-bogglingly unclear just where one partner leaves off and the
other begins —let alone which gesture imitates and which gesture origi-
nates.51 The estrangement of autobiographical or literary events from any
fixed or authoritative point of origin prevents the reader from identifying
an authorial plan, from looking to the author as the “key” to the mean-
ing of the work. If Rousseau claims to expresses his own unique essence,
the narrator of Aveux non avenus represents the self as a synergistic
figure, a self in relation, like the duogram L.S.M., like the team Cahun
and Moore.
As a critique of autobiography (and by extension of self-portraiture,
autobiography’s pictorial analogue), Aveux non avenus clearly participates
in modernism’s interrogation of Enlightenment paradigms of thought —
including constructions of the authoritative self and the strategies of real-
ism that serve to naturalize these constructions.52 For women of the pre-
suffrage era, like Cahun and Moore, whose authority depended on acts of
impersonation (the adoption of a masculine voice or pseudonym, among
other forms of travesty), this reevaluation of “the author” (that is, the
authorized speaking subject) proved especially vexed. Susan Suleiman

points out that although French vanguard artists of this period reclaimed
the social and cultural margins that women had traditionally occupied, the
male initiators of this trend freely chose their marginal status —whereas
women remained marginalized whether they liked it or not.53 Nonsubjects
(women, who did not achieve full citizenship in France until after the Sec-
ond World War) and unrepresentable subjects (lesbians, whose bodies and
relationships could not cohere within the patriarchal economy) would
seem to have had little to lose if the existing categories of social subjectiv-
ity folded under the strain of critical reexamination.54 Yet how could one
demand the right to exist, the right to speak, without envisioning a speak-
ing self—that is, certain conventions of subjective coherence?
A section of Aveux non avenus titled “Eloge des paradoxes” finesses
this dilemma. “Each time one invents a phrase,” the narrator suggests, “it
would be prudent to invert it to see if it holds up.”^5 Like negation, inver-
sion functions throughout the oeuvre produced by Cahun and Moore as
both a structural logic (“simpler than Euclidian proofs”) and a central
thematic.56 Figures of inversion (mirror images, palindromes, syntactical
and formal reversals) animate Aveux non avenus and its illustrations from
the cover of the book forward. These devices —including the title “Dis-
avowed Confessions,” which both invokes and revokes the authority of
narrative positivism —provide leverage with which to deconstruct domi-
nant models of psychic and social subjectivity, in particular notions of
sexual subjectivity such as inversion.
The confessional paradigm, progressively secularized from Rousseau’s
moment on, had, by the twentieth century, come to occupy a place of
prominence in the methodologies of the modern medical and social
sciences, as Michel Foucault has shown. Foucault, in The History of Sex-
uality, aptly characterizes sexology, like psychiatry, as “a confessional sci-
ence, a science which relied on a many-sided extortion, and took for its
object what was unmentionable but admitted to nonetheless.”57 Sigmund
Freud, whose newly translated works were on display in the vitrines of
Paris bookshops throughout the 1910s and 1920s, dubbed psychoanaly-
sis “the talking cure.” His theories gained acceptance by psychiatrists
practicing in Paris, including those whose lectures and demonstrations
Cahun attended at St. Anne’s Hospital in the 1930s.58 The invocation of
confession in the title Aveux non avenus places this book in dialogue with
some of the era’s most significant writings on gender and sexuality, includ-
ing the theories of both Freud and Ellis.
A display in the publisher’s storefront window at the time that Aveux

non avenus was launched in 1930 attracted the eye of passersby to
Moore’s ten collage plates, arranged as if to frame an “author portrait”
picturing Cahun and her mirror image (fig. 31). Since autobiography
“enables one to reflect on oneself by presenting an image of the self for
contemplation,”59 what could make a more appropriate author portrait
than a mirror image representing the author and her reflected image? This
mirror image —which I analyze in some depth below —provides a point
of entry into early twentieth-century discourses on “narcissistic” feminine
sexuality and reverses the customary function of the mirror as a signi-
fier of self-absorption and vanity in representations of women. Cahun’s
author portrait emphasizes the tension between the reflected subject and
the photographic subject as the two faces pull away in opposite direc-
tions, straining to achieve some distance from each other, both trapped
within their respective frames. If woman, to borrow the words of a
women’s columnist, “lives always before her glass, and makes a mirror of
existence,” this woman appears to be looking for a way out of her house
of mirrors.60
In the era of the modern woman, the thematic of narcissistic feminin-
ity, especially literary and pictorial images that relied on the mirror as
a prop, proliferated hysterically. “The myth of Narcissus,” Cahun re-
marked, “is everywhere. It haunts us.”61 Cahun and Moore came of age
during a period when toilette scenes like Verre de Venise, painted Jacques-
Emile Blanche, won critical acclaim at salons such as the one sponsored
by the prestigious Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts (fig. 32). The femi-
nist implications of Cahun’s (futile) attempts to escape the self-replicating
frames of mirror and image become glaringly clear when we compare her
author portrait to the kind of salon painting that society painters like
Blanche continued to churn out annually in the first decades of the twen-
tieth century. Typically, the alignment of the painting’s frame with the
mirror frame in such genre scenes collapses the distinction between the
woman and her image, rendering both infinitely reproducible. The painter
of Verre de Venise represents his model and her image frozen in a pose
that suggests nothing so much as a pair of perfectly matched dance part-
ners waiting for the orchestra to strike the first note before stepping out
together on the ballroom floor. Even the placement within the pictured
boudoir of a set of matching arm chairs —one on each side of the mirror’s
plane of reflection —participates in Blanche’s mise-en-scene of narcissistic
coupling.
The woman entranced by her reflection in the mirror, a cliche of auto-

erotic pleasure in the art and literature of this period, played a pivotal role
in modern constructions of homosexual as well as feminine sexuality.
Ellis, for example, supplemented his real-life homosexual case studies with
“true to life” passages from literature. He drew, for instance, from Juan
Valera y Alcala Galiano’s 1897 book, Genio y figura, in which the hero-
ine imitates Narcissus by attempting to embrace her own reflection —a
gesture replicated in salon paintings like Verre de Venise.61 The use of lit-
erary or secondhand evidence undermined Ellis’s credibility in some cir-
cles, prompting one reviewer to complain: “Mr. Havelock Ellis’s book is
written in a purely dispassionate and scientific style and the only excep-
tion we take to the treatment is that we consider some of his quotations
unnecessary because a scientific public is already familiar with the origi-
nals [e.g., case studies from Krafft-Ebing], and some of them useless, being
drawn from tainted sources [e.g., works of fiction, hearsay, unscientific
testimony].”63 Cahun—who had translated Havelock Ellis’s two-volume
Fig. 3E Marcel Moore,

photograph documenting
the launch of Aveux non
avenus, window display
at the bookshop of the
publisher, Paris, 1930.
Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage
Trust Collection
treatise on “Woman in Society” for publication in French in 1929, would

certainly have been familiar with the sexologist’s methods.64
It was Ellis who introduced the figure of Narcissus into psychoanalyt-
ical discourse in an 1898. In a paper titled “Auto-Erotism, a Psycho-
logical Study,” Ellis re-gendered the mythical character, representing this
self-preoccupied type as feminine (or alternatively, effeminate). He de-
scribed the “tendency which is sometimes found, more especially perhaps in
women, for the sexual emotions to be absorbed, and often entirely lost in
self-admiration. This narcissus-like tendency, of which the normal germ
in women is symbolized by the mirror, is found in minor degree in some
feminine-minded men.”65 Ellis’s writings and other cultural texts of this
period (including works of journalism, fiction, art, and science) located
the mirror within what the narrator of Aveux non avenus describes as a
Fig. 32. Jacques-Emile

Blanche, Verre de
Venise. Reproduced in
Les Arts, no. 65, May
1907.
“clear etymology of narcissism.”66 Yet the concept of narcissism —like its

emblem, the mirror —is prone to reversals of meaning that render the ety-
mology (and thus the question of origins) anything but clear. The short
passage from Ellis’s text cited above generates more confusion than clar-
ity; the originally male Narcissus emerges as a woman before her mirror
and then evolves into an effeminate man. The slippage between auto-
eroticism and homoeroticism that makes the mirror imagery in paintings
like Blanche’s Verre de Venise so titillating takes a more serious turn in
Ellis’s text, where mirror imagery clearly serves to naturalize alienated
images of femininity and homosexuality as reflections of reality.
While Ellis, in his early essay, classed the sexuality of women and that
of “effeminate men” under the shared rubric of narcissism, Freud made
the link between the figure of Narcissus and male homosexuality explicit.
In his 1914 essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (one of many texts
on psychosexual subjectivity studied by the members of Cahun and
Moore’s circle) Freud wrote: “We have discovered, especially clearly in
people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such
as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love objects they
have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves.”67 Male
homoeroticism, as represented here, is governed by autoerotic drives (drives
conventionally associated with female sexuality). Sexual desire between
women, in the turn-of-the-century imagination, appeared either as an ex-
tension of these feminine autoerotic drives or as a result of a transgender
identification on the part of one of the partners (active, other-directed
desire being a male, not a female, prerogative). The narcissistic scenario
renders the distinction between female homosexuality and female sexual-
ity per se problematic.
Cahun’s restaging of the narcissistic scene —the simultaneous evocation
of both likeness and difference, the triangulation of a doubled internal
image with an external point of self-regard (that of her lover’s camera) —
offers an alternative to representations of the same-sex partnership as a
self-enclosed unit deficient in social or cultural meaning. While the work
adds weight to Cahun and Moore’s expanding counter-compendium of
feminine images, the author portrait comments, at the same time, on
emerging theories of psychosexual development that feature mirror
imagery (Jacques Lacan) and narcissism (Freud and Ellis) as organizing
metaphors. Yet narcissism is not the only relational model with which the
photographic tableau engages.
In his pathbreaking 1897 study Sexual Inversion, Ellis figures lesbianism
as the coupling of an actively inverted (or mannish) woman with a pas-

sively inverted woman. The passive lesbian partner, not encompassed by
the notion of psychic inversion (“the soul of a man trapped in the body
of a woman”), remains somewhat enigmatic in Ellis’s account, despite tor-
tured efforts to explain her choice of partners. The un-mannish partner,
in which homosexuality, while fairly distinct, is only slightly marked

. . . differ[s] in the first place from the normal or average woman in
that [she is] not repelled or disgusted by love-like advances from
persons of [her] own sex. [Such women] are not usually attractive to
the average man, though to this rule there are many exceptions. Their
faces may be plain or ill-made, but not seldom they possess good
figures, a point which is apt to carry more weight with the inverted
woman than beauty of face. Their sexual impulses are seldom well
marked, but they are of strongly affectionate nature. On the whole
they are women who are not very robust and well-developed, phys-
ically or nervously, and who are not well adopted [sic] for child-
bearing, but who still possess many excellent qualities, and they are
always womanly.68
After establishing that “passive” lesbians “are not usually attractive to the
average man,” Ellis goes on to offer this as “the reason why they are open
to homosexual advances.” Efe notes, however, that such women seem to
“possess a genuine though not precisely sexual preference for women over
men, and it is this coldness rather than lack of charm which often renders
men rather indifferent to them.” Notice how the phrasing here —and in-
deed the logic —turns back on itself, mirror-wise: the fact that men are not
attracted to passive lesbians predisposes these women to prefer sexual re-
lations with active lesbians, which in turn makes men indifferent to them.
Despite this confusion, Ellis is clear on one point: What ultimately
defines the “feminine” lesbian subject is not her “only slightly marked”
physiognomy but her preference for women over men. The “womanly”
partner, as described by Ellis, compromises the thesis advanced by spe-
cialists of the period —including homosexual rights advocates like Mag-
nus Hirschfeld —that homosexuality is a congenital “condition.” For Ellis’s
“womanly” lesbian, at least, homosexuality would seem to be a matter of
choice.69 This willfulness, combined with the subject’s relative invisibility
(she is only visible to —or with —a lesbian partner), makes the womanly
lesbian a figure of apparent anxiety for Ellis. The non-dit surrounding this
figure within Ellis’s discipline suggests that his colleagues in the field not
only shared Ellis’s anxiety but were blinded by it. With the exception of the
cameo appearance in Sexual Inversion referenced above, the un-mannish
lesbian represents a subject of denial in the sexological literature of the
era. What is the significance of this hysterical lacuna? Does it imply that
the invisible subject of same-sex desire poses a greater threat to patriar-
chal norms than her more visible partner? And if so, is it because she is
difficult for men to spot? Or is it because of what she sees in other women
and what other women recognize in her?
Let us return to Cahun’s author portrait (fig. 33) and hold these ques-
tions up to a (double) self-image produced by two women who formed a
couple in which one partner (Moore) was less visible than the other
(Cahun). The two-faced subject that Cahun enacts before Moore’s lens
parses out conventional masculine/feminine binaries along the following
lines: active traits (an engaged gaze, a defensive, self-contained stance, a
clothed body) adhere to the “real” subject, and passive traits (an averted
gaze, a vulnerable, revealing pose, exposed skin) to the reflected image.
Yet, as in Ellis’s text, the male/female schema fails to cohere within the
framework of lesbianism. The subject and her reflection undeniably
embody both masculine-coded and feminine-coded traits. The hair is
short (“masculine”) but dyed blond (“feminine”), the face is masked with
makeup, the lips rouged, but the feminine figure is muffled by a man-
tailored robe. The subject and her mirror image seem to approach an
intermediate—or rather, indeterminate—position from two different angles.
And the point at which these trajectories converge —and where the les-
bian subject does at last cohere —is in the eye of the (invisible) beholder,
Moore’s eye.
A letter from Cahun to Moore cited in Aveux non avenus describes this
convergence in terms that relate the mirror to the photographic portrait
(a “mirror with a memory”) and implicate both in the mediation of same-
sex identification and desire: “Our two heads (hair intermingling inextri-
cably) lean over a photograph. Portrait of one or of the other, our two
narcissisms drowning together there, it is the impossible realized in a
magic mirror. Exchange, superimposition, the fusion of desires. The unity
of the image achieved through the close intimacy of two bodies—if needs
be, sending their souls to the devil!”70 In the magic mirror described
above (as in the author portrait), “feminine narcissism” recognizes “nar-
cissistic” homoeroticism as a twin. Elere Cahun reclaims the doubly stig-
matized Narcissus as both a feminist and a homophile signifier. Speaking
as a sister and a lover, she quips, “Narcissism? . . . It’s one of my finest

qualities!” 1
Even as Cahun appears to embrace (and in so doing revalue)
the forms of identity embedded in the term narcissism, she also expresses
a desire, in her portrait, to see herself and be seen as something more,
something else."2 Notwithstanding Cahun’s affirmation of narcissism as
a productive rather than sterile mechanism, the mirror pictured in the
author portrait does not frame the term narcissism as the underlying truth
of feminine and lesbian subjectivity but rather as an enabling fiction of
patriarchal authority. The mirror (which doubles and inverts the subject)
offers a metaphor for sexual inversion that may be turned against its own
iconographic and discursive traditions to serve emancipatory purposes
— to mediate the complex but symmetrical exchange of regards between
and among women, to enable recognition and desire within a field of
reciprocity.
A photograph taken by Cahun that pictures Moore in a slightly dif-
ferent pose before the same looking glass introduces another facet of this
Fig. 33. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, untitled (author portrait), ca. 1928.
interrogation of narcissism (figs. 34 and 35). Viewed as pendants, these

photographs picture the subject and object (of representation, of desire)
as interchangeable, albeit not identical, entities. What we have here is not
Narcissus and his/her reflection but “Narcissus and Narcissus,” to bor-
row a heading from Aveux non avenus.7?> “The desire for a responding
eye,” Peggy Phelan suggests, “like the hunger for a responsive voice, in-
forms the desire to see the self through the image of the other.” And this
operation, in which one aspires to see, and therefore become, the self
in the mirror of the other (which we might productively consider an act
of impersonation), normally transpires within an “unequal political, lin-
guistic, and psychic field” in which one lacks and the other has.74 As envi-
sioned by Cahun and Moore, however, such acts of impersonation have
Fig. 34. Claude Cahun

and Marcel Moore,
untitled (Moore with
mirror image), ca. 1928.
Courtesy of the Jersey
Heritage Trust Collection
little to do with “passing,” in the traditional sense of the term, from a dis-
advantageous position to a more advantageous one. Nor do they mesh
with Lacanian scenarios of social subjectification and desire that entail
having power (in the case of the male) or being its token (in the case of
the female). Here the desiring gaze is conceived as mobile and therefore
in principle reciprocally empowering.
Notice the dynamics of looking and “looking like” in these two pho-
tographs. In the photograph of Cahun taken by Moore, the subject turns
away from her own reflection to return the regard of the camera, the re-
gard of the lover looking through the camera’s lens. In the photograph of
Moore taken by Cahun, the subject meets her lover’s regard via the mir-
ror image. The mirror is not, in either case, a closed system (self vis-a-vis
Fig. 35. Claude

Cahun and Marcel
Moore, untitled
(Cahun with mirror
image), ca. 1928.
Courtesy of the
Jersey Heritage Trust
Collection
self-same), nor a space of Lacanian alienation (real self vs. ideal self). Tri-
angulated by the external regard of the collaborator and her camera, the
mirror opens the field of representation to possibilities of transformation
and exchange. I suggest that this exchange, this doubling and redoubling
of the portrait subject/object, not only construes Cahun and Moore as a
sort of coupled subject;75 it paradoxically construes each half of this cou-
ple as a whole unto herself. The set of photographs, what is more, pic-
tures a particular collaborative mode of authorship. These faces reflected
by turn in the same mirror figure the agency (the complicity in the pro-
duction of meaning) of both partners —the pictured and the picturer, the
performer and the spectator. As Mary Ann Doane has usefully observed,
“the face . . . that bodily part not accessible to the subject’s own gaze (or
accessible only as a virtual image in a mirror) ... is for the other. It is the
most articulate sector of the body, but it is mute without the other’s read-
ing.”76 Viewed in this light, Cahun and Moore’s mirror-image portrait pho-
tographs appear to represent both a “we” and an “I” in relationship —via
the mirror, via the camera —to a “you” for whom (and of whom) the “I”
makes sense.
Ten collages “composed by Moore after designs by the author,” the title
page of the book states, serve as faceplates for the chapters of Aveux non
avenus. Here Moore has reassembled fragments of Cahun’s body culled
from the couple’s “monstrous dictionary” of photographic images. ~ The
photographs used as source material for these collages picture an already
dramatically fictionalized subject: a self in masquerade, in male or female
travesty, a self encumbered by countless cultural cliches —but, neverthe-
less, a self reinvented. The narrator of Aveux non avenus describes these
instances of self-invention, in which she imagines that she is other, as an
ecstatic dream.78 What medium could reenact the theater of the uncon-
scious, the dream, more convincingly than collage? With its significant
distortion of images, its fragmentation of time and space, its sly displace-
ments of emphasis, collage mimics the strategies deployed by the uncon-
scious mind to disarm the policing faculties of consciousness.79 The
medium works, by analogy, to loosen the hold of positivist visual regimes,
and the social and political relations that these regimes engender. Noth-
ing could better suit the authors’ purposes.
Most of the collages executed by Moore for this book revolve around
the thematic of vision. The frontispiece, the only plate in the book actu-
ally signed by Moore, presents a single enucleated eye cradled like an
offering in a chalice formed by two hands (fig. 36), the eye that Moore
offers to Cahun. “Because I see the world through your eyes,” Cahun told
her, “you mustn’t think that I am a poor observer. You didn’t close your
soul to me, you didn’t refuse me the usage of your clear regard. . . . Your
eyes, far from troubling my view, provide me with corrective lenses.”80 In
this faceplate Moore’s eye, her lens, also provides Cahun with a (deform-
ing) mirror; we can just make out the reflection, contre-jour, of the sub-
ject on which this eye is trained. Although Cahun had used the eye as an
emblem for Moore in the ex libris she designed over a decade earlier, the
eye represented here must be viewed not only as a reference to Moore but
also as an emblem of (monolithic) authority —as the word Dieu, spelled
out in mirror writing above the eye, indicates. The collage collapses sev-
eral interrelated iconographic registers: the coded language of the couple,
the symbols of monotheism, and the privileged tropes of surrealism.
The ocular imagery elaborated by Georges Bataille in his roughly con-
temporaneous L’Histoire de Voeil (1928) offers a point of comparison
with respect to the latter. In Bataille’s text, the sun, the egg, the third eye,
the eyeball, the vagina, the anus, the penis run together into one all-
encompassing sexual metaphor from which there is no way out (but, per-
chance, a way in). Similarly, the eye and its avatars dominate both the
pictorial and the poetic imagery of Aveux non avenus from cover plate
to final page. The eye at the center of this book and at the center of its
cover plate —as in Bataille’s novel —is also, of course, the “I.”81 An epi-
sode described near the conclusion of Aveux non avenus makes the analogy
explicit:
Strike ... at the heart of the eye. . . . Strike the most visible:
exactly the blackest part of the dilated pupil. And so as not to miss,
[take aim] in front of a magnifying glass. . . .
For the first time, the beautiful little convex images, the illumina-
tions of the eye . . . cease to exist. What I see there, that abominable
bleeding hole, comes from past times, from me, from the interior.
A hand falls, slack.
Intensity and shame serve no further purpose: if [the eyej is not
dead, it’s as good as dead. . . . renouncing itself, its sovereignty . . .
[the eye] only now dares to look at itself.82
The annihilation of this eye —the suicide of the autobiographical sub-

ject—these are the terms of self-knowledge, the conditions of a new
Fig. 36. Marcel Moore, frontispiece for Aveux non avenus, 1930
vision: blindness. This blindness, Cahun suggests, renders mimetism mean-

ingless and makes any representation of the self as same, as a reflection
of the other, impossible. In this illuminated state of blindness, those
“beautiful little convex images, the illuminations of the eye” that have
ceased to exist and the face in the mirror refuses, as in Cahun’s author
portrait, to look back. It is the condition of what Phelan describes as an
ability to “inhabit the blank without forcing the other to fill it.”83
The suicide episode—with its moment of blinding truth (“une image
du monde formee des verites qui vous crevent la vue”) —speaks obliquely
to several other of the book’s plates.84 For instance, the faceplate for chap-
ter 2 (displayed in its original dimensions in the publisher’s window
alongside the author portrait) can be understood as a related allegory (fig.
37). This collage, which introduces a chapter titled “Moi-meme (faute de
mieux)” (myself [for want of something better]), converses with the auto-
biographical “I” that Rousseau identified in his Confessions as “Moi-
seul,” my singular self.85 In place of Rousseau’s rational and natural
world—with it’s plumbable depths, its navigable horizon, and orthogo-
nals converging reassuringly at some central point in the distance —
Moore’s collage for “Moi-meme (faute de mieux)” presents us with a
black abyss, a “widening circle of shadow” (death, as pictured in the
suicide episode).86 Within this disorienting field, parts of Cahun’s body
circulate —legs, arms, hands —released from the normal imperatives of
anatomy.
Here again the organizing tropes (the eye, the mirror, feminine dis-
memberment) correspond with surrealism’s hallmark imagery. We are
reminded of Hans Bellmer, whose poupees decompose and recompose the
female body in various monstrous ways. Opposing the manifestly de-
formed feminine subject of Bellmer’s photographs to the apparently pris-
tine feminine figures preserved in the annals of “straight photography,”
Rosalind Krauss notes that, in surrealist practice, “woman and the
photograph become figures for each other’s condition.”87 The feminine
body—figured in patriarchal discourse as incomplete, imperfect, and
therefore denied full membership in the “family of man” —is not so much
dismembered in surrealism, Krauss argues, as re-membered in a way that
makes plain the ideological stakes of cultural deformation. Krauss’s
insight opens another perspective on Moore’s illustrations for Aveux non
avenus, where collage and the lesbian body may also be productively
viewed as “figures for each other’s condition.” The disfigurement of fem-
ininity participates here in a process of reconfiguration. The lesbian body
emerges, resurrected, from —and as — this process. This body desires “to
become rather than to be.”88 A manifestly “impossible identity,” the les-
bian body provides a symbolic “rallying point . . . for a certain resistance
to classification,” as Moore’s collage for “Moi-meme (faute de mieux)”
demonstrates.89
Here, two reflections of Cahun —one inverted in the pupil of her own
beholding eye, the other righted in a mirror framing herself as the
beheld —provide the focal points. Occupying opposite poles of the com-
position, each image appears to reflect upon the other in startled recog-
nition—as if caught in the act of becoming. Cahun’s hand, captured in the
circle of the mirror’s reflection, holds an invisible mirror (the mirror that
is always mentally present) up to her already reflected face. Her eyes stand
out, as if caught in a spotlight. A second hand —this one Moore’s —con-
trols the visual relations here, however. Clasping lightly between two
fingers a tiny foot and leg excised from a photo of Cahun, Moore’s hand
adjusts the angle of the mirror to capture and magnify her lover’s reflec-
tion, “placing,” Cahun acknowledged, “your own imprint upon my acts
that they be admired.”90
Yet another hand, scissored out of the book’s galleys, intrudes upon the
circle inscribed by the mirror’s frame. This third hand, whose index finger
Fig. 37. Marcel Moore, faceplate for

chapter titled “Moi-meme (faute de
mieux),” in Aveux non avenus, 1930.
points to Cahun’s reflection in a promotional manner, delivers a cryptic

message from the text.91 The hand-shaped hole left in the book’s galleys
points to a statement that links the pointing finger in the collage to a
pointing finger in the text: “After a thousand attempts by trial and error,
just once I put my finger on God (deep in my heart and despite my insin-
cere protests), here I am, at last, a prophet.”92 In the narrative that fol-
lows, this prophet plummets back to earth, to the material conditions of
a feminine destiny that she aspires to transcend. “There is too much of
everything,” the text protests (hence, perhaps, the excess of feminine parts
that circulate outside the fields inscribed by the eye and mirror in Moore’s
collage).93 The narrator explicates: “If an element doesn’t fit my compo-
sition, I leave it out. One thing after the other, I eliminate everything. . . .
I shave my head, pull out my teeth, remove my breasts . . . everything that
perturbs or waylays my regard: the stomach, the ovaries, the mind, con-
scious and cyst-bound.”94 This passage describes a pared-down subject
like the one captured in the mirror-like surfaces of Moore’s collage. It
describes a feminine subject divesting herself of her attributes —her long
hair, her toothy smile, her breasts, her womb, her ovaries, her socially con-
ditioned mind —in the interests of re-creating, rather than reproducing,
a social subject.
The project of re-creation proposed here calls for the implementation
of new modes of expression, the development of new modes of percep-
tion. The medium of collage, in the hands of Moore, would appear to
respond to these demands. Aveux non avenus and its plates dislodge the
customary markers of gender, in other words, to provoke a perceptual cri-
sis that has social as well as artistic repercussions. When the book’s nar-
rator evokes “le confusion des genres,” s/he describes, in the same breath,
an indeterminate gendered subject and an indeterminate means of repre-
sentation (the French word genre signifying both gender and genre).95
Calling attention to this slippage, Moore insinuates the words brouiller
les cartes (a figure of speech meaning “to muddle the issue”) into her col-
lage. In the passage of Cahun’s text from which Moore has culled this
phrase, the narrator reflects with some frustration upon the shortfalls of
the available symbolic terms, however redistributed: “Mix up the order
of the cards in the deck. Masculine? Feminine? That depends on the occa-
sion. Neuter is the only gender that invariably suits me. If it existed in our
language one would not observe this oscillation in my thinking.”96
Reshuffling the deck, however, will not pry the symbols loose from their
historical meanings.
As Barthes concludes in “Death of the Author,” “a code cannot be

destroyed, only ‘played off.’”97 To create another vocabulary, the narra-
tor of Aveux non avenus recognizes, “to polish the silver of the mirror,
wink my eye, blur my image . . . correct my flaws and recopy my gestures,
divide myself to conquer myself, multiply myself to impose myself . . . this
can change nothing.”98 For this reason, the tactics that Cahun and Moore
adopt in their game of give and take with a culture that denies them rep-
resentation always retain a provisional character. Their representational
strategies, which rely on citation, build on historical precedents to set in
motion a sort of literary and visual jurisprudence —supple, living, pro-
ceeding from mouth to mouth, hand to hand, by trial and error.
The only constant in this oeuvre is the insistence of the self, the selves,
to exist, to express, and, yes, to leave behind autobiographical traces.
However, as we have seen, the autobiographical “I” represented through-
out Aveux non avenus little resembles the “moi-seul” portrayed by
Rousseau (for whom Nature broke the mold). This is, instead, an “I” rep-
resented in complicity with a “you.” We sense this “you” throughout the
oeuvre: a hand, a voice, a shadow, a gap, a double.
We see this “you” quite clearly holding up the backdrop in another
photograph, taken ca. 1925, for which Cahun poses with a huge star (a
star of David partially eclipsed) tied tightly around her neck and comet-
like reflections bracketing her head (fig. 38).99 Moore’s eyes peer over the
black backdrop at her mate’s reflection in a mirror upon which the pho-
tographic lens is also trained. It is explicitly for Moore that Cahun “stars”
in this picture. Yet the “you”—the collaborator, the audience — addressed
by the “I” represented here (and throughout the oeuvre) could be under-
stood implicitly as a plural form of address. The narrator of Aveux non
avenus suggests as much in her description of a scene like the one re-
hearsed in many of the photographs: “Before her mirror . . . touched by
grace ... she consents to recognize herself. And the illusion she creates
for herself extends to certain others [quelques autres].”100
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their jointly authored analysis of
literature produced by lesbians in the early twentieth century, suggest that
lesbian modernists evolved a “collaborative aesthetic out of their com-
mon sense of extreme cultural expatriation.”101 This expansion of the
conceptual parameters of expatriation allows us to consider Cahun and
Moore in such terms prior to their immigration to the Isle of Jersey in
1937. The factors contributing to a sense of being “a stranger everywhere,”
as Elisabeth de Gramont noted with respect to Brooks,102 include many

of the conditions I have discussed in relation to Cahun and Moore: a
rejection of the native community and family name, a repudiation of
stereotypes of sexual subjectivity, and a declared resistance to both the
inherited culture and existing models of opposition. At home in no geo-
graphic place, no literary or art historical territory, lesbian activists such
as Brooks and Barney or Cahun and Moore “attempted to forge a cul-
tural tradition out of what they had: each other.”103 Their complicity, in
addition to challenging prevailing modes of cultural production, hedged
against the problem of the cultural exile’s isolation and vulnerability.
Cahun and Moore, I conclude, did not aspire to create a new paradigm
so much as a new process. By engaging each other in continuous acts of
artistic and subjective re-creation, they improvised spaces of possibility
that extended beyond the sphere of their partnership to “quelques autres,”
to certain kindred spirits capable of envisioning “new heavens and a new
earth.” This, indeed, is the epitaph inscribed on their tombstone: “And I
saw new heavens and a new earth.” Nine words, appropriated from the
Revelation of Saint John, represent the last citational act of Cahun and

Marcel Moore, untitled (star),
ca. 1925.
Collection of Leslie Tonkonow and
Klaus Ottmann
Moore’s career The quote implies without bringing to closure the full
phrasing of this apocalyptic verse: “for the first heaven and the first earth
were passed away, and there was no more sea.”104 True to their credo of
togetherness, the two who spoke of their union as a “singular plural”
came to rest in a plot overlooking the channel that separated them from
their native shores, beneath a single monument bearing two names and
two six-pointed stars reclaimed from the night.105
FOUR
Suzy Solidor and Her Likes
Amour est ce qu’on veut

Qu’avez-vous a blamer?
J’aime comme il me plait
Ce quil me plait d’aimer.
— Paul Valery, composed

for Suzy Solidor
ortraits of Suzy Solidor lined the walls of La Vie Parisienne, the

cabaret where she presided—on the fringes of Paris’s exclusive first
arrondissement, and at the heart of what would become the city’s
first gay quartier—from 1932 to 1946.1 Some of the portraits, like Yves
Brayer’s sketch of Solidor performing “on stage,” incorporate the night-
club’s decor—paintings, objects, and audience —as if to acknowledge the
process through which this lesbian icon enacted her own celebrity (fig.
39). Portraiture, like theater, like the face itself, exists for—and cannot
signify without —an external regard. Identity could also be described as
theatrical, to the extent that it exists in relation to the other—with respect
to sexual identity, in relation to the object of desire. Homosexual identity,
more specifically, defines itself in relation to two “others”: the refused,
opposite-sex other identified with normative, heterosexual erotic schemas
and the same-sex other, object of perverse desire. Brayer’s portrait repre-
sents Solidor as the focal point and enabler of multiple erotic identifica-
tions. She performs, slightly elevated and in the spot light, at the center
of an intimate performance arena. To her right, habitues of the club
would have had no trouble recognizing Henri Bry massaging the ivories
of a too grand piano. Bry, an openly homosexual entertainer, taunted Soli-
dor nightly with comic proposals of marriage in the course of her routine.
A pair of cross-dressed spectators in the foreground of Brayer’s portrait

represent the homosexual sector of the audience for whom La Vie Parisi-
enne reserved a special place. Across the table, a trio of well-heeled
socialites make themselves at home. Two portraits hanging in the penum-
bra surrounding the singer evoke the scores of likenesses that constituted
the club’s decor, works realized by artists whose stars were on the rise in
Paris between the two world wars. Artists like Brayer competed for the
chance to depict Solidor, recognizing the advantage of placing their work
at a point where Paris’s transgressive subcultures, Europe’s upper crust,
and the artistic establishment converged.
The portraits jostled each other for primacy, hanging frame to frame,
“from the cash register to the washroom.”2 Pictures of Solidor invaded
even the coatroom, which served as a “musee des erreurs,” a repository
for efforts that failed to garner the sitter’s favor.3 The eclectic character of
this collection— which included works in a variety of media and styles by
artists from over a dozen countries —reflected not only the nightclub per-
former’s status as an “artiste mondialement connue a Paris” but also her
desire to resist inscription within rigid categorical boundaries —be they
Fig. 39. Yves Brayer, Suzy

Solidor, 1935, reproduced in
Deux Cents Peintres, un modele.
(ARS), New York/ADGAP, Paris
SuZY SOLIDOR AND HER LlKES 107
sexual, social, political, or artistic.4 The portraits de-classed Solidor and

reframed her (variously) to her advantage. Although not a single like-
ness here bears Solidor’s signature, the collection itself constitutes a self-
representational oeuvre. Like her contemporaries Claude Cahun, Marcel
Moore, Romaine Brooks, and, for that matter, Natalie Barney, Solidor too
explored portraiture as a site of self-invention and self-inscription. In all
five cases, these artists' relations to the objects with which they sur-
rounded themselves —Brooks with her portraits of modern women, Bar-
ney with the women themselves, Cahun and Moore with the (photo)graphic
traces of their self-exploratory acts, Solidor with her self-centered decor —
participated in what might productively be considered “the dramaturgy
of the self.”5 However, as the only (arguably) self-made woman among
them, Solidor stood apart from the other lesbian cultural figures I have
discussed thus far.
Despite the approbation of influential male intellectuals from Paul
Valery to Robert Desnos, Solidor did not win the favor of Paris’s lesbian
intelligentsia. While male intellectuals applauded Solidor’s animal appeal
and her cultural sophistication from a secure position, many lesbian cul-
tural leaders (with the notable exception of Colette) avoided the taint of
association with this dubious “sister.” A roster of Paris lesbians who did
not frequent Solidor’s club would include —in addition to Claude Cahun,
Marcel Moore, Romaine Brooks, and Natalie Barney—literary lights
such as Elisabeth de Gramont, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and H.D.;
cinematographers and producers like Germaine Dulac and Bryher; pho-
tographers Berenice Abbott and Gisele Freund; the founders of the Little
Review, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; the influential literary ar-
biters Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach; and the journalists Golda
Goldman and Janet Flanner. In contrast to this well-educated sorority,
Solidor benefited from no inherited capital, be it symbolic or financial, as
she herself emphasized.
Solidor’s parentage was in no way distinguished. Her mother was not
an artist or aristocrat, educator or international society hostess, hut a char-
woman in the service of a provincial notable. According to Solidor, this
employer (a descendant of Saint-Malo’s most legendary corsair, Robert Sur-
couf) impregnated her mother.6 Born out of wedlock, Solidor was given
her mother’s surname, Rocher. Following what she described as a child-
hood of truancy in the Brittany seaport, the rebellious Suzanne Rocher,
determined to avoid the career of domestic service for which she was des-
tined, obtained a driver’s license and enlisted in the army ambulance corps.7
In the wake of the 1914-1918 war, she migrated to Paris, equipped with
little more than her arresting looks and perhaps a list of contacts passed
on by her sisters in the ambulance corps. According to the origin myth
upon which she continuously embroidered, the adolescent veteran pre-
sented herself, suitcase in hand, at the door of a Right Bank boutique
d’antiquite owned and operated by the celebrated lesbian socialite Yvonne
de Bremond d’Ars. Over the next eleven years, Bremond d’Ars, well con-
nected in aristocratic, artistic, and homosexual circles, turned the “little un-
cultivated Breton” she found on her doorstep into an urban sophisticate.8
Indeed, Bremond d’Ars played the role of Pygmalion with an acknowl-
edged flair. “She sculpted me,” declared Solidor. “Each day she added some-
thing to her oeuvre.”9 “Mademoiselle,” as Solidor called her, groomed
and dressed the novice in fashions by Lanvin; she paid for lessons of dic-
tion, comportment, drama, and music; she inculcated in Solidor a certain
erudition. Patiently, she created a “propitious atmosphere” for Solidor’s
“initiation ... to the codes of Lesbos” —even though Solidor, by her own
estimation, “was not a born tnbade.”10 “All of the books that she put
at my disposal,” Solidor embellished, “celebrated the cult of sapphism:
[in my bookcase], Verlaine’s Femmes nestled up against the poetic oeuvre
of Renee Vivien.”11 Chez Bremond d’Ars, Solidor familiarized herself with
a set of references shared by an elite homosexual literary community: the
writings of Lranôis Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire; manu-
scripts by Pierre Louys and Paul Valery “vaunting the beauty of the lovers
of Bilitis and Chloe”;12 fragments of Sapphic poetry; the writings of Oscar
Wilde; Idylle saphique, in which the courtesan Liane de Pougy commem-
orates her affair with Natalie Barney; Remy de Gourmont’s L’Amazone
(also a tribute to Barney); and more recent entries to this bibliography,
such as Hall’s infamous Le Puits de solitude.
It was Bremond d’Ars who first cast Solidor as a work of art and first
presented her to the public as an image. Bremond d’Ars commissioned the
very first portraits in what would become Solidor’s collection.13 She
“upholstered’ the bedroom that she shared with Solidor with these paint-
ings, prefiguring the decor of Solidor’s nightclub. “She had me pose,
almost always nude, for a quantity of artists such as Domergue, Van Don-
gen, Marie Laurencin, Vertes, Loujita, Kisling ... not to mention even
better ones.”14 In reality, if Solidor appears unclothed in works by Vertes
and Domergue, she looks the very picture of propriety as rendered by
Moise Kisling, Loujita, Laurencin, and Kees van Dongen. Van Dongen, for
instance, presents us with just the head and shoulders of his sitter, whom
SuZY SOLIDOR AND HER LlKES 109
he pictures as a youthful sailor (fig. 40). This boyish girl with flaxen hair
bobbed at the ears, a mariner’s stripes, and eyes as vacant as the violet
sky would grow into the role that Van Dongen prefigures here. In 1927,
though, when this image was created, the sailor’s suit meant no more, no
less, than the fishnet bathing costume or Greek lace-up sandals acquired
for Solidor by her benefactor —attire for a season at Deauville, where Bre-
mond d’Ars displayed her “treasure” annually with a “sort of ostenta-
tious rage.”15
After a decade of preening for her proprietary employer on the side-
walks of Paris and boardwalks of seaside resorts, Solidor reclaimed the
independence that was a bastard’s birthright.16 She broke with Bremond
d’Ars, using the relations that she had cultivated during her apprentice-
ship to launch a career as an entertainer —and to continue a career as a
lesbian spectacle and an oeuvre d’art. Motivated by promotional concerns
(and perhaps a bastard’s spirit of revenge), the would-be celebrity aban-
doned her mother’s name, Rocher, in favor of the patronymic Surcouf.
The pirated patronymic, tinged with the romance of the high seas and
realms beyond the reach of the law, at once marked and redressed Solidor’s
Fig. 40. Kees van Dongen,

Suzy Solidor, 1927,
reproduced in Deux Cents
Peintres, un modele.
(ARS), New York/ADGAP,
Paris
illegitimacy. Surcouf’s staunchly bourgeois legal heirs prevailed on the

courts, however, to impose an interdiction. “Our off-spring are not in the
habit of appearing clad only in three rubies (of which one on each breast)
or of exhibiting themselves in bathing suits fashioned of mother-of-pearl
or fish net,” they declaimed.17 Ultimately, the Tour Solidor, the fortress
tower that keeps watch over Saint-Malo, capital of the corsairs and his-
torical city of asylum,18 provided the entertainer with a stage name: Suzy
Solidor. The phonetics of the name (solide or, solid gold) even retained
the glint of pirate’s booty.
From its inception, the name Solidor appeared in headlines, in lights,
in gossip columns, on record jackets, book jackets, and high-society guest
lists. The name attracted listeners to Radio-France and viewers to the ear-
liest national television broadcasts.19 It lent cachet to the emerging record-
ing industry and the cinema parlant as well. Solidor starred, for instance,
in the second film version of Margueritte’s novel La Gargonne, directed
by Jean de Limur. The first version, a silent film produced in the 1920s,
was banned shortly after its release. In Limur’s remake, Solidor played the
role of a nightclub proprietor who introduces the heroine, Monique Ler-
bier, to the pleasures of opium and sapphic eroticism. Within a reconsti-
tuted nightclub setting, replete with portraits borrowed from the walls of
La Vie Parisienne, Solidor sang one of her standbys, “La Vie est un feu
de paille.” Her costars included two legendary cabaret performers: Arletty
and Piaf. Solidor, a relative newcomer to the entertainment business,
worked hard to keep her name in circulation, making the rounds of
charity fundraisers, art openings, ship launchings, automobile rallies,
groundbreaking ceremonies for new metro stations, book signings, opera
and ballet galas, funerals, horse races, fashion shows, and Suzy Solidor
look-alike contests (“Madame, mademoiselle, vous pouvez gagner 250fr:
Ressemblez-vous a Suzy Solidor?”)20—events, in short, that would attract
the attention of the media. But unlike the stars produced by the burgeon-
ing recording and movie studios, a population with whom she constantly
rubbed shoulders in the course of these activities, Solidor maintained per-
sonal control of her public image and career.
It is no coincidence that several of her portraitists pictured Solidor at
the helm of the ship. A painting signed Jincart, reproduced in promotional
material that Solidor distributed, figures a swashbuckling Solidor, face to
the wind, one gauntleted hand steadying the wheel of the ship, the other
clutching a drawn sword (fig. 41). She looks like an illustration from her
own novel, Fil d’or, whose heroine—a cross-dressing female sea captain —
SlJZY SOLIDOR AND HER LlKES 111
dodges the law to navigate “where the waters are most treacherous .
to do combat with the sea each day of [her] life” and, ultimately, to earn
her redemption.”21 The novel, like Jincart’s painting, represents a roman-
tic outcast battling hostile elements to master her own fate. The sea of
faces that flooded La Vie Parisienne each night was, for the novel’s author,
an analogous arena of combat and redemption.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, Solidor appeared episodically in
theatrical and music-hall productions, and ventured once or twice again
into the realm of cinema. She poured most of her energy, however, into
the operation of her own night spot at 13 rue Ste. Anne. By Solidor’s
account, there were only ten or twelve such clubs —including Cocteau’s
haunt, Le Boeuf sur le Toit —when she made her debut on the entertain-
ment scene.22 It is certainly true that very few other women opened clubs
Fig. 41. Jincart, Suzy Solidor, ca. 1939, reproduced in Deux

Cents Peintres, un modele.
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADGAP, Paris
in Paris during this decade, despite the growing popularity of these inti-
mate entertainment venues.23 Among them, Solidor alone entered the
entertainment business through her own front door, without working her
way up through the music-hall and cabaret circuit. Unlike her colleagues,
who built their reputations from scratch, Solidor had already captivated
an audience (thanks to the exhibitionism of Bremond d’Ars) before she
officially launched her career as a professional performer.
First, in her quai Voltaire boutique d’antiquites, called La Grande
Mademoiselle, and then in her clubs La Vie Parisienne and Chez Suzy
Solidor, she played to this audience on a near nightly basis for thirty years.
The nightclub clientele —artists, aristocrats, celebrities, high-ranking offi-
cers and officials of state, wealthy industrialists, visiting potentates, and
an inner circle of lesbian colleagues, entertainers, and demimondaines —
never seemed to tire of Solidor’s variety act. Surrounded by a kaleido-
scope of images representing the proprietor in a range of postures, club
patrons succumbed to her charms night after night, year after year, as her
portrait collection expanded. Her fans followed as she moved from venue
to venue, from the Left Bank to the Right Bank to the Cote d’Azur.
As her performance routine matured, Solidor skillfully tempered rustic
authenticity with chic modernity, homoeroticism with heteroeroticism,
masculinity with femininity, constantly renewing the vitality of her spec-
tacle and reigning over the performance arena as if it were a fiefdom. The
images of Solidor that filled the space around her emptied it of anything
else, creating a “milieu,” a circle emptied out and then filled in, a per-
sonalized theater.24 Solidor took possession of and arranged this space,
and the collection of objects with which she filled it, in a way that made
her both the producer and the star of the show. One of the aging Solidor’s
last promotional photographs shows her posing, surrounded by like-
nesses, cloaked in black after the fashion of a legendary predecessor, the
impresario/performer Aristide Bruant (1851-1925). Like Solidor, Bruant —
whose notorious cabaret, Le Mirliton, extended the pleasures and abuses
of Bohemian Montmartre to a high-born clientele —carefully cultivated
(with the help of trend-setting artists) a profitably transgressive public
image. The promotional portrait of Solidor-as-Bruant, with its overdeter-
mined emphasis on posing and imposture, challenges the viewer to get to
the bottom of the performer’s self-fictions (fig. 42).
The power of Solidor’s productions (the magnetism of her presence
within the arenas she created) derived in part, from the tension between
the contrasting projections that she and her collection embodied: between
Fig. 42. Suzy Solidor, in her Haut-de-Cagnes club, ca. 1960, posing as
Aristide Bruant against the backdrop of her portraits.
Photo courtesy of Doris Lemaire, Cagnes-sur-Mer
virility and tenderness, between seducer and seduced, between the rude-
ness of the material and the polish of its presentation. Describing herself
as ua Parisian who retained the trace of all the flaws and qualities of her
origins,”25 she draped cosmopolitan sophistication like a brigand’s cloak
over her pampered but naturally athletic body. Her husky voice and
elegant diction heightened the drama of these competing effects, as did
the eclectic, ever-expanding portrait collection that set the scene for her
performances.
Solidor was neither the first nor the only public figure to shape her pub-
lic image and to enhance her reputation via portraiture —as the example
of Brooks and the counterexamples of Cahun and Moore demonstrate.
Historically, indeed, one of the primary functions of portraiture has been
to underwrite the authority and enhance the renown of the culturally and
politically powerful. Many of the social and artistic celebrities whom Soli-
dor courted forged alliances and kept themselves in the public eye by sit-
ting for their portraits. Image-conscious personalities such as the saloniere
Anna de Noailles, the cosmetics tycoon Helena Rubinstein, and the poet
Jean Cocteau, to name three who frequented Solidor’s club, recognized
the social and commercial utility of the portrait genre. Some of the most
significant cultural producers and patrons of the previous century had
dramatized their influence in this way. Grandes dames such as Madame
Recamier (portrayed, most notably, by Jacques-Louis David and Francois
Gerard) and artists such as Whistler (portrayed in caricatures and por-
traits by as many as one hundred artists) understood the self-promotional
potential of portraiture.26 Of these sitters, however, none constituted a
collection of self-images quite like that of Solidor.
Perhaps only the collection of the comtesse de Castiglione surpasses
Solidor’s ambition in strictly quantitative terms. Solidor sat for close to
250 portraits. The countess posed for almost twice that number. Most of
the countess’s images issued from the same portrait studio, that of the
nineteenth-century photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson. Castiglione’s choice
of medium (photography, a putatively documentary genre) and of a com-
mercial interpreter, as well as the serial character of her portrait enter-
prise, could be viewed as evidence of her intention to shift the emphasis,
as Solidor did, away from the agency of the portrait maker toward that
of the sitter —as one famous portrait of the countess staring back at the
camera through a frame held to one eye seems to imply (fig. 43). How-
ever, as Abigail Solomon-Godeau has cautioned, although the photographs
SUZY SOLIDOR AND HER LlKES 115
for which the countess posed are unarguably “the personal expression of an
individual woman’s investment in her image —in herself as image . . . this indi-
vidual act of expression is underwritten by conventions that make her less an
author than a scribe.”27 Is it safe to assume that Solidor, at a later moment in
history, was in a better position to assert her own authority? At the very least,
important differences in class, arenas of production and display, and histori-
cal context make drawing an analogy between Solidor and Castiglione a
shaky proposition.
The self-promotional initiatives of Sarah Bernhardt, France’s premiere mass
celebrity, more closely resembled Solidor’s enterprise, though. To wit, Bernhardt
fully exploited the latest fads and technologies to this end—most notably, the
latest photographic and stereographic developments. For instance, a carte-de-
visite (which would have been displayed among the collectables in the pho-
tographer’s vitrine) pictures Bernhardt, ca. 1879, paintbrush in one hand,
palette in the other, putting the finishing touches on an already framed easel
painting (fig. 44). At first glance, the effect of this gilded frame and the fact
that Bernhardt’s painting hand rhymes so precisely with the hand of the
Fig. 43. Pierre-Louis Pierson,

Comtesse de Castiglione, ca.
1855, reproduced in Robert de
Montesquiou’s homage, La
Divine Comtesse: Etude d’apres
Madame de Castiglione (Paris:
Manzi Joyant, 1913).
woman that she has painted invest the tableau with the character of a mir-
ror image. We quickly become aware, though, that the framed image is
not the product of passive mimetism but the result of Bernhardt’s creative
act. The artist poses, one foot turned out like a dancer, costumed in im-
probably spotless white trousers and matching frock coat, ruffles overflow-
ing the lapels, a corsage pinned to her shoulder. Focusing on her canvas,
she cuts her famous silhouette against a background darkened for con-
trast like the one in her painting. Bernhardt was always on stage, always
engaged in the creation of her image —here the image of an artist of many
dimensions, a Renaissance woman —and Solidor followed in her footsteps.
Like Bernhardt, who excelled as an actor, director, set and costume de-
signer, painter, sculptor, and writer, Solidor demonstrated her artistic
prowess in multiple arenas. Like Bernhardt, who, in addition to recog-
nizing the self-promotional potential of photography, recorded her voice
on Edison’s earliest devices and performed in the first moving pictures,
Solidor too exploited the latest technologies of her era. Like Bernhardt,
who toured by balloon and received guests couched in the white satin-
lined casket that she kept in her parlor, Solidor calculated appearances
that would attract the attention of the print media and add texture to her
myth. Like Bernhardt, Solidor, with her penchant for travesty roles and
her passions for members of both sexes, garnered a cult following in
Paris’s lesbian communities. And, like Bernhardt, Solidor “inspired” innu-
merable works of art and literature.
The mise-en-scene of Suzy Solidor by Suzy Solidor, however, unlike
that of Sarah Bernhardt by Sarah Bernhardt, transpired after the Great
War, with its complex consequences for women in both public and pri-
vate life. Imaging technologies, too, had changed dramatically in the in-
terim. Cinema, for one, had evolved from an experimental arena into an
industry. The monstre sacre of the theatrical stage (and Bernhardt, who
died in 1923, was among the last of these) had ceded to the vedette of the
silver screen —thanks in large measure to breakthroughs in filmic technol-
ogies. If Bernhardt had to work harder than Solidor to achieve autonomy
in the solidly masculine public sphere of the fin de siecle, Solidor had to
work harder than Bernhardt to distinguish herself as “an original” within
the media-driven celebrity culture that accompanied the ascent of cinema.
Solidor, in other words, faced a very different set of challenges than Bern-
hardt as she vied for a margin of self-determination within a rapidly
evolving entertainment economy —a “star system” that functioned on an
international scale.28
Solidor’s exploitation of original artworks set her one-woman promo-

tional operation apart from the industry that created stars like Garbo,
whose Hollywood handlers catered to the demands advertisers, fan mag-
azines, newspapers, and correspondence clubs.29 Hollywood-generated
celebrity photographs, even more than the movies themselves, played a
critical role in the creation of 1930s viewing communities, and thus stars.
Garbo’s face became the logo unifying a filmography identified by the star
rather than by the auteur. In the 1930s, fans stood in line to see “the lat-
est Garbo.” Who among them could have identified the director of Mata
Hari or Queen Christina? Garbo’s face was featured on magazine covers,
enlarged for posters, billboards, and even theater marquees.30 As Louise
Brooks commented, “When I think of Garbo, I do not see her moving in
any particular film. I see her staring mysteriously into the camera. . . . She
Fig. 44. Poirel, Sarah Bernhardt,

carte-de-visite, ca. 1880.
is a still picture —unchangeable.”31 Barthes suggests that Garbo’s face

crystallizes “this fragile moment when the cinema is about to draw an
existential from an essential beauty, when the archetype leans toward the
fascination of mortal faces.”32 Solidor’s image, in contrast, as a result of
its dissipated character, seems neither existential nor essential, appearing
instead as a shifting play of surfaces. Her portrait collection forces the
viewer’s eye to move constantly, creating a blur, a composite, an image
that cannot not be seized.
Indeed, perusing the scores of portraits hanging in the club, the unini-
tiated observer might not have recognized, in this eclectic ensemble, that
the paintings all represented one and the same model. But then, thanks
to the mass media and Solidor’s grasp of its potential, few uninitiated
observers ever crossed the threshold of her club. Solidor attracted atten-
tion to her collection by traveling with it when she took her show on the
road and by inviting her public to champagne celebrations at the night-
club each time she unveiled a new acquisition. Society and entertainment
columns pictured each addition to the collection. Photos of Solidor pos-
ing (in the club, at home, on tour) with one or more of her portraits were
reproduced in popular niche publications such as Les Ondes, La Rampe,
Mon Cine, La Vie Parisienne, Comoedia, Marianne, and Plaisirs de France.
Portrait images of Solidor were also occasionally reproduced in the offi-
cial catalogues of annual salons, as well as in coverage of these exhibi-
tions by art journals.33 Even the newsreels, a new phenomenon, captured
Solidor’s likenesses.
In 1932, for instance, a Pathe-Gaumont news feature titled “Un Bel
Atelier moderne” caught Solidor posing nude in Tamara de Lempicka’s
studio.34 We witness Lempicka, working frontally and up close, depicting
a modern amazon, one breast bared, face helmeted by a cask of brassy
hair, posing against a nocturnal urban skyline (fig. 45). Lempicka’s geo-
metrical, art deco aesthetic transforms Solidor into an objet d’art while
her proximity to the sitter eroticizes the visual relations. The subject’s
cold, come-hither eyes, the manicured hands that finger a silken drape,
the erect nipple of that precisely semispherical breast, the impenetrable
surfaces of a body on display in the hard, artificial light of a city night
congeal into a sort of modern erotic archetype: a spectacularized, sexu-
ally available but sexually predatory body, one that appears both objec-
tified and objectifying, Solidor’s body.
Such portrait images, previewed in the news media, captured the imag-
ination of every client entering Solidor’s club. A bust of the proprietor
executed in oil by Othon Friesz, a pinup by Jean-Gabriel Domergue,35 life

drawings by Francis Picabia and Mariette Lydis, a caricature by Jean
Cocteau, an impression in pastel pinks and blues by Marie Laurencin —
all met the eyes of the arriving clientele. The promiscuity of the display,
whose density and variety rivaled that of the patrons packed shoulder to
shoulder around the club’s small tables, made it nearly impossible to con-
sider these portraits as individual works of art.
The hodgepodge effect prevented any single portrait from standing out
against the others, foregrounding the collection as a whole (thus, Solidor’s
oeuvre, Solidor’s celebrity) at the expense of its individual parts (and the
individual artists). More importantly, no portrait image ever eclipsed the
subject “in the flesh.” Each work was absorbed into a collective pictorial
context that framed Solidor to her best advantage —as one society colum-
nist recording his impressions of a soiree at La Vie Parisienne affirmed:
I admire [Suzy Solidor] both as a woman and as an artist —and I

must not be the only one, since a hundred painters —one more
famous than the next —have executed her portrait. [The portraits]
hang on all the walls, works by Foujita, Marie Laurencin, Domergue,
Van Dongen . . . , and if one has the good fortune to be dead-drunk,
one sees two thousand images swirling before one’s eyes. . . . But
Suzy Solidor, in flesh and blood makes this collection of art works
pale.36
Fig. 45. Tamara de Lempicka, Suzy

Solidor, 1932, reproduced in Deux
Cents Peintres, un modele.
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/ADGAP, Paris
One thing that the artists for whom Solidor posed had in common was
that they were all celebrities of sorts themselves in the 1920s and 1930s.
Murals by Mikhail Yacovleff, Othon Friesz, and Roger Chapelain-Midy
decorated the foyer of the new Theatre National Populaire in Paris’s
Palais de Chaillot at Trocadero (lavishly renovated in 1937). The inter-
nationally acclaimed Ballets Suedois featured sets and costumes by Helene
Perdriat. Louis Touchagues designed the decor for the Palais de Tokyo.
Jacques Thiout and Christian Berard turned heads in the arena of high
fashion. Jean Dunand set trends, with his luxuriously lacquered decora-
tive schemes, in the realm of interior architecture. Affiches by Paul Colin
enlivened Paris’s most sophisticated night spots, and Jean-Gabriel Domer-
gue created the poster for the first international film festival at Cannes.
Erte’s star was on the rise in Hollywood, and Jacqueline Marval’s portrait
oeuvre functioned as a pictorial register of the cosmopolitan beau monde.
Each of these artists produced a portrait image of Solidor, and most
frequented the club. “Each night my painter friends came,” Solidor rem-
inisced in a radio interview, “to see me, but also to assure that their por-
traits were properly displayed.”3 Where these celebrity artists went, the
journalists followed, “satisfied to report on the overall scene.”38 The
champagne vernissages that Solidor hosted to unveil each new portrait
enhanced the club’s allure, as did the transgressive climate that the pro-
prietor created around herself and La Vie Parisienne.
Many of the artists who portrayed Solidor flirted openly with sexual
scandal and perversion. Cocteau had published a daring album of homo-
erotic drawings, Le Livre blanc, in 1928.39 Lydis, who illustrated deluxe
editions of erotically charged works by Baudelaire and Colette, explored
in her paintings and drawings “the world of suffering and voluptuousness
. . . with all the fatal lyricism of Sappho.”40 The signature Vertes appeared
with regularity in racy pulp magazines, and his erotic drawings illustrated
texts by Louys (Poesies erotiques) and Colette (Vagabonde, 1927, and
Cheri, 1929). The society painter Kees van Dongen’s images of the mod-
ern woman and sapphic love served as plates for Margueritte’s sensational
La Gargonne (1922). Critics referred to the images created by Dietz Ed-
zard as “black flowers of romanticism” and labeled Jules Pascin (whose
sketch of Solidor was described in the press as “deux femmes se saphisant
sur un canape”) the “pornographer of the School of Paris.”41 Lempicka’s
sapphic icons provoked reflections by reviewers on the underlying eroti-
cism of her practice as a painter; “Where does the voluptuousness of
touch leave off and the voluptuousness of painting begin?” one of her
critics mused.42 Via portraits bearing signatures like these, Solidor illus-
trated a text of her own elaboration, a dramatic text governed by the con-
ventions of erotic fiction.
The legibility of this oeuvre as a statement of perverse desire made Soli-
dor the figure de proue (or symbolic figurehead) of an increasingly visible
lesbian following. Commercial artists and caricaturists pictured her quite
literally as the figurehead of a sailing vessel (fig. 46). The Russian artist
Zmowiev’s portrait of Solidor-as-figurehead occupied pride of place in the
nightclub, hanging just above the piano throughout the 1930s (fig. 47).43
Zinowiev invests Solidor’s feminine body —somewhat inelegantly spliced
to its metaphorical equivalent, the vessel —with phallic rigidity. Her arms,
like those of a martyr tied to the stake, are pinned behind her (the rig-
gings that crisscross the bow of the ship reinforce the suggestion of
bondage). Her pale head and torso —“lovingly patinated by the light,”
streamlined, erect as the ship’s bowsprit —lunge at the darkening horizon.
Her lower body, which merges with the vessel’s prow, penetrates the briny
deep. The effect of this picture, with its mixing of gendered metaphors, is
one of ambivalence. The figurehead represents Solidor as a forerunner,
yes, and as such a figure of influence, audacity, and freedom, but it also
depicts her as a sort of fetish object, sexualized, bound. However contra-
dictory, each of these interpretations reconciles in its own way with Soli-
dor’s status as a lesbian icon.
Solidor assumed the role of lesbian figurehead with humor, naming her
country getaway in Medan, which Colette helped to decorate, Le Puits de
Solitude, an ironic citation of the title of Radclyffe Hall’s scandalous—if
somewhat stuffy —lesbian novel.44 As more than one journalist pointed
out, solitude was an unlikely term to evoke in association with Solidor,
who was typically surrounded by doting women. Solidor’s theme song
“Ouvre,” with its unequivocal lyrics (“open your trembling knees, open
your thighs”) became a sort of lesbian anthem —and remains so to this
day.45 As gossip columnists frequently remarked, Solidor “never hid the
vigorous and tender passion that creatures of her own sex inspired in
her.” On the contrary, she flaunted it. Lesbianism sold well in 1930s Paris.
Reporters claimed that the performers and servers who worked in Soli-
dor’s club “were all her ‘little allies.’”46 There was some truth to this
assertion. Solidor “adopted” a series of young protegees, and some re-
mained in the entourage for decades. Doris Lemaire, for example, cele-
brated her sixteenth birthday in the celebrity’s embrace on the dance floor
of the Paris nightclub and remained more or less at her side, and on and
Fig. 46. Zinowiev, Suzy
Solidor, Figure de proue,
1930s, reproduced in Deux Cents
Fig. 47. Cover, sheet music

for “Chanson du large”
picturing Solidor as
figurehead, 1930s.
off in her employ, until Solidor’s death in 19 8 3.47 And Solidor did indeed
launch a number of lesbian as well as gay male performing artists —
including her successor Colette Mars, who took over La Vie Parisienne in
the 1940s, and her “god daughter” Dany Dauberson, who drew Solidor
admirers to the lesbian bar Carroll’s in the 1950s.48 These affiliations con-
tributed to the sophistication of Solidor’s reputation and that of her club.
It was Solidor’s calculated revelations about her attachments to women,
what she called her “solidorite feminine,” that underwrote this reputa-
tion—and made the performer and her club the focus of constant media
attention.49 Journalists could always count on her for a titillating one-
liner. “When I eat fois gras and have a nightmare,” Solidor tossed off to
an interviewer who grilled her about the men in her life, “I dream that I
am married. Actually, I’m a confirmed bachelor [un vieux garôn].”50 She
informed another interviewer, inquiring about an up-coming tour of
Greece, that above all she looked forward to visiting the Temple of Les-
bos “with all the fervor of a pilgrim.”51 As for the homophobic slurs that
Solidor’s candidness about her sexuality occasionally provoked, she dis-
missed them with contempt. “These stories won’t cost me a single friend,”
she insisted. “Just as the adversaries of the nude tend to be ugly women,
these rumormongers are sexually frustrated lovers whom I’ve banished
from my bedroom.”52 Backing up her bold remarks to members of the
press with equally bold acts, Solidor hosted women-only “tea dances” at
the club twice a week and recorded an album titled Paris-Lesbien as a ges-
ture of recognition to her lesbian following.53 The album featured songs
with titles such as “Tout comme un homme,” “Sous tes doigts,” and “Ob-
session,” whose lyrics (“Chaque femme je la veux / Des talons jusqu’au
cheveux”) openly celebrate lesbian desire. Solidor’s self-identification as a
womanizer, despite significant liaisons with men, undeniably ramped up
her allure as a celebrity and added a breath of succes a scandale to the
hearsay about her club.54 “Without Confessions [a magazine in which
Solidor revealed the “strange destiny of a woman without men”] and an
aura of unwholesomeness, there wouldn’t be so many customers at [La
Vie Parisienne],” one entertainment columnist affirmed.55
While maintaining the homophile atmosphere within La Vie Parisi-
enne, Solidor did not shortchange her heterosexual clientele. A journalist
entering the premises for the first time was struck by the clublike cama-
raderie among the habitues. He noted that the hostess “spoke to all of her
clients as if they were her friends because they all were her friends. She
mingled constantly with the guests, coming and going in the dim light. . . .
And in that little room, as intimate as a boudoir, I felt a growing sense of

well-being, an indulgent tenderness for those around me and for my-
self.”56 Another observer, a longtime patron, mused about what he called
the “professionalism” of Solidor’s charm: “Was she such a good actor
that she seemed attentive while thinking of a thousand other things, or
was she really that attentive?” Anyway, he concluded, she made her cus-
tomers feel so at home that “they forgot that they had to pay for it.”57
Solidor’s performance style on stage was also “professionally inti-
mate.” Her voice, which one enchanted reviewer described as “a little
black, a little magical,” made each moment of her performance seem like
“a sort of miracle,” whatever the nature of the material.58 And the mate-
rial varied as widely as the images of Solidor mounted on the club’s walls.
She punctuated her musical sets with dramatic renderings of verses com-
posed by her “poet friends.” Between love songs conceived in the realist
tradition and nostalgic songs of the sea, she recited poems by Paul Valery,
Maurice Magre, Francis Carco, Paul Fort, but especially Cocteau. The
audience, charmed by the versatility of this declasse performer, hung on
her every word as she segued from poem to poem and then, perhaps, to
a musical adaptation of a verse penned by Paul Verlaine or Jacques Pre-
vert that had been tailored to her voice and style by one of her several
popular composers.59 The effect on clients, who had the impression that
Solidor was speaking to and about each of them personally, was by all
reports spellbinding.
No one balked when Solidor spoke or sang torchy verses addressed to
women —texts customarily interpreted by men, like “Fin voilier,” in
which she compared “the gorgeous body of my blond” to “a beautiful
ship” that she governed.60 While Solidor visibly relished such instances of
textual inversion, the majority of the songs and poems she performed
were open to more than one interpretation. By modulating the repertoire
and the delivery with subtlety and intelligence, Solidor created a stage per-
sona that was at once intensely seductive and entirely mercurial. And she
never stepped out of character (or, more accurately, out of characters).
It is fitting that the portraits for which Solidor posed represent the per-
former in so many different roles. Dunand lends luster to the star, preen-
ing her best profile and professional smile in the spotlight. Foujita pictures
an “ingenue libertine,” fixed in the worshipping gaze of her dog and
decked out like a character from the writings of Colette. Most of the por-
traits in this collection sexualize the sitter in one way or another. Beltram
Y Masses aptly portrays Solidor herself as a collection —arranging, in a
piano-top display, a framed photograph of the performer’s face, a pair of

elbow-length black gloves, a smoking cigarette balanced on the edge of
an ashtray, and the sheet music to the theme song “Ouvre.” Man Ray’s
nude studies rake the amazonian musculature of Solidor’s torso with avid
highlights and voluptuous shadows, a tenebristic effect he pushes further
in some prints by solarizing the body’s contours. Lydis pictures Solidor,
languorous and prone, barely clothed, head thrown back and eyes closed.
In the late 1930s, “la femme la plus portraituree de Paris” published
an illustrated catalogue of these likenesses.61 Autographed copies of Quar-
ante Peintres, un modele were available for purchase at the bar.62 Solidor
prefaced the souvenir catalogue with words of praise solicited from (male)
members of her entourage. Here, Joseph Kessel, author a la mode and edi-
tor of the magazine Confessions, recorded his impressions of the portraits
on display in La Vie Parisienne. “From the walls forty faces that inspired
forty artists of different races from every country watch her,” he recounts.
“Forty faces, all in her likeness, confront the real, the living subject who
at once resembles them and defies them.”63 Solidor herself described the
environment of the nightclub as one in which, at every turn, she caught
her own reflection in “a series of distorting mirrors.” In order to stave off
a sense of alienation, she continued, “I force myself to resemble my lat-
est portrait.”64
Solidor’s “act” owed its dynamism, in part, to the way she played with,
against, and to this gallery of likenesses. The gallery was not merely a
material record of a star’s narcissism, although this dismissal undoubtedly
satisfied her detractors. “When I look at the portraits,” the sitter claimed,
“it isn’t my own image that I see; it’s all of the artists: once again I see
Kisling, once again I see Foujita, all my friends.”65 For Solidor, the por-
traits appear to have constituted a kind of audience incorporating both
her own (externalized) self-regard and the appraisal of an elite and sym-
pathetic artistic public —a public captivated by an ever-changing image,
the evasive object of desire.
In Quarante Peintres, un modele, Cocteau described the charismatic per-

former as she leaned back against the piano to draw from deep within “a
voice that comes out of the most intimate zones of her being,” a voice
that “issues from her sex.”66 Yet, listening to her sing, audiences must
have asked, “Which sex?” Solidor’s voice ranged without apparent strain
from the alto to the soprano registers. Playing up this ambiguity, Solidor
interpreted songs such as “Partir avant le jour,” a duet in which the part
of the male vocalist soared an octave above Solidor’s.67 This crossing of

vocal registers reiterated the conceit of travesty (that is, the fluidity of
roles) that distinguished Solidor’s act.
In keeping with her pirate (or pirated) heritage, Solidor’s nightclub
routine revolved around a repertoire of erotically suggestive ballads about
the sea, its vessels, its victims, its rewards, and its pleasures. An oil por-
trait painted in the 1930s by Jacques-Henri Lartigue depicts the broad-
shouldered chanteuse steadying herself against the edge of her piano to
hit the metered notes of a chanty, braced as if against the gunwales of a
ship in rough seas (fig. 48). The iconographic incongruities here—the per-
former’s form-fitting evening gown and the tail-ship mise-en-scene —
would probably not have jarred habitues of La Vie Parisienne. The vogue
for sea chanties was, after all, the very essence of urban sophistication at
that time. What is more, Solidor had inherited a sector of her audience
from Yvonne George, who launched the maritime vogue from the music-hall
stage in the 1920s. Her premature death in 1930 left admirers, among
them Cocteau, bereft.68 The sea chanties that made a name for George,
like those performed by Solidor, in no way contributed to the revival of
a folk art form. They were contemporary creations, designed to appeal to
a very modern appetite for “primitive” authenticity. With respect to Soli-
dor’s cover of George’s theme song, “Nous irons a Valparaiso,” one music
critic noted: “It is not only a moving rendition, it is also a ‘test’ that allows
us to appreciate the artificiality, the ‘chique’ of the false sea chanties now
in vogue that Mme Suzy Solidor incarnates with, what is more, incon-
testable talent, a genre that is deplorable in its falsity.”69 Navigating the
poles of European modernity, from the cult of the past to the cult of
progress, Solidor appropriated as her own a market niche that George
had created. She finessed, with her usual aplomb, the apparently contra-
dictory demands of a sophisticated audience—the demand for tradition
and novelty, rusticity and urbanity. “I spend my vacations aboard a sail-
ing ship,” she would say, as if it were true, “where I prepare my songs in
an authentic atmosphere. When I return to the city ... my work at the
cabaret engulfs me. The cinema, too, now ... I developed a taste for cin-
ema with La Gargonne. In my second film [Figure de prouej, I will be
playing the role of a woman plying the waves alone across the ocean.
Always the ocean.”70 The sea was the constant that made Solidor’s act
in all its many aspects —the musical repertoire, the memoirs, the litera-
ture, the interviews —cohere. The same can be said of the portrait collec-
tion; most of the portraits make at least passing reference to the sea —an
anchor, a seashell, a flash of blue in the background, a tall ship on the

horizon.
In a caricature titled “La Vedette et sa cour,” one of the many featur-
ing Solidor published in the mid-1930s,71 the artist has sketched a watery
horizon across the assortment of objects that constitute the performer’s
visual framework (fig. 49). This device creates a liaison among the vari-
ous paintings hanging on the nightclub wall while communicating the
salty atmosphere that Solidor generated. In reality, as in this cartoon, the
overarching motif of the sea links the disparate objects of the portrait
collection —and the many faces of the sitter —together in a relation of kin-
ship. While assuring a certain continuity (the eternal sea), the trope also
evokes Solidor’s mercuriality (the ever-changing sea). Indeed, the slipper-
iness of this trope—powerful yet feminine —allowed her to “go overboard”
on stage and in her personal life without running the risk of “sinking her
own ship.”
Beyond the bounds of Solidor’s club, maritime themes remained appar-
ent on the interwar entertainment horizon in the wake of George’s passing.
Fig. 48. Jacques-Henri

Lartigue, Suzy Solidor, 1930s,
reproduced in Quarante
Solidor’s relationship to the genre, though, was unique. While rivals like
Damia and Frehel sang of sailors’ girls left grieving on the shore and par-
layed feminine narratives of star-crossed love into box office receipts, Soli-
dor—with theme songs such as “N’Espere pas” (1936), “Le Fin Voilier”
(1936), and “Partir avant le jour” (1938) —often personified, instead, the
free-spirited sailor whose heart refuses to be tethered. She held her chin
high and delivered refrains such as this one, from “N’Espere pas”:
Do not hope to tie me to your banks,

My boat drifts freely with the stream,
As I pursue, where no one dares to land,
A mirage, a sailor’s dream.72
Solidor’s memoirs, her roles in film and theater (she sang “La Fiancee du
pirate” in a 1937 production of Brecht’s Beggar’s Opera), her portraiture,
like her nightclub repertoire, all reclaimed for the performer the liberties
associated with a seafaring life. This was also true of her 1940 novel Fil
d’or, the story of a “pirate’s child” who evades her enemies, “the hateful
masses that condemn all that is unfamiliar to them, who would stone you
and bring you to your knees.”73 The voice of the narrator, the protago-
nist (a “young sailor with a woman’s heart”), and the author converge
here in a way that troubles the distinction between fact and fiction. This
novel aspires, on a more popular register, to the self-mythologizing effects
achieved by its more literary stepsisters —contemporary novels such as
Colette’s Le Fur et I’impur and Barnes’s Nightwood, for instance.
Commenting on the personage that Solidor so persuasively projected
in her fiction, her portraiture, her encounters with the press, and her
nightclub routine, Albert T’Serstevens, a maritime novelist himself,74 ob-
served that the chanteuse, with her salty, androgynous appeal, seemed to
be “made for singing these sea chanties, with their nostalgia of far-off
places, with their odor of iodine, of spume and of becalmed depths. She
makes me think, not of a woman, but of a young sailor of Saint-Malo
whose eyes rhyme with the blue of the sea, and whose long thin face
expresses the lyricism of his voyages.”75 Solidor’s changeling voice, her
changeling body —more than once portrayed as that of a monstrous yet
seductive creature of the sea (mermaid, siren, sea nymph, sea goddess) —
riveted the public’s attention and provoked a devotion approaching
addiction in her followers —male or female, homosexual or heterosexual.
A portrait by the Venezuelan artist Andrade, reproduced in one of Soli-
dor’s souvenir catalogues, pictures her as a mermaid —a hybrid creature,
half fish, half woman, who is never completely in nor completely out of
her element (fig. 50). Solidor’s blond head takes the sun setting on a
watery horizon as its halo, while her somewhat repulsive scaled body dis-
appears into the sea’s dark and mysterious depths. “On ne peut pas
reprocher a un poisson de ne pas etre un oiseau,” Solidor complained in
her confessions, although she herself claimed to be neither one nor the
other.76 The lame gown that clung to her mermaid’s body, glinting like fish
scales in the nightclub lights, belied the husky voice that, each night,
regaled audiences with tales of the sailor’s life told in the first person.
The indeterminacy and fluidity that Solidor affected gave her a degree
of leeway exceptional for a French woman of her era —especially a
woman of her provincial, working-class origins. Indeterminacy was cer-
tainly the key to the sexual freedom she exercised: her affairs with men
“excused” her lesbianism, and her lesbianism both enhanced her appeal
to men and explained her reluctance to marry one of them. “How could
I be held responsible,” she asks rhetorically in her confessions, “for a con-
fusion that throws me one day upon the protective shoulder of a man and
the next day compels me to embrace, against my forever sterile thighs,

and to caress and to sooth, a young and vulnerable creature who could
as easily be my daughter as my lover?”77 At the same time, this neither-
fish-nor-fowl model of feminine sexuality —since it was bracketed by the
frames of the portrait gallery and set off as “staged” within the perform-
ance venue—posed little threat to real-world value systems based on un-
equal power relations between men and women. Neither did the liberties
that Solidor took with the codes of sexual identity position her as a par-
tisan within the debates about gender relations that raged on throughout
the interwar period.
If anything, the pan-eroticism that Solidor generated in her routine (on
and off stage) uncritically reiterated the class-inflected vision of feminine
Fig. 50. Andrade, Suzy Solidor,

1930s, reproduced in Deux Cents
Peintures, un modele.
sexuality that informed nineteenth-century literary classics of the realist

tradition, such as Zola’s 1880 novel Nana. Zola’s prototypical demi-
mondaine Nana, her degenerate appetites and her excesses, crystallized
modern stereotypes about female sexuality that continued to reverberate
in the literature of sociology, psychology, and criminology well beyond
the fin de siecle. The character Nana seems to prefigure the case studies
informing works like Bernard Talmey’s Woman, which showed how sex-
ual contact between members of the weaker sex (and lower class) ex-
tended naturally from uncontainable autoerotic impulses. Taking erotic
pleasure in herself or in another woman represented, under such circum-
stances, essentially the same socially meaningless gesture. “While homo-
sexuality has been made a crime in men,” Talmey explained, “it has been
considered as no offense in women” for this reason.78 Otto Weininger, in
his much-touted treatise Sex and Character, describes femininity, simi-
larly, as undifferentiated —and therefore uncontainable. Woman, he writes,
exists in “a condition of fusion with all the human beings she knows, even
when she is alone. . . . Women have no definite individual limits.”79
The metaphor of the sea (la mer, which, with each utterance evokes
its homonym, la mere) naturalizes this image of unbounded femininity,
a metaphor that Solidor exploited to the fullest. Aptly, several of her
portraitists painted Solidor as a figure born of and borne up by the sea.
In Jean-Dominique van Caulaert’s painting, for instance, Solidor’s shim-
mering gown, her eyes, the sky, the ocean waves from which her body
emerges and into which it dissolves, share the same tonal range and tex-
ture. To a large extent it was the figure of the sea —leitmotif of Solidor’s
musical repertoire, her portrait iconography, and her personal mythology—
that negotiated the celebrity’s safe passage as both a “loose woman” and
a “free woman” (a woman without boundaries, a woman out of bounds).
Even more specifically, Solidor’s identification with the sea’s denizens
(pirates, sailors, sirens, mermaids) glossed her sexual ambiguity in cul-
turally acceptable ways. Solidor barely raised eyebrows when she signed
letters to friends “votre amiral breton” or appeared on the boardwalk in
Deauville, and in the society pages of the press, decked out in a sailor’s
suit or pirate’s costume. Here, once again, the “lesbianization” of the
already (homo)sexually nuanced mode —in this case, the maritime mode —
enabled a lesbian artist to inscribe herself within already established tradi-
tions of sexual marginality (as Brooks had done with the dandy-aesthete
and Cahun and Moore with their send-up of Flandrin’s nude study).
The sailor’s success as a feature of male homosexual culture was an
established fact well before Solidor made her debut on Paris’s club scene.
Sailors already had a penchant for “the most liberal notions of moral-
ity,” to paraphrase Herman Melville, thanks in part to the vividness
of accounts produced by the authors of best-selling fiction.80 In the popu-
lar imagination, a sailor’s sexuality is never firmly moored. This fluidity
invests the sailor trope with the ability to catalyze alternative readings
within a given narrative context or viewing community. Not surprisingly,
Solidor’s marine themes captured the fancy of sectors of the public whose
viewpoints and tastes otherwise diverged, particularly with respect to sex-
ual matters.
The mobilizations and demobilizations associated with the 1914-1918
war had accelerated the elevation of the sailor to cult status within Euro-
pean sexual subcultures. Edouard Roditi, a poet, literary critic, and afi-
cionado of Paris’s homosexual nightlife recalled:
French pederasts of this era (at least those who were not in the
closet), displayed an almost patriotic attraction to uniforms. . . .
Cocteau and his milieu were probably responsible in part for this
vogue for sailors and the red pompom. ... In Paris, there were even
meeting places for such special tastes: in the dance halls of the rue
de Lappe, for instance, sailors on leave were often relatively numer-
ous; I went there for the first time with the great American poet Hart
Crane, who was drunk and wanted to cruise for sailors.81
Cocteau, whom Solidor counted among her hundreds of closest friends,

routinely descended upon the waterfront hotels of Toulon to cruise. The
verb to cruise itself demonstrates the extent to which homosexual and
maritime practices overlapped. In his memoir Professional Secrets, Coc-
teau recounts, “From all over the world, men who have lost their hearts
to masculine beauty come to Toulon to marvel at the sailors lounging
around the town alone or in groups, answering stares with smiles and
never refusing propositions.”82 In Cocteau’s eyes, the sailor’s costume
served to eroticize the male body —its tailoring molding the buttocks,
biceps, deltoids, and pectorals. The bell-bottom cut of the pants allowed
sailors “to roll their trousers up around the thighs,”83 and the drop fly
framed the sailor’s groin.
Solidor’s gay male devotes, spearheaded by Cocteau, homoeroticized
the lyrics of her 1938 hit “Escale” —a poetic account of a one-night stand
with a handsome sailor. The “open window” evoked in the song’s refrain
became even more explicitly erotic: the modified lyrics bid the sailor to
open his braguette (the button-up flap providing access to his groin)
rather than his fenetre (window).84 Whistling the tune of Solidor’s “Es-
cale” was understood in male homosexual circles as a kind of musical
wink: a wink of recognition and of proposition.
The Ballets Russes, one of the most influential cultural enterprises of
the early twentieth century (and an enclave for gay male performers and
artists —among them, Cocteau), exploited the ambiguities of maritime
themes and motifs on a grand scale. The sailor—thanks to a long-standing
hornpipe tradition in the seafaring sector —provided a credible pretext for
the display of male virtuosity, and the Ballets Russes produced two hugely
successful tributes to sailors, Les Matelots and The Triumph of Neptune,
in the 1920s. These ballets, which received ovations from both gay and
straight audiences in Paris and in London, embroidered upon vaudevil-
lian romantic farce formulas while glossing them in a gay-affirmative
manner.81 On the other side of the footlights, Serge Lifar, the ballet’s pre-
mier dancer, appeared in his sailor costume at high society parties and
posed for the press with influential public figures —including, of course,
Solidor. Displays of ballet-related art in theater lobbies (Pedro Pruna’s
portrait of Lifar clad only in his briefs and a sailor cap, for instance),
deluxe souvenir programs, limited edition fine-art albums, illustrated syn-
opses, and carefully orchestrated gallery exhibitions reverberated with the
nautical themes of the ballet programs that so appealed to the company’s
gay following. This following, while striking a distinctive subcultural
stance, was also thoroughly integrated into every sector of the wider ballet-
going public — le tout Paris, le gratin, the cosmopolitan artistic vanguard,
the intellectual elite —a public that constituted Solidor’s clientele as well.
It seems clear that Solidor, who launched her entertainment career in

1932, adopted a performance mode and set of motifs whose popularity
had long since crested a decade earlier in elite cultural arenas such as the
ballet theater. The maritime chic of the 1920s had become the 1930s mar-
itime cliche, permeating middle-class consumer culture. During the sum-
mer months, the rude quays of Toulon, Marseille, Villefranche, and Brest
became holiday promenades “avidly frequented by snobs who came look-
ing for the indispensable invitation to adventure.”86 Lrom Montparnasse
to Montmartre, sailor bars (boites a matelots) re-created the exotic dock-
side ambiance of these tourist destinations by means of maritime decora-
tive schemes and sailor-suited “orchestras of accordionists recruited from
Toulon.”87 The public clambered after watercolors and prints represent-

ing “with vigor and without vain sensitivity, sailors in their low-life hang-
outs.”88 What with the influx of chansons de marin, maritime fashions,
maritime decorative schemes, swashbuckler movies (for example, Douglas
Fairbanks, he Pirate noir, 1926), and pulp publications vaunting the high
seas (T’Serstevens, Les Corsaires du roi, or The Memoirs of a Buccaneer;
Pierre Loti, he Matelot and Mon Frere Yves; Henry de Montfreid, Les
Secrets de la mer Rouge and Aventures de mer), the market niche had nearly
reached the point of saturation by the time Solidor emerged on the enter-
tainment scene with her maritime routines.
Why, then, would Solidor have invested so heavily in a flagging the-
atrical conceit? Why —by inscribing herself in the lineage of Surcouf, aris-
tocrat of pirates, among many other gambits —did she aspire to make this
overexploited genre her own? Apparently the maritime offered Solidor a
pretext like no other for turning both the rude conditions of her birth and
her sophisticated adult proclivities to professional advantage. The lyrics
of Solidor’s songs, the plotlines of her books, and the outfits fashioned
after the sailor’s uniform or the swashbuckler’s costume that she occa-
sionally modeled in her off-stage hours wove the story of her childhood
in Saint-Malo, her debut in Deauville, and her performance career in Paris
into a romantic narrative. The lyrics of songs like those of “La Chanson
de la belle pirate” (“Abandoning my women’s robes / I embarked upon a
sailing boat / And made an oath under the moon / To be a soldier of for-
tune”)89 contributed to the image of audacity and abandon that Solidor
cultivated. Acting out the soldier of fortune in vamp’s clothing, Solidor
enacted an ambiguity that afforded her the leeway she needed to preserve
a degree of autonomy within the still restrictive social environment of
1930s Paris. Several of the portraits hanging in the club evoked the harsh
environment that Solidor managed to dominate: Jincart’s painting of Soli-
dor at the helm of a ship, for instance; or a drawing by Laprade, repro-
duced in the same souvenir catalogue, in which she appears decked out
in foul weather gear, braving the hostile elements. The author of neither
the works of art with which she surrounded herself nor the songs and
poems that she interpreted in their midst, Solidor made, out of this req-
uisitioned material, a fortune —a destiny, that is, and the where with all
to enjoy it.
In Paris during the 1930s, Solidor brought lesbianism out of the rare-
fied environment of the salons frequented by Brooks and hosted by Bar-
ney, out of the vanguard movements to which Cahun and Moore adhered,
and into the brightly lit and highly commercial world of popular culture.
While Brooks measured success by the extent to which she and her work
remained misunderstood, and Cahun and Moore embraced marginality
as a form of protest, Solidor sought the spotlight—and thrived in it. I have
argued that Brooks, in her portraiture, related lesbianism to genius, and
that Cahun and Moore visualized the revolutionary potential of same-sex
desire. Solidor represents a more worldly position, recognizing the capi-
tal advantages of acting sexually ambiguous on the entertainment scene.
The performer’s collection of original art works—portraits rendered from
every angle —stretched the parameters of her erotic appeal, reified the gen-
der, class, and sexual mobility to which she aspired, and substantiated her
status as a celebrity.
Conclusion
Ils durent, en fin de compte, nous condamner sans

croire a notre existance . . . comme a regret.
— Claude Cahun,
“Le Muet dans la melee”
his story began in Paris with the Great War of 1914-1918.

Twentieth-century warfare, with its industrial efficiency, broke
faith with the Enlightenment’s promise of progress and made the
creation of new systems of social engagement —or the resurrection of ar-
chaic ones —seem urgent. Representational systems, gender systems, class
systems, political systems all hung in the balance. Politicians demanded
change or promised restoration. In Paris, no fewer than twenty cabinets
formed and crumbled between 1918 and 1939, the dates that bracket this
investigation. The subjects of my case studies experienced these decades
as a time of intense creativity. They participated in the post-war recon-
struction of Western culture in a highly motivated ways, each according
to her own imperatives. Collectively, they revolutionized the politics of
(self) representation, as lesbianism—conceived as a social, sexual, and
cultural identity—came to the fore in the images that they projected of
themselves.
By the time that war broke out in Europe for the second time in the
twentieth century, this identificatory emphasis had lost currency. From
France, Barney reported by letter on the dissolution of her milieu —on
Brooks, who sat alone in Nice “surrounded by all the portraits she did of
notre belle epoque,” on the disappearance of cultural icons like Stem and
Cocteau. With each death that “cuts us down,” Djuna Barnes responded
CONCLUSION 137
from New York, “ . . . our legendary time is being calendared.”1 The soci-
ety of visible and vocal homosexuals that had earned recognition in Paris
during the interwar years grew ghostly silent during the Occupation and
reconstruction period. Its members were aging, tiring, and no new blood
revitalized Barney’s salon. The post-World War I drive for emancipation
— on professional, sexual, cultural, economic, and political fronts —im-
ploded, under enormous social and political pressure, into the insistence
of a hearty few upon transgressive, if largely depoliticized, lesbian “life-
styles.” Lesbianism as a form of cultural and/or political activism would
not resurge anew until the 1970s. By then, even in Paris, most of the
women I have discussed here were, if not dead, then long forgotten.2 Yet
the iconography of modern womanhood that lesbians of the interwar era
had helped to codify (to conventionalize, that is, and to normalize) sur-
vived. In the interim, this iconography had devolved, however, into a very
different kind of code —an encoded language, a cryptography.
Although my individual case studies conclude with the advent of the
Second World War, this epilogue provides an opportunity to consider rev-
elatory events beyond the historical scope of the book’s chapters. It not
only permits me to track Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore,
and Suzy Solidor after the outbreak of the war to determine which of their
self-representational practices survived beyond (or were modified by) this
turning point; it also enables me to evoke the dissolution of what I refer
to in this volume’s title as “lesbian Paris,” bringing to light the volatility
and fragility of nondominant communities more generally.
If, as Monnier claimed, women coming into their own during the
1914-1918 conflict were “blessed by the terrible goddess of war,” I am
tempted to suggest that the same goddess cursed them two decades later.
It would be simplistic, though, to blame the destruction of the fruitful
sexual and artistic alliances loosely described here as lesbian Paris on the
Second World War. In fact, oppositional communities of every sort—buf-
feted by internal divisions (political discord, cultural and aesthetic rifts,
professional and sexual rivalries), pressured by economic crises, and tar-
geted by social and political campaigns (the pro-natalist manifestations
that periodically blocked the streets of downtown Paris, for instance) —
began to unravel well before France and England declared war against
Germany on 3 September 1939.
Cahun and Moore, for example, packed up their affairs and moved
from Paris to the Isle of Jersey in 1937. Since the German invasion of
France may not have seemed inevitable at this early date, one can only
speculate as to their motives. Their disillusionment with the political cli-

mate in the capital surely influenced the decision to expatriate. The out-
breaks of anti-Semitism, the swelling ranks of right-wing factions such as
the Croix de Feu, the electoral and administrative frustrations of the
Front Populaire, and the violent schisms that divided their circle of sur-
realist friends and the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Revolution-
naires to which they adhered undoubtedly contributed to the couple’s
estrangement from the city they loved. Brooks too had abandoned Paris
well before France came under siege. She spent most of her time between
1932 and 1938 in New York coping with the effects of the 1929 stock
market crash on her inherited financial holdings. Other key members of
the Paris expatriate community also returned to the States well in advance
of the hostilities —among them Berenice Abbott and Djuna Barnes. In
1929 Abbott abandoned the edgy portrait practice that had made her
reputation in Paris to produce a photographic record of “Changing New
York” under the auspices of the Federal Art Project. Barnes, whose the-
matically lesbian literature of 1920s and 1930s Paris marked the high-
point of her creative career, burrowed into Manhattan’s West Village and
lowered her lesbian profile. She refused to include Ladies Almanack, for
instance, in the collected works that she prepared for publication, lest this
lusty parable cast a “salacious” pall upon her literary legacy.
For Paris’s nascent lesbian society, the Second World War came as a
coup de grace. The conflict razed the earth upon which Paris-Lesbos had
been founded and left behind no grounds for reconstruction.3 Expatriates,
Jews, artists, sexual deviants, and radicals repatriated, went into exile, or
went underground, losing touch with each other for years. Gertrude Stein
and Alice Toklas, for example, took refuge in eastern France, in a remote
area called Le Bugey whose regional fare Toklas memorialized in the cook
book she partly composed there. Stein and Toklas survived the war thanks
to the good offices of a collaborator named Bernard Fay, a wealthy Roy-
alist Catholic who had been named director of the Bibliotheque Nationale
by the German administration in 1940 (replacing a Jew) and who served
as personal advisor to Petain throughout the Occupation.4
Brooks, whose writings from this period share with those of Stein and
Toklas an astonishing detachment, spent what she described as the “war
interlude” in a villa “on a hill of Florence,” where she remained for the
duration, in the company of Barney, under the protection of Mussolini’s
regime. She did not conceal her admiration for Italy’s dictator, whom she
described as lifting “the mind to those epic tales which are now to be
CONCLUSION 139
enriched by the reality of today.” Like many of the exiled aristocrats

holed up in surrounding villas, Brooks claimed allegiance to no country
but to her privileged class. Throughout the conflict, she and Barney put
their villa and staff at the disposal of various displaced citizens of Europe’s
ruling class. For instance, they took one neighbor’s “very valuable Ori-
ental carpets” under their care “in order to save them should the Ameri-
cans arrive with the Communists in their wake.” Brooks’s memoirs reveal
much about the politics of this dispossessed population. “We have been
hiding our trunks and boxes [of valuables! in all possible places though
from whom or from what no one knows precisely.” The members of this
elite community feared the Germans, the Partigiani, the Allies, but most
of all they feared the Bolsheviks, who were “menacing France, menacing
all Europe.” As to their attitude about the Free French, they suspected that
De Gaulle, “a friend of Stalin,” was “directing the Communist movement
in Africa” while waiting for his chance “to enter and Bolshevize France.”
Nevertheless, Brooks considered herself nonpartisan, pan-European, above
the political fray, exceptional. “No artist stands for war,” she proclaimed.
On hearing a rumor that the Villa d’Este at Tivoli had been destroyed, she
asked, showing her hand, “Are all the old palaces and monuments fin]
the world to be destroyed by this war? Palaces and monuments created
in those times when Aryan geniuses, like giants, led the way.”5
In stark contrast to Brooks and Barney, Cahun and Moore continued to
combat the forces of fascism just as they and their surrealist comrades had
in Paris. They refused to retreat to England (with half of Jersey’s popula-
tion) when the German Army invaded the island in 1940. On the contrary,
they launched a two-woman, anti-Nazi propaganda operation and, after
four years of conducting successful covert actions, were apprehended and
condemned to death. Cahun’s memoir from this period recounts:
The Gestapo searched four years in vain. If we lived prepared for

any inquisition, however sudden, they never believed, despite their
informers, that we could be the ones they were looking for. Even
with proof in hand, they didn’t believe their eyes. They remained
convinced that we could only be co-conspirators, accomplices to
... X. In order to get them to stop interrogating us on the subject
of our hypothetical affiliations with ... X, or with the Intelligence
Service (!!!), we had to demonstrate to them that we were com-
pletely conscious and capable of our “crimes.” A little patience —on
both sides —was necessary. . . . Noting that we were women, those
inferior beings . . . ; that we had the reputation on Jersey of peace-

able bourgeoises; that it was impossible to pass us off . . . for “terrorists”;
that, at the time of our arrest and throughout our interrogation, we
maintained a cold hostility, devoid of any sign of emotional violence
. . . they lost their “Aryan” bearings: our “idealism” couldn’t be rec-
onciled with their cynical conception of humanity. It taunted what re-
mained, despite everything, of their psychological curiosity. . . .
They were forced, at the end of the day, to condemn us without be-
lieving in our existence. In a manner of speaking. As if with regret.6
Moore discussed their ordeal in an interview with a Jersey journalist just

after the liberation of the island, and the couple’s release from prison, in
May of 1945. “We were sentenced [to death] for ‘Propaganda undermin-
ing the morale of the German Forces.’ Then we were sentenced to six
years’ penal servitude for listening to the B.B.C. and to six months for
having arms and a camera,” she explained. “My sister asked if we did the
six years and six months first, and the judge gravely remarked, ‘No, the
death sentence cancels that.’” In prison, awaiting deportation, they each
attempted suicide to cheat their captors of the option to deliver the death
blow. Thanks to an appeal by the island’s bailiff, the death sentence had
been converted —but the conspiratorial “sisters” spent nearly a year in
solitary confinement.
In the meantime, their seaside home was commandeered and system-
atically ransacked by the German military police. They brutalized the
gilded plaster head that the sculptor Channa Orloff had made in Cahun’s
likeness, smashing the distinctive Semitic profile. They destroyed the cou-
ple’s “degenerate” books and photographs. “Quite a few negatives have
survived,” Cahun wrote after the war. “We had so many that they gave
up on destroying them . . . but I’ve never had the time or the courage to
verify exactly what remains —knowing that my favorites are lost.”8 This
Gestapo campaign of eradication links Cahun and Moore’s artistic prac-
tices, their social/sexual relations, and their acts of political resistance
under the unifying charge of sedition.
Back in Paris, Solidor followed a completely different path during the
Occupation —the path of least resistance. She remained at the center of
Paris nightlife, entertaining German officers and sheltering the occasional
English spy—without discrimination. “Receiving the client, that’s my
business!” she exclaimed at hearings during the post-war purge.9 During
the Occupation, however, as in the pre-war era, Solidor’s chameleonlike
CONCLUSION 141
capacity for adaptation, her fundamental ambivalence, assured her sur-

vival. Nothing illustrates this point more effectively than the story of the
performer’s interpretation, in 1942, of “Lili Marlene,” the French version
of the anthem adopted by the German troops during World War I. Not
only did she feature the number in her nightclub routine “at a time when
Lily incarnated the figure of the spy,”10 but she also broadcast “Lili Mar-
lene” over the airwaves of Radio-Paris (Radio-Allemand, as it was un-
officially known) and profited handsomely from a hit recording. During
the hearings held by the Commission Gouvernementale d’Epuration in
1945-1946, Solidor defended herself against accusations of collabora-
tion, pointing out that Goebbels himself had judged the song “defeatist”
and that her “good friend” Marlene Dietrich, well known for her anti-
Nazi sentiments, had recorded a version of the ballad in English for the
benefit of the American GIs. “[I believed] it was the hymn of the Ameri-
can army,” Solidor insisted in an interview.11 Despite interventions on her
behalf by high-ranking connections —including an English diplomat, a
prince, a number of fellow entertainers, and at least two members of the
Resistance —the commission ultimately imposed sanctions. They con-
demned, above all, her complicity with Radio-Paris, which broadcast her
rendition of “Lili Marlene” as well as an anti-English number, “Le 31 du
mois d’aout,” with the refrain “Et merde pour la reine d’Angleterre / Qui
nous a declare la guerre.”12 For putting her name and her celebrity in the
service of the German propaganda machine, Solidor was banned from
recording or performing in France for one year and forbidden to operate
a business in her name for five years.13 Drawing on her considerable pro-
motional skills, she launched a counterpropaganda campaign in the press,
but the stigma of collaboration clung to her. She sold her cabaret to
Colette Mars and set out on a tour of America, as Jacques Robert re-
ported in his Paris Matin story, “Avec cent quinze tableaux et un chien ne
d’un lion et d’une chevre, Suzy Solidor va faire le tour du monde.” In New
York and Montreal, she made new conquests and gave her clientele in
Paris five years to forget that during the war La Vie Parisienne had
become “La Vie Flitlerienne.”14
What these individual stories reveal collectively and comparatively about

the convergence of lesbian culture, feminism, and visual culture in early
twentieth-century Paris amounts to more than the sum of the parts.
Although this book’s case-study approach in no way compromises the dis-
tinctive character of each subject’s career, it accommodates more fully
than a monographic or survey format could my own ambitions as a his-

torian of visual culture. These ambitions include the introduction of sex-
ual identity as a focus for the investigation of cultural (especially visual)
artifacts produced in a period and place —Paris of the 1920s and 1930s —
where patriarchy appeared to be alternately losing and desperately tight-
ening its grip. The effect of this pulsation was one of disarray —and of
enormous vitality. Under such circumstances, alternatives to patriarchal
schemas of creativity, productivity, and social utility seemed imaginable.
Art, particularly portraiture, provided an experimental arena in which the
imaginable approached the practicable. This is significant to the extent
that, as Michael Ann Holly has argued, “the work of art . . . does not
have its origin in the Teal thing’ —quite the reverse. The material thing in
the world has its origin — only comes into its own — in its visual represen-
tation.”15 What interests me particularly for the purposes of this study is
the relationship (and nonequivalence) between the stable notion of ori-
gins and the more dynamic notion of coming into being, which implies
both becoming and continuing to evolve. With this in mind, I have viewed
one of art history’s most traditional objects of investigation —portrai-
ture—from postmodern and lesbian-feminist perspectives, focusing espe-
cially on the ways in which gender and sexual identity “come into their
own” in and through representation.
I have, in addition, widened the angle of vision to consider portraiture
within a broad representational field that includes period theories of sex-
uality as well as popular culture representations of gendered and sexual
identity. What has this approach enabled me to discover that traditional
monographical, biographical, stylistic, nationalistic, or even social-historical
perspectives do not reveal? For one thing, it throws into relief a whole
population of culturally and sexually active women upon a terrain, Paris
of the 1920s and 1930s, that men —those whose names spring to mind in
association with Paris modernism—once appeared to dominate. One could
argue, justifiably, that having chosen to focus on acts of self-representation
by women, I inevitably looked for (and therefore found) a historical
panorama in which women enjoyed preeminence. Yet my choice of case
studies, in general if not in particular, was foreordained by earlier choices
— personal, political, and practical —that bear more directly on method.
For example, what I learned by thumbing through bins of theater pro-
grams, illustrated magazines, postcards, sheet music, fashion plates, advice
books, and popular novels at Paris’s flea markets differs radically from
what I learned by conducting research in the institutional archives that
CONCLUSION 143
house cultural artifacts deemed more worthy of preservation. Unlike insti-

tutional archives—whose constitution and indexing typically reinforces
the legitimacy of the dominant culture —popular culture may be viewed
as an archive of unofficial and illegitimate histories. If we accept the
premise that institutionalized culture is paradigmatically male (and offi-
cially straight), then popular culture seems a promising place to look for
evidence of something else —in this case something female, something les-
bian, something that the patriarchy would labor to displace or suppress.
By foregrounding images, what is more, I alter the body of knowledge
that has been fleshed out by more textually oriented historical research in
at least one significant way: I show how lesbian Paris looked. You may
wonder why I consider this important. After all, “lesbian Paris,” however
intriguing to me personally, remains at most a constellation of marginal-
ized (and largely mythical) communities. However, knowing how lesbian
Paris looked allows us to look again at familiar literary texts, visual arti-
facts, material culture, and historical documents with a different archive
of images in mind —and thus to rediscover the strangeness of Paris mod-
ernism.16 What is more, the question of how lesbians looked to, at, and
for each other —how they envisioned and represented themselves in 1920s
and 1930s Paris —achieves broader significance to the extent that lesbians
effected critical embodiments of twentieth-century womanhood. Becom-
ing “modern women,” they acted out the tensions and contradictions that
animated Western modernity as a whole. The history of lesbians, in other
words, is not just the history of lesbians —any more than “women’s his-
tory” pertains exclusively to women. These histories relate inextricably to
the systems that shaped them, which they in turn impact. The same can
be said of the art produced by women and lesbians.
“To make art is to signal belonging, as much as difference,” Anne Wag-
ner has proven in Three Artists (Three Women).17 Paradoxically, to signal
difference (in the case of Paris lesbians, in terms of both gender and sex-
ual identity) is to acknowledge —and thus tacitly validate —the assump-
tions and values underlying the notion of sameness. “Different from what?”
we are forced to ask. Belonging, of course, is also tricky —in that it re-
quires assimilation to existing models. However, by re-purposing these
models (via pastiche, collage, deconstructive appropriation, or collective
effect), the artists introduced in Women Together I Women Apart visual-
ized a place for alternatives within an overall cultural context that included,
but also exceeded, their subcultural niches. If both options, belonging and
differentiation, pose irresolvable referential dilemmas, they may nevertheless
provide enough leverage to shift “the frame of reference of visibility” by

exposing the mechanisms of reduction and erasure within our interlock-
ing systems of social, political, and visual-cultural representation.18 We have
seen how Brooks, for one, used self-portraiture to distinguish herself from
other women (in particular women artists) by forging identifications with
the interpenetrating echelons of aesthetes and elite male homosexuals. At
the same time, her larger portrait project also contributed to the consoli-
dation of a distinctive group identity among her lesbian peers. Paying
attention to strategies of belonging as well as those of differentiation en-
ables us to perceive patterns of interaction and identification among Paris
lesbians, between lesbians and gay men, between these sexual subcultures
and the larger cultural context, that would not be noticeable if the focus
were difference, or distinctiveness, alone.
That the identifications embraced and rejected by Brooks, Cahun, Moore,
and Solidor were consistent with their political positions as well as their
artistic ambitions requires, I hope, no further demonstration. Brooks,
whose portraits construct a lesbian canon, entertained Nietzschean ideas
about a superrace of geniuses and clung to her class privilege. Cahun and
Moore’s practices, from art to love, resisted to the very end the politics of
dominance and submission. The kaleidoscope of images projected by Soli-
dor warded off the consequences of her acts while working to her social
and financial advantage. All four artists used portraiture in ways that
demonstrated their grasp of the genre’s classifying logic. They realized that
to challenge this logic, or to reinvest in it, was necessarily to make polit-
ical as well as representational choices.
Representational choices may not change the determinate realities of
the past, but they affect the way we view these givens and the way we live
them out. Seeing Brooks’s 1923 self-portrait hanging in the Smithsonian
in 1971, for instance, expanded my horizons by legitimating an option
that I had not previously perceived as “real.” Representational choices, I
found, have the power to open multiple possible futures. Whether any of
the futures that Paris lesbians of the interwar era envisioned ever came to
pass, or if only partially or in unimagined ways, seems less pertinent to
me than the example that these visions set for the exercise of agency and
choice in the here and now.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
The epigraph comes from Charlotte Wolff, Love Between Women (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1971), 82.
1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet, historicizes the
closet, observing that “even the phrase ‘the closet’ as a publicly intelligible signi-
fier for gay-related epistemological issues is made available . . . only by the dif-
ference made by the post-Stonewall gay politics oriented around coming out of
the closet.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 14.
2. Albert Flament, cited in Blandine Chavanne and Bruno Gaudichon, eds.,
Romaine Brooks (Poitiers: Musee de la Ville de Poitiers et de la Societe d’Anti-
quaires de l’Ouest, 1987), 157. “Le chapeau noir assez haut, le regard dans l’om-
bre du bord qui avance un peu, le visage pale, les levres a peine colorees, un petit
veston noir, ou le mince ruban rouge de la boutonniere est la seule note qui
tranche dans ce camai'eu. . . . Et je regarde de nouveau ce . . . visage severe et
bleme, cet etre invisible a nos yeux, qu’elle livre la, sur la toile . . . , ce promeneur
solitaire, au large des habitations devastees.”
3. Albert Flament, cited ibid.
4. I am grateful to Whitney Chadwick for sharing her insights about the term
amazon, a signifier that, she has found, crops up similarly wherever women exercise
power in the early twentieth century, as those who had the privilege of attending
her Clark Art Institute lecture, “Amazons and Warriors: New Images of Feminin-
ity in Early Twentieth-Century France,” in the fall of 2003 will vividly recall.
5. Because progressives like Ellis viewed homosexuality as biologically deter-
mined, congenital —and not a “condition” of a cultural, social, or moral order —
they invested the discourse of sexology with universal pretensions. Therefore, they
borrowed case studies and drew conclusions with impunity across cultural and
national borders.
6. Pierre Vachet, E’Inquietude sexuelle (Paris: Grasset, 1927), and Henri
Drouin, Femmes damnees (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1929), participate in the explosive
146 NOTES TO PAGES 4-8
development of a popular genre of “expert-opinion” books on sexuality arising

in response, Vachet explained (156), to the influx of “menages de femmes” evi-
dent in post-war Paris. At the same time, journalists such as Maryse Choisy
(“Dames seules,” Le Rire, 21 May 1932) went “undercover” to report on these
emerging sexual subcultures, while others, such as Marise Querlin, commented on
homosexual practices that transpired, with increasing frequency, in plain sight: “II
est de toute evidence que ces pratiques sont devenues courantes depuis la derniere
guerre et que ceux qui s’y livrent le font ouvertement.” Marise Querlin, Femmes
sans hommes: Choses vues (Paris: Editions de France, 1931), 48.
7. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28.
8. Maryse Choisy, Un Mois chez les hommes (Paris: Editions de France,
1929), 222. “A Ahtenes, comme a Paris, comme a New York, ce ‘lesbisme’ [.sic]
(qu’on ne connait plus a Lesbos) nait chez la femme qui travaille, la femme qui
n’est plus une madone, et pas encore la camarade dont l’homme bien eleve res-
pecte l’independance.”
9. Choisy, “Dames seules,” 3.
10. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, 7.
11. Choisy, “Dames seules,” 3.
12. Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional
Types of Men and Women (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1908), 34. Car-
penter, like Ellis, speculates at length on the apparent relationship between homo-
sexuality and genius, a precept embraced by many members of Brooks’s circle and
on which she embroiders in her writings and portraiture. The all but forgotten
writings of Dr. Camille Spiess on the superiority of the intermediate sex and the
“psycho-synthetic” (androgynous) energies animating genius gained similar cur-
rency in France during the 1920s.
13. Natalie Barney (Nice, Hotel d’Angleterre) to Djuna Barnes, 13 January 1963,
Djuna Barnes Papers, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park.
14. Mireille Havet, Journal, 1918-1919 (Paris: Editions Claire Paulhan, 2003),
62. “Je voudrais que grandir et devenir une femme ne soit pas synonyme de per-
dre sa liberte.”
15. Vu, no. 48, 13 February 1929: “Les Etats generaux de la femme: ce que la
femme ne peut pas faire en France, ce que la femme peut faire dans le monde.”
16. Odette Simon, “Ce que la femme ne peut pas faire en France,” Vu, no. 48,
13 February 1929, 106-108. “Ne peut pas: / Voter a aucune election / Obentir un
passeport sans autorisation / Penetrer a la Bourse / Remplir de hautes fonctions /
Quitter le domicile conjugal / S’habiller en homme (ordonance du 7 nov. 1800) /
Rendre la justice. Sans l’autorisation de son mari, la femme ne peut signer aucun
contrat valable, . . . faire aucun achat, ni consentir aucune vente. . . . il lui est
impossible egalement d’accepter un legs ou une succession, meme pas celle de sa
propre mere, d’mtenter un proces ni de se defendre, de faire une donation, d’etre
tutrice, membre d’un conseil de famille ou executrice testamentaire, sans l’assen-
timent de son conjoint.” In addition to the prerogatives enumerated by Simon, it
was the husband’s “responsibility” to authorize or deny his wife the possibility of
pursuing an education, taking a trip, exercising a profession, spending wages,
obtaining a driver’s license, and even seeking medical treatment.
17. Laura Doan argues that the lesbian, “as a reified cultural concept or stereo-
type, was, prior to the 1928 obscenity trial [over the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness] as yet unformed in English culture beyond an intellectual
NOTES TO PAGES 8-9 147
elite.” Doan represents this trial, and its repercussions with respect to lesbian vis-
ibility, as analogous to the Oscar Wilde debacle of the 1890s and its effects on
gay men in English society a generation earlier. Laura Doan, Fashioning Sap-
phism: The Origins of Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), xvii. I cannot point to an equivalent watershed moment
in the history of lesbianism, or in that of male homosexuality, in France. As
Rachilde wrote of the Wilde trials, “in France, we could not have acquitted Oscar
Wilde, for the simple reason that we never would have put him on trial” (“En
France, on n’aurait pas pu acquitter Oscar Wilde, tout simplement parcequ’on
n’aurait pas fait le proces”). Rachilde, “Oscar Wilde et lui,” Mercure de France,
128 (July-August 1918): 60. Because homosexuality had been decriminalized
after the revolution under France’s Napoleonic Code, homosexual visibility gen-
erally has different implications and different histories here than in countries like
England, where legislation criminalizing homosexuality became more explicit,
more comprehensive, and was enforced ever more systematically in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries.
18. Natalie Barney, Traits et portraits (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963), 31.
“[On] . . . appartient a une categorie d’etres dont l’espece deviendra peut-etre
moins rare lorsque le vieux couple terrestre, definitivement discredits, permettra
a chacun de garder ou retrouver son entite. A ce moment de revolution humaine,
il n’y aura plus de ‘manages,’ mais seulement des associations de la tendresse et
de la passion. Des antennes infiniment plus delicates meneront le jeu des affinites.
Ces allees et venues remueront de l’espace. Pour apporter quelque chose, il faut
venir d’ailleurs. / L’arret dans la fidelite, ce point mort de l’union, sera remplace
par un perpetuel devenir.”
19. Pierre Louys, dedication in Les Chansons de Bilitis (Paris: Librairie de 1’Art
Independant, 1895), n.p. “Ce petit livre d’amour antique est dedie respectueuse-
ment aux jeunes Files de la societe future.”
20. The affordances that enabled this perception of lesbianism were time and
place specific. In contrast to the period between the wars, during the 1940s era of
post-Occupation purging and retrenchment in France, acts of female indepen-
dence-including lesbianism —encountered increasingly effective and more highly
organized resistance, even as measures appeasing the claims of feminists achieved
ratification. Women’s suffrage, for instance, passed into law in 1944; women exer-
cised their right to vote for the first time in the elections of 1945. In 1946, the
preamble of the constitution proposed the principle of equality between men and
women in every domain. Flowever, a law requiring a married woman to seek
authorization from her husband to exercise a profession (enforced more zealously
in the 1940s than in the 1920s) remained on the books until 1965. As for speci-
ficity of place, lesbian Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, while it shared traits with
lesbian Berlin, had no parallel in England or America during the same period. In
America, as Martha Gever has demonstrated, because “lesbianism was considered
a perversion and generally regarded as synonymous with depravity, it was hardly
something that someone striving for public recognition would want to aver,” and
lesbianism in post-Victorian England offered an advantage only insofar as it over-
lapped with class privilege. Martha Gever, Entertaining Lesbians: Celebrity, Sex-
uality, and Self-Invention (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3.
21. Barney, Traits et portraits, 31.
22. This is one of two novels by Mackenzie satirizing the transient lesbian
population that colonized the Mediterranean island of Capri in the first decades
of the twentieth century. “In two books —in Vestal Fire and Extraordinary Women
— I painted portraits of one after another of the Capri characters I knew,” he
wrote. Compton Mackenzie, cited in Andro Linklater, introduction to Extraordi-
nary Women: Themes and Variations (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), n.p. One
of those characters was Romaine Brooks.
23. Jean Royere, Ee Point de vue de Sirius (Paris: Messein, 1935), cited in
Gayle Rubin, introduction to Renee Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me, trans.
Jeannette H. Foster (Reno, NV: Naiad Press, 1976), vii.
24. Janet Flanner, introduction to Colette, The Pure and the Impure, trans.
Herma Brifault (London: Penguin, 1976), 9. Ee Pur et Pimpur (1941) was origi-
nally published as Ces Plaisirs . . . (1932).
25. The following texts have made important contributions to the study of
modern literature from lesbian-feminist perspectives and have served as models
for my own approach to the interpretation of visual culture: Sandra M. Gilbert
and Susan Gubar, No-Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twen-
tieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Susan Gubar, “Blessings
in Disguise: Cross-Dressing as Re-Dressing for Female Modernists,” Massachu-
setts Review 22 (Autumn 1981): 477-508; Catharine R. Stimpson, “Zero Degree
Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed.
Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 243-259; Jane Mar-
cus, “Sapphistory: The Woolf and The Well,” in Lesbian Texts and Contexts:
Radical Revisions, ed. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 164-180; Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna: Women Lovers
and the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Terry Cas-
tle, Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall, Kindred Spirits (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1996); Karla Jay, introduction to A Perilous Advantage: The Best of
Natalie Clifford Barney, ed. and trans. Anna Livia (Norwich, VT: New Victoria
Publishers, 1992). For a cogent overview of the meanings and applications of the
term gender within academic studies, see Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Use-
ful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and Politics of History (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28-50. Here, Scott describes gender as
the “constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences
between the sexes” (42).
26. See, e.g., Doan, Fashioning Sapphism', Christine Bard, Ees Gargonnes:
Modes et fantasmes des annees folks (Paris: Flammarion, 1998); Mary Louise
Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2002); Gever, Entertaining Lesbians; and Bridget Elliott,
“Housing the Work: Women Artists, Modernism and the Maison d’Artiste: Eileen
Gray, Romaine Brooks, and Gluck,” in Women Artists and the Decorative Arts,
1880-1935: The Gender of Ornament, ed. Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland
(Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 176-196.
27. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Iden-
tity (London: Routledge, 1990).
28. Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” reprinted in The Lesbian
and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M.
Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 105, 108.
29. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 1986); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes:
Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994).
30. Teresa de Lauretis coined the phrase queer theory in her 1991 essay “Queer
Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” difference: A Journal of Feminist Critical
Studies 3, 2 (1991): iii-xviii.
31. My work has been influenced by a number of contemporary scholars who
have taken the problematic of lesbian visibility as a central focus. In addition to
Laura Doan, I cite Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexual-
ity and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Peggy
Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Lisa Walker, Looking Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity
(New York: New York University Press, 2001); and Annamarie Jagose, Inconse-
quence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 2002).
32. Jagose, Inconsequence, 2.
33. Ibid., 3. Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, argues that lesbians in our culture
are hidden in plain sight. Jagose builds on this premise.
34. Gever, Entertaining Lesbians, 22-23. “From this perspective,” Gever con-
cludes, “it is difficult to disagree with Leo Bersani’s acerbic assessment of the em-
phasis on visibility politics in lesbian and gay circles: ‘Visibility is a precondition
of surveillance, disciplinary intervention, and, at the limit, gender-cleansing. . . .
Once we agreed to be seen, we also agreed to being policed.’” Gever is quoting
Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 11-12.
35. Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of
Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Whitney Davis, ed., Gay and Lesbian Stud-
ies in Art History (New York: Haworth, 1994); and Richard Meyer, Outlaw Rep-
resentation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), are exemplary.
36. Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 9.
37. Laura Doan, “‘Acts of Female Indecency’: Sexology’s Intervention in Leg-
islating Lesbianism,” in Sexology in Culture: The Documents of Sexual Science,
ed, Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
200, 211.
38. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (New York:
Arno Press, 1975; orig. published 1897), 79.
39. Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack (New York: New York University Press,
1992; orig. published 1928), 7.
40. Laure Murat, Passage de VOdeon (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 14, 292. Sylvia
Beach’s papers at Princeton Library contain dozens of letters from Ellis. In a let-
ter dated 11 July 1921, he proposes to send Beach his Studies in exchange for
Ulysses by James Joyce, which Beach had undertaken to publish. Havelock Ellis to
Sylvia Beach, 11 July 1921, Princeton Library, Sylvia Beach Papers, C0108, box 194.
41. Murat, Passage de VOdeon, 291. Sylvia Beach, in a letter to her mother,
remarks, “I love Havelock Ellis. I took him to have a drawing made by Paul-Emile
Becat [Monnier’s brother-in-law] on Thursday and it turned out marvelously. I am
going to have it in my shop.” Letter dated 29 June 1924, Princeton Library, Sylvia
Beach Papers, C0108, box 19a, folder 24.
42. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, “General Introduction,” in Sexology Uncen-
sored: The Documents of Sexual Science, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3. Murat, Passage de VOdeon, 138.
43. According to Michel Foucault’s often-cited formulation, the sodomite,
previously considered “a temporary aberration,” evolved in the nineteenth cen-

tury into the homosexual, “a species.” “As defined by the ancient civil or canonical
codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing
more than the juridical subject of them,” he writes. “The nineteenth-century
homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addi-
tion to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet
anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total
composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at
the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active
principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that
always gave itself away.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An
Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; reprint, New York: Vintage/Random
House, 1990), 43. Although lesbian identity and community formation are often
represented (including, admittedly, in the pages of this book) as echoing precedent-
setting gay male ontological events, a more careful, gender-specific historical
investigation of pre-nineteenth-century sexuality and sexual subjects is indicated.
44. Charlotte Wolff, a follower of Magnus Hirschfeld, is exemplary. Authors
such as Marie Stopes, whose books were devoured by Brooks, and Stella Browne
contributed to the popularization of prevailing sexological theories.
45. Havelock Ellis, The Revaluation of Obscenity (Paris: Hours Press, 1931).
46. Havelock Ellis, La Femme dans la societe, vol. 1, HHygiene sociale: Etudes
de psychologie sociale, trans. Lucy Schwob (Paris: Mercure de France, 1929).
Cahun’s French translation of the second volume of La Femme dans la societe was
never published. The letter to which I refer, from Lucie Schwob to Adrienne Mon-
nier dated 2 July 1926, is conserved in the archives of the Institut Memoires de
l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC), Caen.
47. “Editorial on the Publication of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion,” Lancet
(1896), cited in Bland and Doan, Sexology Uncensored, 51-52.
48. Havelock Ellis to Bryher, 19 December 1918, Bryher Papers, Gen. Mss 97,
Correspondence Series 1, Incoming Correspondence, box 10, folder 413, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
49. Ellis to Bryher, 8 March 1919, Bryher Papers, Gen. Mss 97, Correspon-
dence Series 1, Incoming Correspondence, box 10, folder 413, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
CHAPTER 1. LESBIAN PARIS BETWEEN THE WARS
The epigraph is from Natalie Barney, Traits et portraits (Paris: Mercure de France,
1963), 31. “In order to bring something, it is necessary to come from elsewhere.”
1. Adrienne Monnier, “Souvenir de l’autre guerre” (1940), in Rue de VOdeon
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 37. “A vrai dire, la terrible deesse me fut favorable.”
2. Karine Jay, in her thesis “Suzy Solidor (1900-1983): Portrait(s) d’une
artiste a la frange doree de Part,” Umversite Jean Moulin Lyon III, 1996, repro-
duces photographs of Solidor posing in 1917-1918 in her military uniform.
3. Phare de la Loire and La Gerbe were published by Cahun’s father, Mau-
rice Schwob.
4. Brooks reproduced her painting La France croisee, along with verses
penned by the Italian decadent poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, in a publication whose
proceeds she earmarked for war relief;
5. Marbury represented Oscar Wilde’s literary and theatrical interests in the
United States, safeguarding the author’s American royalties during his imprisonment
for sodomy and handling subsidiary rights to “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a pow-
erful indictment against homophobia that lent impetus to homosexual rights move-
ments in both Europe and the United States.
6. Joan Schenkar, Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s
Unusual Niece (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 80.
7. Even Brooks had attempted to harden herself for the job of ambulance
driving by underdressing in the cold weather, but by her own admission she only
succeeded in making herself ill. Brooks later claimed, in an interview with Michel
Desbrueres, to have posed herself against a city in ruins in her 1923 self-portrait
because she was against the war. Blandine Chavanne and Bruno Gaudichon, eds.,
quaires de l’Ouest, 1987), 156.
8. The organization operated under the auspices of the French Army before
American military intervention in Europe. The American volunteers answered to
French military authority and wore the sky-blue uniforms of the French army.
Volunteers from overseas —whether recruited via word of mouth or responding to
the call for chauffeurs published in CARD’S weekly bulletin Under Two Flags —
typically benefited from the privileges of class; they had licenses to drive and could
pay for their journey and upkeep in France. These women shared, too, the will-
ingness and ability to de-prioritize family obligations: most were unmarried; many
were lesbian. CARD was only one of many such volunteer relief organizations ini-
tiated and staffed by women. A few of these organizations, CARD among them,
contributed to the post-war reconstruction effort; in the north of France —90 per-
cent of which was destroyed —volunteers remained active well into the 1920s, dis-
tributing donated supplies, assisting to rebuild housing and schools, establishing
health services, planting vegetable gardens and fruit trees, and founding libraries.
For an excellent history of CARD, see Des Americaines en Picardie: Au service
de la France devastee (1917-1924) (Paris: Musee National de la Cooperation
Franco-Americaine de Blerancourt/Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 2002). For an
overview of the volunteer activities of American women during World War I, see
Dorothy Schneider and Carl Schneider, Into the Breach: American Women Over-
seas in World War One (New York: Viking, 1991).
9. Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel (New York: Free Press, 1991), 97.
10. Marian Bartol, letter, 8 August 1920, Pierpont Morgan Library, cited in
Americaines en Picardie, 51-52.
11. Americaines en Picardie, 51-52.
12. Elizabeth Marbury, My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences (New York: Boni and
Liveright, 1923), 274.
13. Mireille Havet, Journal, 1918-1919 (Paris: Editions Claire Paulhan, 2003),
33-34. “Maintenant libre et fantaisiste, elle s’habille en elegant uniforme d’auto-
mobiliste kaki, avec la rayure assez ravissante de la croix de guerre etoilee, et de
l’insigne des blesses de guerre. Elle porte ses cheveux tres courts, et fait evidem-
ment la cour a toutes les femmes jolies.”
14. Sylvia Beach to Bryher, “For Your Birthday September 2nd 1950,” letter,
Gen Mss 97, series 2, Writings, box 93, folder 3399, Beinecke Rare Books Book
and Manuscript Fibrary, Yale University.
15. Claude Roger-Marx, cited by Nicole Albert, “Presentation,” in Dames
seules, text by Maryse Choisy and drawings by Marcel Vertes (Paris: Cahiers
Gai/Kitsch/Camp, 1993), 15 (reprint of the special issue of Le Rire, 21 May
1932). “Fe pseudo-male au col raide, a la nuque rase, au tailleurs strict.”
16. Die Dame (Berlin), July 1929. As Paula Birnbaum points out in her article
“Painting the Perverse: Tamara de Lempicka and the Modern Woman Artist,” in
The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, ed. Whitney Chadwick
and Tirza True Latimer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 104n4,
Alain Blondel, in Tamara de Lempicka: Catalogue raisonne, 1921-1979 (Lau-
sanne and Paris: Editions Acatos, 1999), 196-197, cites a photograph by Andre
Kertesz as the model for this portrait. The Kertesz photo, which served as the
cover image for the 3 October 1928 issue of the French magazine Vu, captures a
women decked out in Hermes sportswear at the wheel of an automobile. This
iconography, however, was so prevalent throughout the interwar period as to ren-
der the establishment of precise chains of influence a gratuitous exercise.
17. Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack (New York: New York University Press,
1992), 18.
18. Florence Tamagne, Histoire de Vhomosexuality en Europe: Berlin, Lon-
dres, Paris, 1919-1939 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), 340. “Mon costume dit
a Phomme: je suis ton egale. . . . Ce sont les porteurs de cheveux courts et de faux
cols qui ont toutes les libertes, tous les pouvoirs, eh bien! Je porte moi aussi
cheveux courts et faux cols.”
19. The Federation Sportive Feminine suspended Morris’s license for persist-
ently wearing pants, despite official reprimands. Morris brought suit against the
professional athletes’ association; the trial was widely covered in the press in arti-
cles such as the one signed R.A., “Je suis moins indecente en pantalon qu’en robe,
nous dit Violette Morris,” Paris-Midi, 26 February 1930, unpaginated clipping,
Varietes, box 2, Fonds Bougie, Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Mor-
ris also lent impetus to a trend among women desiring to flatten their silhouettes
via surgical ablation of the breasts, an operation that Maryse Choisy also under-
went, or so she claimed: “Depuis je me suis fait couper les seins chez la plus
grande chirurgienne de Paris.” Maryse Choisy, Un Mois chez les filles (Paris:
Montaigne, 1928), 171.
20. Paul Morand, Journal d’un attache d’ambassade, 1916-1917 (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1996), 253-254; 30 May 1917: “La mode depuis quelques jours est pour
les femmes de porter les cheveux courts. Toutes s’y mettent: . . . Coco Chanel,
tetes de file.”
21. See Albert, “Presentation.”
22. See Germaine Dulac, Ecrits sur le cinema (1919-1937) (Paris: Editions Paris
Experimental, 1994). The interviewer, Jacques Guillon, for instance, describes Dulac’s
attributes as follows: “de grands yeux noirs tres mobiles, une bouche un peu forte
dont les contractions nerveuses indiquent une grande puissance de volonte; les
cheveux coupes et la cravate me font penser a George Sand” (134) (large black
restless eyes; a mouth slightly too strong whose nervous contractions indicate an
abundance of will power; short hair and a necktie reminiscent of George Sand).
23. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage
Books, 1961), 247.
24. Faura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of Modern English Les-
bian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 110.
25. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender
in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 66.
26. Victor Margueritte, “Avant-Propos,” in Le Couple (Paris: Flammarion,
1924), vii.
27. Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, 47-48.
28. Ibid., 47.

29. The title can be translated literally as “woman on the road”; it could be
more loosely rendered as “woman on the move,” that is to say, woman in evolution.
30. H.D., Bid Me to Live (New York: Dial Press, 1960), 97.
31. Ibid.
32. Otto Weinmger, Sex and Character (London: Heinemann, 1906), 64. The
original German-language version of this book, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine
Prinzipielle Untersuchung, was published in 1903 and appeared first in English
translation in 1906.
33. Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Inversion in Women,” Alienist and Neurologist 16
(1895): 148-153, cited in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Discourses of Sexuality and
Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870-1936,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming
the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George
Chauncey, Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1989), 271.
34. R. W. Shufeldt, “Dr. Havelock Ellis on Sexual Inversion,” Pacific Medical
Journal 65 (1902): 199-207, cited in Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey, Hidden
from History, 271.
35. To an assembly of women students at Newnham College, Cambridge Univers-
ity, Virginia Woolf first delivered the paper that we know as A Room of One’s Own.
36. William Lee Howard, “Effeminate Men and Masculine Women,” New
York Medical Journal 71 (1900): 687, cited in Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey,
Hidden from History, 271.
37. M. Carey Thomas, the first dean and first woman president of Bryn Mawr
College, is exemplary. Under pressure from feminists and antifeminists alike,
Thomas retracted the statement that “only our failures marry,” claiming she had
meant to say “our failures only marry.” Lillian Faderman, To Believe in Women:
What Lesbians Have Done for America, a History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1999), 213. Less than half of the women graduating from Bryn Mawr during the
first decade of the twentieth century married.
38. Revue Frangaise devoted its 17 June 1928 issue to the “jeune fille americaine.”
39. Henri Drouin, Femmes damnees (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1929), 135-136.
“Consequence fatale de l’accession des femmes aux carrieres jusqu’alors reservees
aux hommes, un type nouveau est apparu, celui des femmes d’affaires. En matiere
d’affaires les femmes nous ont rapidement montre qu’elles pouvaient aller aussi
loin que nous.”
40. Ibid., 129, 131, 132. “Pour ces femmes damnees que Baudelaire oublia, les
operations cerebrales ont une valeur de remplacement. Les orgies du savoir et
l’ivresse de la creation artistique leur sont un refuge. . . . Mais, chez les femmes
artistes, il est bien rare de ne pas trouver a la base de leurs expansions artistiques
un vide sensuel. Si Mme de Sevigne avait ete une epouse comblee, une mere heure-
sue, nous eut-elle legue son admirable correspondance? . . . Le type de la femme
artiste pour laquelle la creation artistique constitue le refuge toujours ouvert pour
ses deceptions amoureuses nous parait George Sand. . . . George restera le type
de la virago dont le temperament insatiable epuisait en quelques jours, en
quelques semaines, les amants les plus fougueux. . . . On a ose avancer, non sans
quelques preuves impressionnantes, que George Sand etait atteinte de frigidite
sexuelle. Cette idee nous parait fort seduisante, car l’oeuvre entiere de la ‘vache a
lettres’ en reôit une lumiere inattendue. D’ailleurs, rien de solide ne s’oppose a
cette conception du genie sandien.”
41. Ibid., 131. The flyleaf of the work cited heralds the forthcoming publica-
tion “by the same author” of Sand’s biography.
42. Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (San Diego: Har-
vest/Harcourt Brace, 1979), 62.
43. See Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Lin-de-
Siecle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
44. Germaine Krull, “Pen sees sur Part,” cited by Pierre Mac Orlan in Ger-
maine Krull (Paris: Librarie Gallimard/Les Photographes Nouveaux, 1931), 12.
45. Jean Cocteau to Germaine Krull, April 1930, cited in Orlan, Germaine
Krull, 16.
46. Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1859, Le public moderne et la photogra-
phic,” in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 770.
47. Interview with Berenice Abbott, New York Times, 16 November 1980.
Princeton Library, Noel Riley Fitch Papers, CO 841, box 9. Abbott made this
observation at a time when the close-up had only recently come to the fore in Hol-
lywood cinema, as Roland Barthes remarks in “The Face of Garbo,” and the
human face “still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy.” Roland Barthes,
“The Face of Garbo,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1996), 82.
48. Abbott arrived in Paris to study sculpture in 1921. In 1925 she took a job
as Man Ray’s darkroom assistant and shortly thereafter, in 1926, opened a rival
portrait studio. She returned to the United States in 1929.
49. Berenice Abbott, A Guide to Better Photography (New York: Crown Pub-
lishers, 1941), 56.
50. Vu, no. 1 (1928): 11-12. “Congu dans un esprit nouveau et realize par des
moyens nouveaux, Vu apporte en France une formule neuve: le reportage lllustre
d’informations mondiales. Enfin, dans ses pages, Vu donnera a la Publicite la
place qu’elle. occupe dans la vie moderne.”
51. Vogue, for instance, covered Gertrude Ederle’s historic swim across the
English Channel in 1926. The eyes of the international media were on Ederle, a
gold-medalist in the 1924 Paris Olympics, as she embarked on her second attempt
to cross the Channel. She not only became the first woman to successfully meet this
challenge but ended up beating all previous records by hours. Two million fans
lined the streets of New York to great her with a ticker tape parade on her return.
52. H.D., “Projector II,” Close Up, October 1927, 37. Bryher Papers, Gen.
Mss 97, Film, series 8, box 169, folder 5651, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University.
53. Jayne Marek, “Bryher and Close Up, 1927-1933,” H.D. Newsletter 3, 2
(1990): 27.
54. See Jayne Marek’s work on Close Up in Women Editing Modernism: “Little”
Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995).
55. Some women professionals, however, had reservations on this score. In her
1938 essay Three Guineas, Woolf makes plain her own trepidations about pro-
fessionalism: “We, the daughters of educated men, are between the devil and the
deep sea. Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity,
its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the pro-
fessional system, with its possessiveness its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed. The
one shuts us up like slaves in a harem; the other forces us to circle, like caterpil-
lars head to tail, round and round the mulberry tree, the sacred tree of property.
It is a choice of evils. Each is bad. Had we not better plunge off the bridge into
the river; give up the game; declare that the whole of human life is a mistake and
so end it?” Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938; reprint, London: Penguin,
1977), 86. The knowledge that Woolf ultimately took the plunge she described
(in 1941, Woolf filled the pockets of her coat with stones and walked into the
waters of the river Ouse near her Sussex home) invests her remarks with addi-
tional poignancy. Woolf recognized that the professional credo of the capitalist
marketplace would cause women to renounce their collective quest for social
equity in favor of individual celebrity.
56. H.D., Bid Me to Live, 97.
57. Woolf, Three Guineas, 130, 125.
58. H.D., Borderline: A Pool Film with Paul Robeson (London: Mercury Press,
1930), 5.
59. Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex, cited in Sexology Uncensored:
The Documents of Sexual Science, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1998), 51.
60. See, e.g., Emanuel Kanter, Amazons, a Marxian Study (Chicago: Charles
H. Kerr, 1926).
61. Charlotte Wolff, Love Between Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1971), 82.
62. Renee Vivien, Sapho: Traduction nouvelle avec le texte grec (Paris: Lemere,
1903). Natalie Barney, Cinq Petits Dialogues grecs (Paris: Editions de la Plume,
1902).
63. This movement was later dubbed “Sapho 1900.” See Joan Dejean, Fictions
of Sappho, 1546-1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
64. Barney, Cinq Petits Dialogues grecs, vii-viii; cited and translated in Dejean,
Fictions of Sappho, 280, 354. “Alors l’Inconnue, la persuasive et la redoutable, la
terrible et la douce, me dit: Si tu m’aimes, tu oublieras ta famille et ton mari et
ton pays et tes enfants et tu viendras vivre avec moi. / Si tu m’aimes, tu quitteras
tout ce que tu cheris, et les lieux oil tu te souviens . . . et tes souvenirs et tes espoirs
ne seront qu’un desir vers moi. . . . / Et je lui repondis en sanglotant: Je t’aime.”
65. Barney is one of several prominent lesbian expatriate salonieres animating
early twentieth-century Parisian culture. Gertrude Stein, Winaretta Singer (prin-
cesse de Polignac), and “the triumvirate” (Ann Morgan, Elizabeth Marbury, and
Elsie de Wolfe) opened their homes to artists, musicians, writers, critics, and
patrons on a regular basis.
66. Jacques Depaulis, Ida Rubinstein: Une Inconnue jadis celebre (Paris:
Librairie Honore Champion, 1995), 216.
67. The classical vernacular employed by homosexual advocates from Oscar
Wilde to Andre Gide located these authors within an elite literary tradition in
which homoeroticism had played a dignified and indeed instrumental role.
68. Barnes, foreword to Ladies Almanack, n.p.
69. Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard/Pleiade,
1989), 4:107-108.
70. Eon de Beaumont (the Chevalier d’Eon), a French diplomat to Russia in the
service of Louis XVI who reportedly cross-dressed as a woman for the purposes
of espionage, incarnated the link between travesty and treachery that continued
to resonate, in Barney’s era, in political scandals such as Germany’s Eulenberg
affair. Philipp zu Eulenberg was a ranking diplomat close to Kaiser Wilhelm.
Eulenberg’s affair with the officer Kuno von Moltke, and the cross-dressing
soirees of their “Liebenberg Round Table” (which included the kaiser himself),
provoked a scandal that undermined Kaiser Wilhelm’s regime. The quotation is

from Barnes, foreword to Ladies Almanack, n.p.
71. The memoir, originally written in French and self-published in Paris in
1929, has now been published in an English edition. Natalie Clifford Barney,
Adventures of the Mind, trans. John Spalding Gatton (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1992). The book documents Barney’s life as a cultural hostess and,
most significantly, the creation of the Academie des Femmes, founded by Barney
in 1927 as a feminist alternative to the all-male Academie Franâise. It was not
until 1980, eight years after Barney’s death, that the Academie Frangaise finally
admitted a woman —Marguerite Yourcenar —into its ranks.
72. Ibid., 26.
73. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflec-
tions: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 156.
74. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928; reprint, New York: Avon
Books, 1981), 356. Hall’s description reminds us that Paris, during the inaugural
years of Barney’s salon, was quite literally a no-man’s land —the able-bodied men
having deserted the city, in a manner of speaking, for the front. The visual (as
well, of course, as the economic and cultural) impact of this evacuation must not
be underestimated. Some, like Hall, found the spectacle depressing; others, like
Barney, found it exhilarating.
75. Karla Jay, The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee
Vivien (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 108.
76. H.D., Paint It Today (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 18.
77. Natalie Barney, Traits et portraits (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963), 31.
“Pour apporter quelque chose, il faut venir d’ailleurs.”
78. Barney, Adventures of the Mind, 180.
79. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “‘She Meant What I Said’: Lesbian
Double Talk,” in No-Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twen-
tieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 219.
80. George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie
Barney (New York: Putnam’s, 1976), 44.
81. Barnes, foreword to Ladies Almanack, n.p.
CHAPTER 2. ROMAINE BROOKS
The epigraph is from Natalie Barney, The One Who Is Legion (Orono: National
Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, 1987), 159.
1. Mireille Hay et, Journal, 1918-1919 (Paris: Editions Claire Paulhan, 2003),
73: “dans le mystere un peu inquietant et tres pervers de son grand salon noir,
blanc, cru, et vermilion, avec les coussms d’or, les laques, les miroirs, le tapis a
carreaux et la grande cheminee: seule nature oil flamboie un rude feu que rien n’a
pu asservir et qui jaillit, eclairant I’admirable, hermetique visage de notre hotesse,
son sourire triste d’enfant navre, et son regard autoritaire et ardent qui caresse et
questionne.”
2. Albert Flament, cited in Blandine Chavanne and Bruno Gaudichon, eds.,
quaires de l’Ouest, 1987), 157. “‘Un portrait psychologique’! . . . Dans la psychee
a trois faces, j’aperôis le visage reel de Mrs. Brooks qui vient de se frotter avec
cette poudre ocre qu’elle aime tant et qui rit comme un enfant. Et je regarde de
nouveau cet autre visage severe et bleme, cet etre invisible a nos yeux, qu’elle a
livre la, sur la toile . . . , ce promeneur solitaire, au large des habitations devastees.”
3. See, e.g., Joe Lucchesi, “‘The Dandy in Me’: Romaine Brooks’s 1923 Por-
traits,” in Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture, ed. Susan Fillin-
Yeh, 153-184 (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Bridget Elliott,
“Performing the Picture or Painting the Other: Romaine Brooks, Gluck, and the
Question of Decadence in 1923,” in Women Artists and Modernism, ed. Katy
Deepwell, 70-82 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989); and Brid-
get Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)Pos-
tionings (London: Routledge, 1994).
4. Elliott and Wallace, Women Artists and Writers, 51.
5. Regarding representations of the New Woman considered in late nineteenth-
century portraiture and criticism, see Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in
Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1989).
6. Camille Mauclair, “La Femme devant les peintres modernes,” La Nouvelle
Revue, 2d ser., 1 (1899): 212-213, cited ibid., 69.
7. Louis Vauxcelles, UHistoire generale de Part frangais de la revolution a nos
jours (Paris: Librairie de France, 1922), 2:320; cited in Gill Perry, Women Artists
and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and “Feminine” Art, 1900 to the Late
1920s (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 8.
8. Passe-temps honnete was exhibited at the Galerie Bernheim in Paris in
1921 and reproduced in Bernheim’s catalogue no. 7, August 1921; the painting
was also reproduced in La Vie Artistique, 15 March 1922. Van Dongen’s 1914
Portrait de la marquise Casati (who was portrayed by Brooks ca. 1920) launched
his successful career as a society painter.
9. Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde, 16.
10. Guglielmo Ferrero, “Woman’s Sphere in Art,” New Review, November
1893, cited in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds., Sexology Uncensored: The Doc-
uments of Sexual Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 23.
11. Femmes Artistes Modernes (F.A.M.), founded by Marie-Anne Camx-Zoegger,
organized exhibitions from 1930 through 1938. F.A.M. stressed the professional-
ism of its membership. Suzanne Valadon, Tamara de Lempicka, and Marie Lau-
rencin numbered among les societaires who exhibited in the context of its annual
shows, which often opened with retrospectives reconstructing a history for
women professionals in the arts; the Salon of 1934, for example, opened with a
retrospective celebrating the work of Camille Claudel and Marie Bracquemond.
12. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Les Peintresses, chroniques d’art,” Le Petit Bleu,
5 April 1912, n.p.
13. Montesquiou, “Cambrioleurs d’ames,” Le Figaro, May 1910, unpaginated
clipping conserved in Brooks’s press book, Research Material on Romaine
Brooks: Scrapbook, ca. 1910-1935, Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithson-
ian, reel no. 5134.
14. Brooks cited this excerpt from Montesquiou’s article “Cambrioleurs d’ames”
in her memoirs, “No Pleasant Memories,” unpublished manuscript, ca. 1930,
220; also conserved in the AAA, Smithsonian. “Par ce temps d’amateurisme
debride, la qualite de ses travaux la classe parmi ceux dont la production serieuse,
severe, amere meme, parfaitement destinee aux clients du succes facile, n’a rien a
voir (oh! Mais rien du tout!) avec le groupe mondain annuellement rassemble
sur de vagues cimaises et de temeraires plinthes par Monsieur F.S.” The title of
Montesquiou’s article has often been mistranscribed as “Cambrioleur [in the sin-
gular] d’ames,” leading to its mistranslation as “thief of souls.” As conceived by
Montesquiou, it was not the artist but the portraits that stole the souls of the sit-
ters. This distinction is significant in that it speaks to what Walter Benjamin
describes as the “aura” of the original artwork: an object that has the character-
istics of a subject.
15. Louis Vauxcelles, Arsene Alexandre, Claude Roger Marx, Guillaume Apol-
linaire, and Albert Flament, cited in Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tableaux, dessins
(Paris: Braun et Cie., 1952), 48-52.
16. Vauxcelles, Gil Bias, 14 May 1910, excerpted in Brooks: Portrait,
tableaux, dessins, 48-49.
17. E.S., “Art,” Commentator, 21 June 1911, 75.
18. For an in-depth reading of Brooks’s nudes, see Joe Lucchesi, “‘An Appari-
tion in a Black Flowing Cloak’: Romaine Brooks’s Portraits of Ida Rubinstein,” in
Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks, by Whitney Chadwick,
with an essay by Joe Fucchesi (Berkeley and Fos Angeles: University of California
Press; Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2000), 73-87.
19. Barney to Brooks, undated letter , Fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, Biblio-
theque Fitteraire Jacques Doucet (BFJD), Paris, NCB.C2.2996, 38-39.1 am indebted
to Franyois Chapon for facilitating the consultation and citation of this material.
20. Claude Roger-Marx, “Personnages d’une epoque,” unreferenced clipping,
conserved in Brooks’s press book, Research Material on Romaine Brooks: Scrap-
book, ca. 1910-1935, AAA, Smithsonian, reel no. 5134. “Ce chapeau haut de
forme qui surplombe un visage feminin, ces mains gantees, ce costume viril rap-
pellent certaines descriptions les plus effrontees de A la Recherche du temps
perdu, tandis que la tristesse que l’artiste a donnee a son regard fait rever aux
heroines si tendrement decrites par Colette dans Ces Plaisirs.”
21. Roger-Marx, cited in Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tableaux, dessins, 52.
22. Translated as “Fife Passes by without Me” (1910); alternately titled Au
Balcon. The English critic John Usher, in his comments on the subject of this
painting, noted, “It is almost as if [the sitter] had been intentionally selected from
a type diametrically opposed to the painter’s own character” (International Stu-
dio, February 1926, 49).
23. In a remark cited by Brooks in the monograph, Apollinaire notes that her
portrait subjects impress themselves on the viewer’s mind like “silhouettes resem-
bling memories.” Guillaume Apollinaire, in Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tableaux,
dessins, 48.
24. Concerning the spacialization of gender in nineteenth-century painting, see
Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in The Expanding
Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard,
244-267 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
25. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflec-
tions: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 156.
26. Ibid., 150
27. Ibid., 156.
28. Elisabeth de Gramont, introduction to Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tab-
leaux, dessins, 4. “Indifferente aux honneurs et aux temoignages de reconnais-
sance, elle aspire a rester partout etrangere.”
29. Baudelaire, cited in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in
the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (Fondon: Verso, 1997), 55.
30. Gramont, introduction to Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tableaux, dessins, 4.

“Affranchie des coteries et des etres en general, elle se plait seulement a observer
autour d’elle et a retenir au passage les particularities de chacun.”
31. Vauxcelles, cited in Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tableaux, dessins, 49.
32. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 146-147. “To perceive the aura of an object
we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return” (148).
33. For an extended analysis of the psychic formations that intertwine desire,
loss, and aesthetic fulfillment, see Ellen Handler Spitz, Image and Insight (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
34. This is the ribbon of the Legion of Honor that Brooks earned for her
fund-raising initiatives in conjunction with the exhibition and publication of the
patriotic 1914 painting La Prance croisee (paired with a verse signed Gabriel
D’Annunzio).
35. As the social critic Thorstein Veblen noted in his 1899 Theory of the
Leisure Class, a gentleman’s glove suggests that “the wearer cannot . . . bear a
hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use.”
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Insti-
tutions (New York: B. W. Huebach, 1919), 170-171.
36. Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in
the Fin de Siecle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 23.
37. As Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly noted in his 1843 essay “Du Dandysme et de
George Brummell” — a foundational text on dandyism buttressed by Honore
de Balzac’s earlier “Traite de la vie elegante” (1830) and Baudelaire’s later “Le
Peintre de la vie moderne” (1863): “Le dandy est femme par certain cotes.” Jules
Barbey d’Aurevilly, “Du Dandysme et de George Brummell,” in Oeuvres roman-
esques completes (Paris: Galhmard, 1966), 2:710.
38. Garelick, Rising Star, 19.
39. M.R., “A l’Instar,” Femina, July 1924, 31-32. “Le haut de form de Brum-
mel [sic]”', the accompanying text describes: “Ce que la mode feminine a pris a la
mode masculine . . . Ou les progres du feminisme.”
40. Marius-Ary Leblond, “Les Peintres de la femme nouvelle,” Fa Revue 39
(1901): 278, 283.
41. The following reviews are among those associating Brooks with Whistler:
unattributed review, “Romaine Brooks Shows Portraits Here,” Art News 24, 7
(21 November 1925): 3; Gustave Kahn, “Romaine Brooks,” F’Art et les Artistes
7, 39 (May 1923): 307-308.
42. Montesquiou, “Cambrioleurs d’ames,” unpaginated clipping.
43. Gabriel D’Annunzio, cited in “Her Painting a Sensation: Miss Brooks
Receives the Praises of Thousands in Paris,” Washington Post, 4 April 1914.
44. “Une Exposition d’artistes americains au Luxembourg,” F’Art et les
Artistes 3 (November 1919): 135.
45. She even signed her work with a winged cipher derived, like Whistler’s hall-
mark butterfly, from her monogram.
46. Barney to Brooks, letter ca. 1920, Fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, BLJD,
Paris, NCB.C2 2996,1-35/231: “ne rien ne trouve place qui n’ait d’abord sans sig-
nification par rapport a l’ensemble.”
47. Montesquiou, “Cambrioleurs d’ames,” unpaginated clipping.
48. Brooks, “No Pleasant Memories,” 210-211.
49. Ibid., 205.
50. Barney wrote of Brooks’s hypersensitivity: “Her eye, developed to the point
that it cannot tolerate bright colors, once caused her to eject from her studio
another society woman who had tactlessly arrived dressed in garish green.”
Natalie Clifford Barney. Adventures of the Mind, trans. John Spalding Gatton
(New York: New York University Press, 1992), 181. This memoir was written by
Barney in French and originally self-published as Aventures de Vesprit (Paris:
Emile-Paul Freres, 1929).
51. Roger-Marx, in Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tableaux, dessins, 50. The ref-
erence to Debussy links Brooks with a composer who had collaborated in several
controversial initiatives in the total-art realm of the ballet theater —notably, the
Russian Ballet’s L’Apres-midi d’un faune and Jeux. Both productions provoked
debate on artistic as well as moral grounds. Debussy, what is more, was appreci-
ated by Barney and Brooks’s circle for a piece that he composed as an homage to
the Sapphic poetry of Pierre Louys, Les Chansons de Bilitis.
52. For instance, Andrea Weiss claims that “unlike Eileen Gray, who was influ-
enced by the geometry of Cubism and of the Dutch De Stijl group, Romaine did
not care for artistic trends and painted as though the twentieth century and its
many artistic shake-ups were not occurring around her. As time went on, she was
increasingly discredited for being outmoded and out of touch.” Andrea Weiss,
Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank (San Francisco: HarperSan-
Francisco, 1995), 110.
53. Albert Flament, in Le Trottoir roulant, excerpted in Romaine Brooks: Por-
traits, tableaux, dessins, 51. “Une femme que le gout de son temps n’a pas su
reduire a l’esclavage; en empruntant au passe et au present, elle a su former une
chose —son logis —encore jamais realisee et qui complete l’un des talents feminins
les plus originaux de ce temps.” Louis Vauxcelles, in Excelsior, 21 May 1931,
cited in the same context, described Brooks’s work as “inclassable.”
54. “To judge by the self-portraits at the Alpine Club Gallery, Mill Street, Miss
Romaine Brooks closely resembles her pictures in spirit and appearance. An air
and aspect of decadence pervades most of them. General hopelessness and ashen-
grey tones give one a feeling of waning life, of extinct passion, of decaying lilies,
that suggests the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, or Mallarme.” “The Decadent
School,” unreferenced clipping, Research Material on Romaine Brooks: Scrap-
book, ca. 1910-1935, AAA, Smithsonian, microfilm roll no. 5134.
55. Brooks, “No Pleasant Memories.” The artist’s social and geographical itin-
eraries intersected with Wilde’s in various ways. For instance, Wilde’s niece Dolly
Wilde shared Barney’s bed off and on for decades, according to Shari Benstock,
Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1986), 180. Wilde frequently attended Barney’s Friday salons at 20 rue Jacob
masquerading as her uncle. Barney herself revered Wilde and emulated him as a
writer. See Natalie Clifford Barney, “First Adventure: Oscar Wilde in the United
States,” in Adventures of the Mind, 31. Barney also entertained a brief engage-
ment to Wilde’s lover, Alfred Douglas. See Karla Jay, introduction to A Perilous
Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney, ed. and trans. Anna Livia (Nor-
wich, VT: New Victoria Publishers, 1992). vi-viii.
56. A. T. Fitzroy [Rose Allatini], cited in Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last
Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997), 189. The novel, which tells the story of a
homosexual artist and pacifist who is imprisoned for his beliefs, paints a candid
portrait of same-sex relationships, both male and female. The book was banned
shortly after its publication in 1918.
57. Henri Frantz, “L’Exposition des oeuvres de Mme Romaine Brooks,” 1911,
unreferenced clipping, Research Material on Romaine Brooks: Scrapbook, ca.

1910-1935, AAA, Smithsonian, microfilm roll no. 5134.
58. Oscar Wilde, cited in James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of
Making Enemies (New York: Dover, 1967), 163. Gramont, introduction to
Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tableaux, dessins, 4.
59. Many of Wilde’s dandy-aesthete contemporaries, homosexual or not, took
shelter in France in the wake of his trials. Aubrey Beardsley, for instance, migrated
across the channel. Alfred Douglas took cover in France, converted to Catholi-
cism, and married. The Decadent poet John Gray (allegedly the prototype for
Wilde’s Dorian Gray) and his lover, the sexual theorist Andre Raffalovich, also
cooled their heels on the Continent and converted to Catholicism. Gray, in fact,
took the vows of priesthood. Raffalovich, whom Beardsley addressed as “Men-
tor,” later converted Beardsley to Catholicism. (Max Nordau, the author of
Entartung [Degeneration]), had by then identified Catholicism as “the most fre-
quent and most distinctive stigmata of the degenerate.” Max Nordau, Degenera-
tion (New York: Appleton, 1895), 111. Wilde himself was granted asylum in
France after his release from prison. His name continued to provoke controversy,
interest, and sometimes sympathy in France for decades after his death in Paris in
1900. His remains were ceremoniously moved from Bagneux to Paris’s Pere
Lachaise cemetery when the funerary monument by Jacob Epstein was completed
in 1909. As late as 1933, Gallimard (one of Paris’s largest mainstream publishers)
released a French edition of an English best seller, Le Proces d’Oscar Wilde, by
Hillary Pacq (translated by Maurice Bee).
60. Joan Acocella, “The Reception of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes by Artists and
Intellectuals in Paris and London, 1909-1914,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers Uni-
versity, 1984, 359.
61. In a letter to his colleague and designer Alexandre Benois written in 1897,
Diaghilev acknowledged that “from the age of sixteen onwards” his “packaging”
and other “eccentricities” had caused him “many complicated and dramatic
moments (once an almost tragic moment).” He complained about the violence
and persistence of public attacks on his “vacuous outward appearance” and his
“foppishness.” He confided his “deep belief that this phase will pass, if my life is
crowned with success. Heavens above, it is success and only success that saves us
and supersedes everything else.” Public appreciation of Diaghilev had indeed
started to shift, he noted. “Society has already begun to go on about ‘this really
decent man, tres bien habille, just like a foreigner’ —and those are the same peo-
ple who scoffed at my chic elegance.” Sergei Diaghilev to Alexandre Benois, let-
ter dated April 1897, published in I. S. Zil’bershtein and V. A. Samkov, eds., Sergei
Diaghilev i russkoe iskusstvo [Sergei Diaghilev and Russian art], trans. and with
commentary by John E. Bowlt, “Sergei Diaghilev’s Early Writings,” in The Bal-
lets Russes and Its World, ed, Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 51-52.
62. Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 340.
63. Ibid., 373.
64. Ibid., 363.
65. In a letter dated 7 December 1923, postmarked Kensington SW7, Brooks
discusses an exchange of portraits to which she had agreed with Gluck. “Have
begun Peter’s portrait; well in already. But she wants me to pose too, rather a bore
but can’t get out of it. You would like her but she would not attract you in any
way, she doesn’t me either. No mystery or allure. But I think the portrait will be
amusing and a pity not to do.” Fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, BLJD, Paris,
NCB.C2.2445, 50-56. The reference to Gluck’s appearance at the theater is from
Diana Souhami, Gluck: 1895-1978; Her Biography (London: Pandora, 1988), 52.
66. Michael Baker, Our Three Selves: The Life of Radclyffe Hall (New York:
William Morrow, 1985), 170.
67. Bryher’s papers, preserved at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library at Yale University, include the decade-long exchange of letters with Ellis.
68. The following excerpt from Ellis’s germinal 1897 study Sexual Inversion
represents the observations of one of the most progressive early twentieth-century
sexologists on the exterior symptoms, if not the psycho-sexual preconditions, of
lesbianism: “There is a very pronounced tendency among sexually inverted
women to adopt male attire when practicable. . . . There is [also] nearly always a
disdain for the petty feminine artifices of the toilet. Even when this is not obvious
there are all sorts of instinctive gestures and habits which may suggest to female
acquaintances the remark that such a person ‘ought to have been a man.’” Have-
lock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (New York: Arno Press,
1975; orig. published 1897), 95-96. Ellis, in later works, notably The Psychology
of Sex (1933), problematized characterizations of the homosexual as a freakishly
hybrid “third sex”; further observation and reflection had convinced him that the
frontiers of gender and sexual identity were uncertain and that there were many
possible stopping points between the poles of male and female.
69. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
MacLaughlin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 8.
70. Cassandra L. Langer, “Fashion, Character and Sexual Politics in Some of
Romaine Brooks’ Lesbian Portraits,” Art Criticism 1, 3 (1981): 30.
71. Brooks to Barney, postmarked London, dated 5 June 1923, Fonds Natalie
Clifford Barney, BLJD, Paris, NCB.C2.2445, 50-56.
72. Under the 1801 law, women wishing to wear trousers in public were
required to apply for a police permit. For detailed discussion of the role that cross-
dressing played in the definition and gendering of perversion in turn-of-the-
century Western medical discourse, see Jann Matlock, “Masquerading Women,
Pathologized Men: Cross-Dressing, Fetishism, and the Theory of Perversion,
1882-1935,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993), 31-61. See also George Chauncey, Jr., “From Sexual
Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female
‘Deviance,’” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and
Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 87-117.
73. J. C. Holl, review of the Salon des Independants, 8 April 1925, unrefer-
enced clipping, Research Material on Romaine Brooks, Scrapbook, ca. 1910-
1935, AAA, Smithsonian, microfilm reel no. 5135. “Romaine Brooks, esprit fin,
reste troublante par la conception de ses modeles choisis dans une faune elegante
mais terriblement equivoque.”
74. Barney, poem enclosed in a letter addressed to Brooks ca. 1920, Fonds
Natalie Clifford Barney, BLJD, Paris, NCB.C2 2996, 1-35/231. The poem reads:
“ils / arrivent comme la destinee, sans cause, / sans raison, sans egard, sans pre-
texte, ils / sont la, avec la rapidite de l’eclair, / trop terribles, trop soudains, trop
/ convaincants, trop ‘autres’ pour etre / meme un objet de haine.”
75. Alvan F. Sanforn, “American Artists on the Firing Line,” Boston Evening
Transcript, undated, unpaginated clipping, Research Material on Romaine Brooks,
Scrapbook, ca. 1910-1935, AAA, Smithsonian, microfilm reel no. 5135.
76. Barney, Adventures of the Mind, 180.

77. Whistler attributed the following remark on this subject to Wilde: “Popu-
larity is the only insult that has not yet been offered to Mr. Whistler.” Whistler,
Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 99.
78. An undated letter from Barney to Brooks (ca.1918-1920) mentions Bar-
ney’s efforts to expedite the award. Fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, BLJD, Paris,
NCB.C2.2996,1-35/231.
79. The writer Germaine Beaumont (Colette’s assistant) wrote, for instance, a
glowing review of Brooks’s work after the publication of the monograph, as did
Yvon Bizardel. Both were encouraged by Barney. Germaine Beaumont, “Visages,”
unreferenced clipping dated 24-30 July 1953; Yvon Bizardel, “Romaine Brooks
ou le regard retrouve,” unreferenced clipping; both from Fonds Natalie Clifford
Barney, BLJD, Paris, NCB.C2.2445,476(3).
80. Brooks’s independent income afforded her many luxuries as a painter. She
almost never accepted commissions, for instance, and would not agree to execute
a portrait unless the sitter inspired her; she rarely sold her paintings, retaining
them instead in her personal collection. This distaste for the commercial aspect of
professionalism corresponds with a Romantic notion of genius that Brooks shared
with aesthete comrades and mentors such as D’Annunzio, Whistler, and Wilde.
On her behalf, as a result, Barney was in a position to offer virtually the entire
oeuvre to a single institution. Barney used the monograph as a promotional tool
in this campaign, sending it to ambassadors, museum directors, curators, board
members, anyone whom she felt could advance the cause. In 1966, Barney wrote
to the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, David Bruce (a family friend), alerting
him that Paris’s Musee National d’Art Moderne and Petit Palais had already spo-
ken for a number of Brooks’s portraits of the most “celebrated people of ‘la belle
epoque.’” She urged the ambassador to influence the Smithsonian’s director and
senior curator, with whom she had been in negotiation for years, to come to a
decision about possible acquisitions soon, while Brooks’s collection still remained
relatively intact.
81. Romaine Brooks to Natalie Barney, 14 June 1952, Fonds Natalie Clifford
Barney, BLJD, Paris, NCB.C2.2445, 240-250.
82. Barney also pressured the Smithsonian to publish Brooks’s autobiography,
“No Pleasant Memories.” Brooks intended to illustrate the book with drawings
executed explicitly for that purpose, as well as photographs of her portraits; her
1923 self-portrait would have served, once again, as the cover image.
83. Marie Murat, La Vie amoureuse de Christine de Suede, la reine androgyne.
(Paris: Flammarion, 1930).
84. Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional
Types of Men and Women (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1908), 34. Susan
Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Anchor/Double-
day, 1986), 290, embroiders on this notion of an homosexual “aristocracy of taste.”
85. Gramont, introduction to Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tableaux, dessins, 4.
“Ces Portraits pourraient bien etre les derniers temoins de nos contemporains.”
86. Natalie Clifford Barney, Souvenirs indiscrets (Paris: Flammarion, 1960), 23.
CHAPTER 3. “NARCISSUS AND NARCISSUS”
The epigraph is from Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Aveux non avenus (Paris:
Editions du Carrefour), 1930. “Feminism is already in the fairy tales.”
1. Claude Cahun, “L’Idee-maitresse,” La Gerbe 28 (January 1921): 205; and
164 NOTES TO PAGE 68
29 (February 1921): 240. “Et mon Idee-maitresse . . . ‘the love that dare not speak
its name’ fut Fame unique de ce corps sans defaut, mon etre ideal. . . . L’Idee se
multiplia . . . et s’elargit immensement. Elle se coucha, nuage d’or leger, tout
autour de mon del; et je connus que je n’avais plus rien a craindre d’elle. Je suis
en elle; elle est en moi; et je la poursuivrai a jamais, sans la perdre de vue. Mon
Idee chere, vaste comme l’horizon, sera la couronne indestructible de tous mes
actes, l’aureole de toutes mes antes.”
2. Ibid., 205
3. Cahun refers to her “execrable manie de citation” in a letter to Adrienne
Monnier, 23 July 1926, Bibliotheque Litteraire Jacques Doucet (BLJD), Paris, MS
8718, B’ I 11. “Les Jeux uraniens,” for instance, a text produced by Cahun (and
Moore?) ca. 1914, plays, in a uranian (queer) way, with and off citations of sig-
nificance to uranian readers. Citations from works by Plato, Verlaine, Alfred Doug-
las, Gide, Rimbaud, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Wilde, among others, shape
the text of “Jeux uraniens.” The quotes, set off as handwritten headers within the
typewritten manuscript, serve a generative function. They literally provide the
pretexts for the narrator’s reflections, expressed as an interior dialogue between
the lover and the beloved. It is tempting to speculate that Moore, who had the
habit of collecting citations, may herself have selected the quotes and laid them
down like challenges for her lover to gloss. Cahun adopted the title word uranien
(uranian in English) from writings by the German homosexual rights advocate
Karl Ulrichs in which he defends the third sex. Ulrichs, in turn, had borrowed the
term from Plato. Ulrichs employed uranian in lieu of more clinical terms such as
invert or homosexual. Ulrichs’s notion of the third sex provided a basis of reflec-
tion for influential members of the scientific community such as the German homo-
sexual rights movement leader Magnus Hirschfeld, Andre Raffalovich (author of
Uranisme et unisexualite) in France, and Edward Carpenter in England. Cahun’s
“Les Jeux uraniens,” which assumes the literary form of an epistle, also presents
a long declaration (and defense) of same-sex desire and friendship. There are cer-
tain parallels between “Les Jeux uraniens” and Gide’s Corydon (also largely com-
posed before the 1914 war but not published until 1924). In both cases, the direct
form of address, for instance, collapses the distinction between the utterances of
the narrator and those of the author.
4. Barthes touches on the photography’s proximity to theatricality, in Roland
Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 31-32. Claude Cahun’s “self-portraiture” has
provoked a spate of feminist scholarship in recent years. Since her rehabilitation
in the 1990s as an important contributor to the surrealist movement, Cahun’s
photographic “self-portraits” have figured prominently in several major exhibi-
tions, most notably the 1995 Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris exhibi-
tion. Cahun’s biographer, Francois Leperlier, curated this exhibition and produced
a catalogue raisonnee titled Claude Cahun, photographe for the occasion. Most
subsequent scholarship draws heavily on Leperlier’s path-breaking research and
tends to reflect his emphasis on Cahun as an underappreciated genius, a unique
feminine force within the surrealist movement of the pre-World War II period.
Leperlier, whose focus is more literary than visual, does not emphasize the role
that Malherbe/Moore undeniably played in the coproduction of the photographic,
if not the literary, oeuvre. Subsequently, a growing number of scholars have begun
to consider the significance of Moore’s collaboration. Abigail Solomon-Godeau
produced a catalogue essay titled “The Equivocal ‘I’: Claude Cahun as Lesbian
Subject,” in Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cabun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman, ed.
Shelley Rice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), which raised the question. Laura
Cottingham in her essay written slightly later, “Considering Claude Cahun,”
comments that many of the photographs in question “were most likely produced
in collaboration with Malherbe, as they seem technically impossible to have been
staged and rendered without . . . assistance.” Laura Cottingham, “Considering
Claude Cahun,” Seeing through the Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art
(Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, Gordon and Breach, 2000), 198. Marsha
Meskimmon, in Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London:
Routledge, 2002), fully embraces the collaborative nature of the venture, as does
Jennifer Shaw, in “Singular Plural: Collaborative Self-Images in Claude Cahun’s
Aveux non avenus,” in The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars,
ed. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2003). My own contributions to this collection take the collabora-
tion as a given.
5. Among the various pieces of evidence that led me to adopt this position, I
cite Cahun’s numerous references to “our” photographic efforts. See, e.g., Claude
Cahun to Charles-Henri Barbier, 21 September 1952, cited in Francois Leperlier,
“L’Oeil en scene,” in the introduction to Claude Cahun (Paris: Nathan/HER,
1999), n.p. “II nous reste d’avant-guerre . . . d’assez belles photographies. Belles?
Si j’en puis juger par la diversite des gens qui les ont admirees . . . des inconnus
lorsqu’elles furent exposees chez des libraries . . . et par l’appreciation de
quelques-uns qui les virent chez nous. Parmi ceux-ci, des gens les moins esthetes
a des professionnels tels que Man Ray. D’autre part, recemment, un jeune anglais,
professionel aussi . . . , nous posant des questions sur ‘innovation’ (!) technique
(!)... a propos de nos essais d’amateurs datant des plus d’un quart de siecle.”
6. Golda M. Goldman, “Who’s Who Abroad: Lucie Schwob,” Chicago Tri-
bune, European ed., 23 December 1929, 4.
7. Golda M. Goldman, “Who’s Who Abroad: Suzanne Moore,” Chicago Tri-
bune, European ed., 18 December 1929, 4.
8. Cahun described her encounter with Moore in 1909 as “une rencontre
foudroyante,” a lightning-bolt encounter. Francois Leperlier, “Claude Cahun: La
Gravite des apparences,” in Le Reve d’une ville: Nantes et le surrealisme, ed.
Henry-Claude Cousseau (Nantes: Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 1995), 263.
In 1917, Cahun’s father, Maurice Schwob, married Moore’s mother, Marie-
Eugenie Rondet Malherbe, entwining the lovers in a familial relationship.
9. Subsequent rolls of film shot by Moore repeatedly feature an empty scene,
a horizon line unbroken by the figure of her lover.
10. Claude Cahun, “Les Jeux uraniens,” unpublished ms., ca. 1914, Jersey
Heritage Trust (JHT) Archives, St. Helier, Channel Island of Jersey, 34.
11. Michael Camille, “The Abject Gaze and the Homosexual Body: Flandrin’s
Figure d’etude ” in Gay and Fesbian Studies in Art History, ed. Whitney Davis
(New York: Harrington Park/Haworth Press, 1994), 164.
12. Ibid.
13. Susan Suleiman has described the work of women within the surrealist
movement as “double-voiced,” articulating both a “muted” and a “dominant”
cultural register. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of internal dialogism, in which a word
or term is “polemically related to another, previous term that is absent but
inferred by the response,” structures her analysis. This tool lends itself equally
well to an investigation of the photographs produced by Cahun and Moore. In
many of these photographs, the dominant (male, heterosexual) image or theme

and muted (female, lesbian) response coexist. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive
Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1990), 27.
14. Armand Dayot, L’lmage de la femme (Paris: Hachette, 1899).
15. Cahun’s great uncle Leon Cahun (whose name she adopted) presided over
Paris’s Bibliotheque Mazarine; his historical novels earned him the recognition of
the Academie Franchise. Her uncle Marcel Schwob, a supporter of Oscar Wilde,
achieved prominence in symbolist circles internationally. Her father, Maurice
Schwob, owned and operated the daily newspaper Phare de la Loire of Nantes.
Schwob also published an influential monthly cultural revue, La Gerbe, and a
weekly supplement to the Phare, titled Le Journal Litteraire. The latter served for
a time as the “mailbox of the surrealist movement,” featuring in its columns con-
tributions from Jacques Viot, Jacques Vache, and Andre Breton, all of whom had
ties to Nantes. See Patrice Allain, “Sous les Masques du fard: Moore, Claude
Cahun et quelques autres,” in “Autour de Marcel Schwob: Les “croisades” d’une
famille republicaine a travers 50 ans de presse nantaise,” Nouvelle Revue Nan-
taise 3 (1997): 115-133.
16. Cahun’s article “La Salome d’Oscar Wilde: Le proces Billing et les 47,000
pervertis du ‘livre noir,”’ Mercure de France 128 (July/August 1918): 69-80, for
instance, fired off a double-barreled protest against homophobia by defending
two artists, the homosexual icon Oscar Wilde and his lesbian interpreter Maud
Allan, who had been attacked in the English courts on moral grounds. The edi-
tor of Mercure, Rachilde, published a defense of Wilde, and of France’s relatively
enlightened position regarding homosexuality, in the same issue: Rachilde, “Oscar
Wilde et lui,” Mercure de France, 128 (July/August 1918): 60-68. For detailed
accounts of the Billing trial, see Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Deca-
dence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century (New York:
Arcade, 1997); and Lucy Bland, “Trial by Sexology? Maud Allan, Salome and the
‘Cult of the Clitoris’ Case,” in Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires,
ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
183-198.
Marcel Schwob, was a cofounder of Mercure and frequently contributed to the
journal himself. The magazine’s editors welcomed his niece’s submissions. Her
contributions to Mercure included several pieces expressing feminist and homo-
phile perspectives, including an ironic tour de force called “Heroines.” The col-
lection gives voice to “the real” women behind the myths: “Eve, la trop credule,”
“Dalila, femme entre les femmes,” “Judith, la sadique,” “Helene, la rebelle,” “Sapho,
l’incomprise,” “Marguerite, soeur incestueuse,” and “Salome, la sceptique” (ded-
icated to Wilde), Mercure de France (February 1925): 622-643. Le Journal Litteraire
45 (28 February 1925) contained two more pieces, titled “Sophie, la symboliste”
and “La Belle.” The manuscripts of “L’Allumeuse,” “Marie,” “Cendrillon,” “L’E-
pouse essentielle,” “Salmacis,” and “Celui qui n’est pas un heros,” which were
never published during Cahun’s lifetime, are preserved in the JHT Archives, St.
Helier. The book version, illustrated by Moore, that Cahun envisioned never
materialized.
17. The literary vignettes comprising Vues et visions first appeared without
Moore’s illustrations in Mercure de France 406 (16 May 1914). Vues et visions
was published as a separate volume in 1919 by Georges Cres et Cie.
18. Claude Cahun, dedication, Vues et visions (Paris: Editions Georges Cres et
Cie., 1919). “A Marcel Moore: Je te dedie ces proses pueriles / afin que l’ensemble
du livre / t’appartienne et qu’ainsi / tes dessins nous fassent / pardonner mon texte.”
19. E.g., John Addington Symonds, Studies of Greek Poets (1873) and “A
Problem in Greek Ethics” (1897); Walter Pater, Greek Studies: A Series of Essays
(1910) and Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (1910); and Edward Car-
penter, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folks (1919).
20. Fonds Maison des Amis des Livres, Adrienne Monnier/Maurice Saillet,
Institut Memoire de l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC), Paris, ADR2.R7-03. Regis-
tre: Inscription a la biliotheque, livres empruntes. The entry reads: “Lucie Schwob
(No 117)/15 Decembre 1918/Dec 17, Du Dandysme 7 50 fBarbey d’Aurevilly]
/—, Parallelement [Verlaine] 4 50/ Janvier 10, Le Banquet de Platon 3 00/Avril
2, Le Promethee mal enchaine ed. or. 15/—, Chemin de Crois—Claudel 2 50.”
21. Pierre Louys, Les Chansons de Bilitis (Paris: Librairie de l’Art Independant,
1895), n.p. “Ce petit livre d’amour antique est dedie respectueusement aux jeunes
filles de la societe future.”
22. For instance, in the 1950s Dell Martin and Phyllis Lyon named the first les-
bian advocacy organization in the United States the Daughters of Bilitis. Claude
Cahun, “Sapho, Pincomprise,” Mercure de France (February 1925): 622-643.
23. Cahun, Vues et visions, 94: “vers l’inconnue, a tatons dans l’obscurite.”
24. Ibid., 94. “Est-ce le del, est-ce la mer, est-ce la mort, est-ce . . . ? on ne sait
pas. . . .Vers la clarte blanche, seule esperance, unique fin de cette nuit obscure,
le long du chemin sombre a peine indique par les feux verts qui vacillent, deux
ombres s’avancent, enlacees.”
25. Ibid., 95. “Deux formes blanches passent et s’eloignent, confondues dans
une brume doree. Elies s’en vont vers la ville, dont les toits scintillent aux pre-
miers rayons de l’aurore, elles s’en vont plus loin peut-etre, vers Pinconnue, dans
la lumiere et dans la joie.”
26. Ibid. “A Phorizon, une vague lumiere rose. Est-ce le soleil levant, est-ce un
Eros sans fleches, une vie nouvelle, est-ce . . . ? on ne sait pas.”
27. Address book of Cahun/Moore, JHT Archives, St. Helier.
28. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1928).
29. Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1923-1928, vol. 3, ed. Nigel
Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 429.
30. For instance, Man Ray, in Self-Portrait, the autobiography he began writ-
ing in 1951, laced the opening chapters of his life story with anecdotes of childhood
precocity that worked to naturalize his vocation as a creative genius. “Looking back,
I cannot help admiring the diversity of my curiosity, and of my inventiveness,” he
wrote. “I was really another Leonardo da Vinci.” Man Ray, Self-Portrait, (New
York: Bulfinch Press, 1998), 15. As Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz have demonstrated,
since the publication in the 1550s of Giorgio Vasari’s compendium Lives of the
Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, the biographies of canonical
Western artists from Giotto to Picasso have shared remarkably similar childhood
chapters; the anecdotes unfailingly authenticate the artist’s status by constructing
genius as an in-born condition. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, introduction to Leg-
end, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1979), 1-12.
31. Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 143.
32. Here it would be useful to reconsider, and in slightly different terms, the
question of the pseudonym. If the proper name speaks to specific social relations
within patriarchal societies, notably underlying kinship structures, the artist’s

name functions on an additional register; it serves, as Michel Foucault in his 1969
essay “What Is an Author?” points out, as a “means of classification,” a kind of
brand name. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1977), 123. The author’s name is not entirely a function
of its bearer’s civil status nor a product of fiction; it spans, as Foucault notes, “the
breach, among the discontinuities, which give rise to new groups of discourse and
their singular mode of existence” (23).
33. Merry A. Foresta, in her foreword to Man Ray’s memoir Self-Portrait,
reports that the artist assembled a self-commemorative album in 1934, creating a
bronze self-portrait bust especially for the cover photograph. He described the
project as “a sort of propaganda” with the self at the center “as the commodity
to sell” (10).
34. Henri Bergson, cited in Cahun, “Jeux uramens,” 14. “La negation differe
done de l’affirmation proprement dite en ce qu’elle est une affirmation du second
degre.”
35. Goldman, “Who’s Who Abroad: Lucie Schwob,” 4.
36. Lucie Schwob to Adrienne Monnier, Paris, 2 July 1926, IMEC, Caen.
37. Ibid. “Mais il est des jours ou je souffre tant de cet isolement, dont ma
nature surtout mais aussi toute sorte de circonstances sont cause, que ...”
38. Ibid. “Vous m’avez dit d’ecrire une confession parce que vous savez bien
que e’est actuellement la seule tache litteraire qui puisse m’apparaitre tout d’abord
realisable, ou je me sente a l’aise, me permettant une prise directe, un contact avec
la vie concrete, avec les faits. . . . Mais je crois avoir bien compris de quelle fagon,
sous quelle forme vous entendiez cette confession (en somme: sans tricherie d’au-
cune sorte).”
39. Lucie Schwob to Adrienne Monnier, Nantes, 23 July 1926, BLJD, Paris.
“N’ayez pas grand espoir.”
40. Ibid. “D’ailleurs, quoi que je fasse, jamais je ne pourrai eviter vos objec-
tions, trop profondes, qui s’adressent a l’essence meme de mon temperament.”
41. “Confidences au miroir,” an open-ended essay begun by Cahun ca.1945
and dedicated to Suzanne Malherbe, was published only recently in Francois Le-
perlier, Claude Cahun, ecrits (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2002). Cahun published
her meditations on various subjects in revues such as La Gerbe and Philosophie.
42. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 143.
43. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions (Paris: Garnier-Flammanon,
1968), 1:43. “Je forme une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple et dont l’execu-
tion n’aura point d’imitateur. Je veux montrer a mes semblables un homme dans
toute la verite de la nature; et cet homme ce sera moi. Moi seul. Je sens mon coeur
et je connais les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j’ai vus; j’ose
croire n’etre comme aucun de ceux qui existent. Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins
je suis autre. Si la nature a bien ou mal fait de briser le moule dans lequel elle m’a
jete, e’est ce dont on ne peut juger qu’apres m’avoir lu.” Despite Rousseau’s self-
designation as initiator of the autobiographical enterprise, we should note that
nearly two centuries earlier, in 1580, Michel de Montaigne set precisely the same
task for himself; in a note to the reader that prefaces his autobiography, he writes:
“Je veus qu’on m’y voie en ma faôn simple, naturelle, et ordinaire, sans con-
tention et artifice: car e’est moy que je peins. . . . Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moy-mesmes
NOTES TO PAGE 84 169
la matiere de mon livre” (I would like to be seen simply as I am, natural, and ordinary,
without contention and artifice: because it is I whom I paint. ... In this way,
reader, I am myself the material out of which my book is made). Michel de Mon-
taigne, “Au Lecteur,” in Essais (Paris: Gallimard/Pleiade, 1950), n.p. Rousseau
virtually cites Montaigne in the preface and introductory paragraphs of his own
autobiography: “Void le seul portrait d’homme, peint exactement d’apes nature
et dans toute sa verite, qui existe et qu probablement existera jamais” (Here is the
only portrait of a man painted exactly after nature and absolutely true in every
way that exists and probably ever will exist) (preface to Confessions, n.p.).
44. It is tempting to speculate that one of the voices may indeed be that of
Moore. Patrice Allain, in “Sous les Masques du fard,” points to similarities of
style that complicate any certain attribution to Cahun of certain published
texts (among them, Vues et visions). However, it is clearly the mobility and inde-
terminacy of the subject position that matters here —and emphatically not the
attribution of authorship or identification of fictional characters with biographi-
cal counterparts.
45. Cahun and Moore were involved for several years during the 1920s in the
Theatre Esoterique, founded by Berthe d’Yd and Paul Castan. Here Cahun occa-
sionally performed and Moore designed costumes and sets. In this context, they
grew close to an exotic dancer, an American expatriate named Beatrice Wanger,
whose stage name was Nadja (like the heroine of Andre Breton’s later novel of
the same name). The company produced “dramatic tableaux that made one
dream, because of the preciousness and refinement of the palette, of Oscar Wilde’s
Salome.” Unreferenced clipping, dated 29 December 1923, Bibliotheque de
1’Arsenal, Pans, RT 3993 SR97/1984,1923.
During this period, Cahun successfully auditioned before Georges and Ludmilla
Pitoeff but was unable to keep pace with the demands of the company due to frag-
ile health. In 1929, Cahun joined Pierre Albert-Birot’s company Le Plateau, where
she performed as Satan (“Le Diable”) in Albert-Birot’s adaptation of a twelfth-
century mystery play, Les Mysteres d’Adam, in March 1929. Cahun earned
critical praise for her role as Blue Beard’s wife (the character named Elle) in
Albert-Birot’s play Barbe bleue. She also performed in Banlieu, which was not as
well received. Moore apparently did not produce costumes or sets for Le Plateau
but documented several of Albert-Birot’s productions photographically, including
those in which Cahun performed. Albert-Birot mapped out a research program
for new modes of dramatic expression in the theater’s “Programme-Revue,” Le
Plateau. Cahun presented excerpts from Aveux non avenus in this publication, in
which Moore’s portraits of the members of the company also appeared.
Albert-Birot’s theater Le Plateau (the name evokes the “naked stage,” theater
at its essence) survived for only one season but left a mark, nonetheless, upon the
history of modern theater. The troupe lent impetus to the era’s most radical trends,
incorporating the ideas of theorists such as Brecht (the alienation effect) and
E. G. Craig (the shift of dramatic emphasis away from the actor). With Apolli-
naire, Albert-Birot envisioned a theater in the round in which the members of the
audience, acknowledged and activated as participants in the interpretive process,
occupied the center of the theatrical arena. He shared with Apollinaire and other
members of the Parisian avant-garde an interest in puppet theater as a locus
of cultural renewal. (Albert-Birot supported two associations —Les Amis de la
Marionnette and l’Association de Nos Marionettes —whose members included
Apollinaire, Philippe Soupault, Ivan Goll, Joseph Delteil, Jean Furât, Juan Gris,
Marc Chagall, and Maeterlinck, among others.) Although his own early ambi-
tions for exploiting body puppetry outstripped his technical capacities and means,
he urged his cast members to void themselves of individual character, acting
instead as human marionettes in the service of the poetic text.
I am obliged to Arlette Albert-Birot for sharing her insights and writings about
Pierre Albert-Birot’s theatrical activities with me.
46. Cahun, “Jeux uraniens,” 29. “Mais ce qui me plait surtout dans ton entre-
prise incomplete et close, ce sont les places que tu as su laisser vides.”
47. Leigh Gilmore, “An Anatomy of Absence,” Genders 26 (1997): 237.
48. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Mod-
ern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), explores absence as
signifier of the lesbian subject.
49. Barthes, in “Death of the Author,” describes this kind of modern text,
which reduces the all-knowing author to a humble scribe, as a “tissue of quota-
tions” (146).
50. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Aveux non avenus (Paris: Editions du
Carrefour, 1930), 119. “Je recopie cet exercice (que mon partenaire ecrivait en
temps voulu et de ma propre main) pour montrer comment nous cherchons a
delimiter nos personnages.”
51. Jennifer Shaw’s essay “Singular Plural: Collaborative Self-Images in Claude
Cahun’s Aveux non avenus” considers in depth the questions of authorship and
originality that this body of work raises.
52. In “Death of the Author,” Barthes calls our attention to works of modern
literature that problematize the author’s role as the originator of the text. He notes
that Marcel Proust, for example, rather than basing the narrative of A la
Recherche du temps perdu on his life (as convention would have it), “made his
very life a work for which his own book was a model” (144). Barthes tracks the
“desacrilization” of the author from Balzac, through the decadent school, up to
the advent of the surrealist movement. He draws out the continuities between
decadent Symbolism and Surrealism, the two outsiders of high Modernism, and
two movements with which Cahun and Moore identified closely.
53. Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 14.
54. As Judith Butler has argued, “If it is already true that ‘lesbians’ and ‘gay
men’ have been traditionally designated as impossible identities, errors of classi-
fication, unnatural disasters within juridico-medical discourses, or what amounts
to the same, the very paradigm of what calls to be classified, regulated, and con-
trolled, then perhaps these sites of disruption, error, confusion and trouble can be
the very rallying points for a certain resistance to classification and to identity as
such.” Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Outside: Les-
bian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991),
13-31. Cahun and Moore theorized lesbianism, similarly, as a position of “non-
cooperation with God” {Aveux non avenus, 39).
55. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 215. “Chaque fois qu’on invente
une phrase, il serait prudent de la retourner pour voir si elle est bonne.”
56. Ibid. “C’est plus facile que la preuve par neuf.”
57. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 64.
58. Henri Michaux sometimes accompanied Cahun, as several of his letters
indicate. I thank Mireille Cardot for sharing Michaux’s letters with me.
59. Robert Folkenflik, “The Self as Other,” in The Culture of Autobiography:

Constructions of Self-Representation, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 234.
60. Advice columnist Lynn E. Linton, in Modern Women (1889), cited in Bram
Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 135.
61. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 38. “Le mythe de Narcisse est
partout. II nous hante.”
62. I discuss another example, Antoine Magaud’s 1885 painting A Kiss in the
Glass, at some length in Tirza True Latimer, “Looking Like a Lesbian: Portraiture
and Sexual Politics in 1920s Paris,” in Chadwick and Latimer, Modern Woman
Revisited, 135-136.
63. “Editorial on the publication of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion,” Lancet,
1896, as cited in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds., Sexology Uncensored: The
Documents of Sexual Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
51-52.
64. Havelock Ellis, La Femme dans la societe, vol. 1, UHygiene sociale, etudes
de psychologie sociale, trans. Lucy Schwob (Paris: Mercure de France, 1929). This
work was published in English in the context of the author’s multivolumed Study
of Social Psychology. Cahun’s French translation of the second volume of La Femme
dans la societe was never published. In a letter to Adrienne Monnier dated 1926,
Cahun emphasizes the centrality of Ellis’s work to her intellectual development.
65. Havelock Ellis, “Auto-Erotism, a Psychological Study,” cited in Dijkstra,
Idols of Perversity, 145. If the mirror plays a more or less symbolic role in Ellis’s
texts, his contemporary Otto Rank paints a more literal picture of feminine nar-
cissism. He records a case study of a “narcissistic” woman who “would some-
times feel sexual excitement when seated before a mirror doing her hair.” Cited
in Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 146.
66. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 38. “L’invention du metal poli est
d’une claire etymologie narcissienne.”
67. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), in The Stan-
dard Edition, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957),
14:89. Freud’s characterization of homosexuality owes a measure of its credibil-
ity to the complicity of homosexuals. Even before the publication of Freud’s essay
on narcissism, Narcissus had a history within male homosexual subcultures:
Nijinsky’s 1911 ballet Narcisse, for instance, enjoyed cult status within Paris’s
homosexual high society; Jean Cocteau, exploiting this subcultural cliche, episod-
ically adopted the pen name “Narcisse” during the 1920s.
68. Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson and MacMillan, 1897),
87-88.
69. Ibid. Ellis’s attempt to account for lesbians who exhibit no masculine char-
acteristics or proclivities goes beyond the territory explored by sexologists such as
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who sees lesbianism as a sort of psychic by-product of
biological masculinity; for Krafft-Ebing, too, the lesbian may be readily identified
by her physical manliness. The congenital model (figuring homosexuality as an in-
born disposition, not a matter of criminal or sinful conduct) legitimated homo-
phile pleas for tolerance and was widely embraced by early twentieth-century
homosexual advocates (from sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld to novelists
like Radclyffe Hall). The element of choice, however, had more profound politi-
cal implications. The fact that feminism is so often characterized as “leading to”
lesbianism, in both pro- and antifeminist writings of the period, affirms the dis-
ruptive potential of the free-will, or sexual-preference, model.
70. A “mirror with a memory” refers to the fact that the daguerreotype re-
flected back, off of its silvery surface, an uncannily precise image of the sitter; both
the exactitude of the resemblance and the mirrorlike quality of the photographic
plate made the mirror an apt analogy. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., reportedly
coined the phrase “mirror with a memory.” The longer quotation is from a letter
dated 20 September 1920, cited in Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 13.
“Nos deux tetes (ah! que nos cheveux s’emmelent indebrouillablement) se
pencherent sur une photographie. Portrait de Pun ou de l’autre, nos deux narcis-
sismes s’y noyant, c’etait Pimpossible realise en un miroir magique. L’echange, la
superposition, la fusion des desirs. F’unite de Pimage obtenu par Pamitie etroite
des deux corps —aux besoins qu’ils envoient leurs ames au diable!”
71. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 9. “Narcissisme? Certes. C’est ma
meilleure tendance.”
72. “Let us recognize,” Richard Meyer has urged in a similar vein, “the indi-
vidual’s need not only to inhabit the space of identity but also, and even simulta-
neously, to get the hell out of there.” Richard Meyer, “Identity,” in Critical Terms
for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Schiff (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 356.
73. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 39.
74. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993), 16.
75. Sue-Ellen Case, in “Meditations on the Patriarchal Pythagorean Pratfall
and the Lesbian Siamese Two-Step,” argues that the “lesbian body, defined by its
desire, is always two bodies.” Case, “Meditations,” in Choreographing History,
ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 198.
76. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanaly-
sis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 47.
77. Leperlier, “L’Oeil en scene,” n.p.
78. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 66. “Moments les plus heureux de
toute votre vie? . . . Le reve. Imaginer que je suis autre. Me jouer mon role
prefere.”
79. The collage medium, which signifies by appropriating and displacing found
elements, adheres to the Freudian principles of “dream work.” In dream work,
unarticulated and/or unspeakable (repressed) memories re-present themselves in
some disguised form in order to escape the attention of the conscious mind’s cen-
sor. The texts of Freud elucidating this and other mechanisms that permit the
unconscious to circumvent the interdictions of consciousness inspired attempts by
Cahun and Moore’s circle to formalize dream theory in surrealist practices such
as collage, found poetry, automatic writing, and in various photographic and cin-
ematic procedures such as multiple exposure, splicing negatives, dodging, solar-
ization, time lapse and strobe photography, the use of distorting lenses, cinematic
crash cutting, and over- and undercranking the movie camera.
80. Cahun, “Jeux uraniens,” 73. “Parce que je vois le monde a travers toi, il
ne faut pas m’en croire plus mauvais observateur. Tu ne m’as pas ferme ton ame,
tu ne m’as pas refuse l’usage de ton regard clair. . . . Tes yeux, loin de troubler ma
vue, lui sont des lunettes correctrices.”
81. Both Cahun and Moore spoke English fluently. English puns, among other
forms of wordplay, enliven the pages of Aveux non avenus.
82. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 229-230.
Libere de l’anneau (cette prison, l’orbite), peut-etre le globe de l’oeil se met-

trait a tourner ... II evoluerait dans le ciel, se peuplerait de mes creatures,
adorable monde!
II s’est assez vu. Ne s’appartient plus. On Pa detourne de son cours.
Cette amertume qui l’attachait etroitement a soi s’est moderee. Aucune
intimite possible entre nous. Le voila pris dans sa vie nouvelle, englue dans
ce gout pluriel des realites —transitoires, accessoires. Toute concentration
s’est dispersee dans la curiostite de connaitre, de changer l’inconnaissable,
l’inchangeable monde, dans la volonte d’agir (ne fut-ce que sur soi), dans le
souci de se meler a tout, (lui qui se demelait d’autrui si exclusivement!) —
Devenir au lieu d’etre. II se sent aliene. Autant dire: vendu.
II faut en finir.
Frapper en plein visage, en plein centre de 1’ame, au coeur de l’oeil —du
seul qui compte (mon oeil droit, de naissance, est un miroir sans tain.) Frap-
per au plus visible: en plein noir de la pupille dilatee. Et pour ne pas rater
son coup, devant la glace grossissante. . . .
C’est presque fait deja. En somme, il ne reste plus que le bout crispe du
doigt, la gueule ronde prete a hurler quand bondira la balle —et le but, la
proie, la peur, le cercle d’ombre s’elargissant. . . .
Pour la premiere fois, les belles petites images convexes, les enluminures
de l’oeil, les miniatures innocentes du monde, les faibles representants de
l’espace, les reflets, ont cesse d’etre. Ce que je vois la-dedans: cet abom-
inable trou qui saigne, vient du temps, de moi, de l’interieur.
Une main retombe, molle.
L’intensite, la honte, pouvaient suffire: s’il n’est pas mort, il n’en vaut
guere mieux. L’oeil droit dedaigne, rageur, jette son encre sympathique —et
l’oeil gauche renongant a soi-meme, a la pourpre, aux prodiges, n’ose enfin
se regarder.
83. Phelan, Unmarked, 33.

84. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 235.
85. Rousseau, Confessions, 1:44. If “Moi-seul” describes the fully enfranchised
subject of patriarchal discourse (with its monotheistic God, its hierarchical logic,
its single vanishing point), “Moi-meme (faute de mieux)” represents fleeting posi-
tions held, “for want of something better,” by the disenfranchised.
86. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 230. “Le cercle d’ombre s’elargissant.”
87. Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” in L’Amour Fou: Photography and
Surrealism, by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston (New York: Abbeville Press;
Washington, DC.: Corcoran Gallery, 1985), 95.
88. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 229. “Devenir au lieu d’etre.”
89. Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 16.
90. Cahun, “Jeux uraniens,” 83. “Ainsi tu vis, posant ton empreinte sur mes
actes pour les faire admirer.”
91. The hand bears the following arithmetic equation: “Dieux x Dieux / Dieux
= Moi = Dieux” (God times God divided by God equals Me equals God). Cahun
and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 34.
92. Ibid. “Entre mille tatonnements, qu’une seule fois j’ai mis le doigt sur Dieu,
(au fond du coeur et j’aurai beau m’en defendre) me voila passe prophete.”
93. Ibid., 35. “II y a trop de tout.”

94. Ibid. “Si un cube n’entre pas dans ma construction, je le supprime. Un a
un je les retire tous. . . . Je me fais raser les cheveux, arracher les dents, les seins —
tout ce qui gene ou impatiente mon regard —l’estomac, les ovaires, le cerveau con-
scient et enkyste.”
95. Ibid., 147.
96. Ibid., 176. “Brouiller les cartes. Masculin? feminin? mais qa depend des
cas. Neutre est le seul genre qui me convienne toujours. S’il existait dans notre
langue on n’observerait pas ce flottement de ma pensee.”
97. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 144.
98. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 235. “Me faire un autre vocabu-
laire, eclaircir le tain du miroir, cligner de l’oeil, me flouer . . . corriger mes fautes
et recopier mes actes, me diviser pour me vaincre, me multiplier pour m’en
imposer . . . qa n’y peut rien changer.”
99. Cahun’s Jewish identity might also be viewed, like this six-pointed star, as
a cultural label tied around her neck, one partially eclipsed by the secularity of
her background and her own representational choices.
100. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 58. “Devant son miroir . . .
touchee de la grace. . . . Elle consent a se reconnaitre. Et Pillusion qu’elle cree pour
elle-meme s’etend a quelques autres.”
101. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “‘She Meant What I Said’: Lesbian
Double Talk,” in No-Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twenti-
eth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 222. Gilbert and Gubar
focus on the creative relationship of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, among others.
102. Elisabeth de Gramont, introduction to Romaine Brooks: Portraits, tab-
leaux, dessins (Paris: Braun et Cie., 1952), 4. “Indifferente aux honneurs et aux
temoignages de reconnaissance, elle aspire a rester partout etrangere.”
103. Gilbert and Gubar, ‘“She Meant What I Said,’” 22.
104. Revelation 21:1. I thank James Leventhal for calling my attention to the
full citation.
105. Cahun and Moore, Aveux non avenus, 117. “SINGULIER PLURIEL / Nous. /
‘Rien ne peut nous separer.’”
CHAPTER 4. SUZY SOLIDOR AND HER LIKES
The epigraph by Paul Valery, composed for Solidor, is translated “What reason
have you to blame me? / I love as I please / whom it pleases me to love.”
1. The Parisian chanteuse posed for some 250 portraits over the course of a
performance career that spanned three decades. The collection grew, from its
inception in the early 1920s, to include no less than a hundred portraits during
the period under consideration in this chapter, the decades between the wars. Soli-
dor donated forty portraits, representative of the collection, to the Chateau-
Musee, Haut-de-Cagnes, the fortress village to which Solidor retired in 1960 and
where she operated her last club, Chez Suzy. The Chateau-Musee acquired a num-
ber of additional portraits by posthumous donation and made several purchases
(including Solidor’s press books and some of her furniture) at auction. The auc-
tioneer at the Galerie Robiony, 50 r. Gioffredo, Nice, passed close to two hundred
paintings from the collection under his gavel on 6-7 July 1983.
2. Suzy Solidor, cited in Jacques Robert, “Avec cent quinze tableaux et un
chien ne d’un lion et d’une chevre, Suzy Solidor va faire le tour du monde,” Paris
Matin, 7 November 1947, unpaginated press clipping, Bibliotheque de PArsenal

(BA), Paris, RT 10750.
3. Ibid., n.p.
4. G. Rouland, cited in Karine Jay, “Suzy Solidor (1900-1983): Portrait(s)
d’une artiste a la frange doree de Part,” master’s thesis, Universite Jean Moulin,
Lyon III, 1996, 61b. Solidor’s portraits bear the signatures of artists from Greece,
Russia, Germany, Portugal, Japan, England, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Austria,
Canada, Poland, the United States, Venezuela, and Italy, as well as France.
5. For an elaboration of this notion, see Donald Preziosi, “Collecting/Muse-
ums,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 409.
6. Robert Surcouf (1773-1827) began his seafaring career as a slave trader.
In 1795 he launched a series of campaigns (which amounted to state-financed
piracy) targeting the English merchant marine fleet in the Indian Ocean. His tri-
umphs as a corsair made him a popular hero in France and one of the most hunted
men in English maritime history. The British crown offered a sizable reward for
his capture or death. In 1802, having narrowly evaded the bounty hunters, he
returned to Saint-Malo with a cargo valued at two million francs. In 1815, after
conducting yet another spectacular campaign in the Indian Ocean, he turned to
relatively legitimate commercial ventures. Whether or not Surcouf’s distant de-
scendant actually sired Suzy Solidor has never been proven or officially acknowl-
edged. Solidor’s claim was vehemently denied by the family but not (according to
the testimony of several people in Solidor’s entourage) by her alleged father, who
frequented the club (once Solidor’s fame was established) and even contributed a
drawing of his own to her portrait collection.
7. Suzy Solidor, “Suzy Solidor revele son etrange destin de femme sans
hommes,” Confessions 1, 3 (December 1936): 22. The biographical narrative I re-
count here draws on Solidor’s sensationalized autobiographical article for Joseph
Kessel’s popular magazine Confessions, which I introduce, as with Brooks’s mem-
oirs “No Pleasant Memories” and Cahun and Moore’s Aveux non avenus, as a
form of self-representation, not an evidentiary document. Certain aspects of the
tale she tells, though —such as her military exploits —are verifiable. Karine Jay, in
her thesis, “Suzy Solidor: Portrait(s) d’une artiste a la frange doree de Part,” doc-
uments Solidor’s career as an ambulance driver, for instance, and reproduces a
photograph of Solidor in uniform.
8. Suzy Solidor, Deux Cents Peintres, un modele (Paris: Nef de Paris, n.d.),
n.p. “Cette femme, pres de laquelle je vivais, a fait de la petite Bretonne inculte
que j’etais un Parisienne.”
9. Solidor, “Solidor revele son etrange destin,” 24. “Elle me sculptait,
ajoutant quelque chose a son oeuvre chaque jour.”
10. Ibid., 23. “Quant a moi, je garde trop de reconnaissance a Mademoiselle,
j’ai en verite trouve trop de plaisir a notre vie commune pour crier au scandale,
au rapt, ou a la perversion. Tout ce que je puis dire, c’est que je n’etais pas une
tribade-nee.”
11. Ibid. “Mademoiselle composait avec patience l’atmosphere propice a mon
initiation. Les livres mis a ma disposition celebrient tous le cultre saphique.
Femmes, de Verlaine, voisinait avec les oeuvres de Renee Vivien.”
12. Jacques Robert, untitled clipping, 1930s, BA, Paris, microfilm RO16340.
“Elle vie la, parmi des manuscrits de Pierre Fouys et de Valery, vantant la beaute
des amours de Bilitis ou de Chloe.”
13. Solidor, “Suzy Solidor revele son etrange destin,” 24. To celebrate the tenth
anniversary of their “marriage,” Bremond d’Ars presented Solidor with Le Livre
d’amour, a volume of verses and engravings created uniquely for Solidor and
signed by the “most of the artists of our era.”
14. Ibid. “Elle fit faire mon portrait, presque toujours nue, par une quantite de
peintres, tels que Domergue, Van Dongen, Marie Laurencin, Vertes, Foujita,
Kisling . . . j’en passe et des meilleurs. Sa chambre en etait tapissee.”
15. Ibid. “C’etait la grande epoque de Deauville oil Mademoiselle, tous les ans,
menait grand train, tenait table ouverte. Elle m’y exhibait avec un sorte de rage
ostentatoire.”
16. “A bastard is an infringement of all the rules,” Violette Leduc asserts in her
memoir La Batarde; the originary infringement of illegitimacy —irreconcilable —
imposes a kind of template on the life of the bastard from cradle to grave, accord-
ing to Leduc. Although Leduc suffered acutely from the stigmatizing conditions
of her birth, Solidor made the most of her bastard status. She reclaimed infringe-
ment (of every imaginable sort) as her legitimate purview. Violette Leduc, La
Batarde, trans. Derek Coltman (1964; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1979), 44.
17. Cited by Jacques Primack, in an insert to Suzy Solidor, la fille aux cbeveux
de lin: 1933-1939, Chansonophone recording 121, n.d. “Nos enfants n’ont pas
l’habitude de s’habiller avec trois rubis dont deux sur la poitrine ou de s’exhiber
avec un maillot en ecailles ou en filet de pecheur.”
18. In the twelfth century, the town introduced a law of asylum, making it an
attractive shelter for the fortunes of pirates, corsairs, and smugglers.
19. In 1934, when Solidor became the first chanteuse televised in France, the
TV appearance did not widen her audience —only a few dozen French households
owned television sets. However, the event attracted extensive coverage in the
press. Pioneering television as a performance venue reinforced Solidor’s public
identification with the signs and conditions of modernity. M. H. Berger, “La
Television en est aujourd’hui au point ou etait la T.S.F. en 1922 lors des premieres
emissions radiola: Les impressions de Suzy Solidor, premiere chanteuse de music-
hall Televisionnee’ par les P.T.T.,” Excelsior, 6 June 1934, unpaginated press clip-
ping, BA, Paris, microfilm RO16340.
20. Unreferenced clipping, Solidor press book, Chateau-Musee Archives (C-M
Archives), Cagnes-sur-Mer.
21. Suzy Solidor, Fil d’or (Paris: Editions de France, 1940), 102-103. “Tu nav-
igueras la ou la mer est la plus severe, la plus dure aux marins. Combats avec elle,
chaque jour de ta vie. Triomphe, ce sera ton honneur et ta redemption.”
22. Suzy Solidor, “Les Feux de la rampe,” part 3, radio broadcast, 1 October
1971, Radio-France (RF) Archives, Paris, 200V 1127.
23. One was Lucienne Boyer, who worked her way up from popular music
halls to increasingly exclusive venues and finally opened her own nightclub in
1930; it closed later that year. In Montparnasse, the duo Pills and Tabet operated
Chez Elle with more success. Finally, in 1938, Agnes Capri opened Capricorne in
an upscale locale between the Palais Royal and the Opera (just around the cor-
ner from Solidor’s La Vie Parisienne).
24. Susan Stewart, in her chapter on the “objects of desire,” explores the role
that collecting plays in the creation of presence, absence, and milieu. See Susan
Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 157.
NOTES TO PAGES 114-120 1 77
25. Solidor, Deux Cents Peintres, n.p.: “une Parisienne qui aurait garde tous
les defauts et les qualites de sa race.”
26. Albert E. Gallatin compiled a list of representations of Whistler, Portraits
and Caricatures of James McNeill Whistler: An Iconography, in 1913 that iden-
tified some four hundred works.
27. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” in Fetishism as Cul-
tural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993), 268-269. If the question of feminine agency remained vexed for women
of Solidor’s generation, the debate had at least been ushered into a more public
arena by artists such as Brooks, Cahun and Moore, and Solidor herself.
28. With respect to the star system emerging in the early twentieth century, see
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: Macmillan, 1987).
29. Goldwyn broke new ground in 1925 by establishing a permanent in-house
photography department; this gave the studio absolute control over an actor’s
image. Distinct genres emerged, each requiring a specialist: the film still on loca-
tion, the glamorous studio portrait, the product endorsement photo, the casual
shot off the set.
30. A 1934 photograph by Jean Morel, which I did not succeed in obtaining
permission to reproduce despite the determined efforts of Tom Gitterman (Tom
Gitterman Gallery, New York), shows the star’s face hovering like a logo over her
name amid a field of neon lights and specterlike reflections.
31. Louise Brooks, cited in Robert Dance and Bruce Robertson, introduction
to Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press/Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2002 ), n.p.
32. Roland Barthes, “The Pace of Garbo,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Son-
tag (New York: Hill and Wang), 83-84.
33. Portrait of Mile S. avec le chien Pacha appartenant a Mile de Bremond
d’Ars, for instance, was reproduced as a full-page illustration in the Catalogue
officiel illustre of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts Salon in 1926. Lempicka’s
portrait, exhibited at the 1933 Salon des Independants, was reproduced in several
journals.
34. “Un Bel Atelier moderne,” actualites feminines (women in the news, news
for women), newsreel, Pathe, 1932.
35. Jean-Gabriel Domergue identified himself as the “inventor of the pin-up.”
Marie Wallet, “Jean-Gabriel Domergue,” in 1918-1958: La Cote d’azur et la
modernite (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1997), 210.
36. Rene Guetta, unreferenced press book clipping, ca. 1940, C-M Archives,
Cagnes-sur-Mer. “Je l’admire comme femme et comme artiste —et je ne dois pas
etre seul, puisque cent peintres —les uns plus connus que les autres —executerent
son portrait. Ils pendaient tous aux murs, ces portraits de Loujita, de Marie Lau-
rencin, de Domergue, de Van Dongen, de Trucmuche ou de Machinskoff et si on
a le bonheur d’etre lvre-mort, on en voit mille, deux mille qui tourbillonnent folle-
ment devant les yeux. . . . Mais la Suzy Soloidor en chair et en os faisait palir cette
collection d’oeuvre d’art.”
37. “Un Quart d’heure avec Suzy Solidor,” part 2, radio broadcast, 7 April
1948, RL Archives, Paris, NS3108. “Chaque soir, mes amis les peintres venaient
me voir, a la fois pour me dire bonjour mais aussi pour constater que leur por-
trait etait bien en place.”
38. Ibid. “Des journalistes, bientot, les accompagnerent, probablement satis-
faits d’effectuer des reportages sur le tout.”
39. Cocteau’s illustrations for Jean Genet’s homoerotic novel Querelle (1948)
earned Genet a fine and a jail sentence for “offence against public decency.”
40. Marius-Ary Leblond, “Mariette Lydis,” La Vie, 15 July 1928, unpaginated
clipping, Fonds Bougie, Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Regarding an
exhibition of forty paintings and illustrations at the Galerie Tremois, Leblond
wrote: “La suavite dans la torture. Le monde de la souffrance et de la volupte
s’ouvre. Une grande artiste, avec le lyrisme fatal de Sapho . . . nous conduit dans
cet enfer: Le Suicide, Criminelies. . . . tous les vices, toutes les horreurs s’y
depeignent, entre autres le supplice de la caresse, avec une sobriete hallucinante
de lignes convulses, de passivite abimee, de douleur qui approche l’extase. ... La
femme de Vienne, devenant libre comme l’homme dans l’Europe sans regie et sans
foi, verse fatalement a la curiostite de l’extreme; elle prend l’intensite pour la pas-
sion, et elle prete a l’artificiel toute la seve de sang de la nature.”
41. Regarding an exhibition of Edzard’s work at the gallery Durand-Ruel, the
critic Marcel Sauvage observed: “void toutes les fleurs noires du romantisme qui
est le fond meme de Fame allemande.” Marcel Sauvage, “Un Peintre allemand a
Paris,” L’Art Vivant 83 (June 1928): 471. The Pascin reference is from a clipping
preserved in the municipal archives of Cagnes-sur-Mer.
42. Petit Marseillais, 15 April 1936, unreferenced clipping, Solidor press book,
C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-Mer.
43. Solidor reproduced Zinoviev’s portrait in Deux Cents Peintres. Pierre Bar-
latier described Solidor as follows: “brillant comme un soleil noir. Elle avait Pair
reelement d’une figure de proue, d’une de ces statues de bois, longue et mince,
amoureusement patinee par la lumiere et les embruns et ou trainaient encore un
peu d’or a la chevelure, un peu de rose aux joues et aux levres, un peu de bleu
aux yeux.” Barlatier, excerpt from a review reprinted in Donation Suzy Solidor
(Cagnes-sur-Mer: Chateau-Musee, 1973), n.p.
44. “Quand Suzy Solidor devient romanciere,” 29 April 1939, unreferenced
press clipping, BA, Paris, microfilm RO16340.
45. “Ouvre tes jambes, prends mes flancs / Dans ces rondeurs blanches et lisses
/ Ouvre tes deux genoux tremblants, ouvre tes cuisses / Ouvre tout ce qu’on peut
ouvrir / Dans les chauds tresors de ton ventre / J’inonderai sans me tarir 1’abime
ou j’entre.”
46. “Je suis un vieux gargon dit Suzy Solidor: ‘Quand j’ai un cauchemar je reve
que je me marie,’” Samedi Soir, 25 December 1948, unpaginated clipping, Soil-
dor press book, C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-Mer. “Suzy Solidor n’a jamais cache
la passion vigoureuse et tendre qu’elle eprouvait pour les creatures de son sexe. . . .
Les enfants charmantes qui chantaient dans son cabaret etaient toutes ses ‘petites
alliees.’”
47. Lemaire contributed in a number of ways to the intimate ambiance of the
club; she circulated among the tables, chatting up the clientele, and she primed
the audience for Solidor’s appearances by performing “warm-up” sets that she
had rehearsed with the vedette. Interview, Doris Lemaire, Cagnes-sur Mer, April
2001.
48. “Dany Dauberson Nouvelle Suzy Solidor,” Radar, 6 March 1949, unpag-
inated clipping, Solidor press book, C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-Mer.
49. When asked to which political party she adhered, Solidor responded: “De
la Solidorite Feminine!” Unreferenced press clipping dated 1952, Solidor press
book, C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-Mer.
50. “Je Suis un Vieux Garmon dit Suzy Solidor,” n.p. “Quand je mange du foie
gras et que j’ai un cauchemar, dit elle, je reve que je me marie. D’ailleurs, je suis
un vieux garôn.”
51. “On Ferme chez Suzy Solidor,” Marianne, July 1938, unpaginated press
clipping, Solidor press book, C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-Mer. “La-bas je chan-
terai, je visiterai le Temple de Lesbos avec ferveur, en pelerin.”
52. Leon Treich, “Notes parisiennes: Les memoires de Suzy Solidor,” Le Soir,
23 July 1966, unpaginated press clipping, BA, Paris, microfilm RO16340. “Ces
histoires ne m’enleveront pas un ami. De meme que les adversaires du nu sont les
femmes mal faites, les medisants sont des refoules qu j’ai ecartes de ma chambre!”
53. The tea dances were announced on flyer for La Vie Parisienne, ca. 1937,
C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-Mer.
54. Maurice Barbezet, director of the firm Packard, succeeded Bremond d’Ars
as Solidor’s protector in 1929. Fie set her up as an antique dealer in the boutique
La Grande Mademoiselle and undoubtedly helped finance the opening of the club
La Vie Parisienne. In the late 1930s, Solidor had an affair with Jean Mermoz, the
legendary aviator, whose love letters she incorporated into her recitations at the
club in the wake of the flyer’s highly publicized disappearance. A sign of the ris-
ing conservatism of these times, Solidor’s exploitation of this romantic episode
marks a momentary shift in a self-promotional strategy that had heretofore priv-
ileged lesbian liaisons.
55. Jean Serviere, “Sur la voix de Suzy Solidor,” Je Suis Partant, 13 December
1941, unpaginated clipping, Solidor press book, C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-
Mer. “Sans Confessions et une aureole de mauvais aloi, il n’y aurait pas autant
de monde rue Sainte-Anne.” Solidor’s “confessions” appeared in the first issue of
the magazine, along with those of Colette and Joseph Kessel, the editor of the
magazine.
56. Rene Guetta, unreferenced clipping, Solidor press book, C-M Archives,
Cagnes-sur-Mer. “Elle parlait a ses clients comme a des amis puisque tous ses
clients etaient ses amis. Elle allait, elle venait, dans la penombre. . . . Et dans la
petite piece, intime comme un boudoir, je me sentais heureux, attendri, plein d’in-
dulgence pour les autres et pour moi-meme!”
57. Charles Zalber, cited in Jay, “Suzy Solidor,” 78.
58. Serviere, “Sur la Voix de Suzy Solidor,” n.p.
59. E.g., Marguerite Monot, who also composed for Piaf.
60. “Le plus job bateau du monde / Et le plus finement gree, / C’est le joli corps
de ma blonde / Ayant la souplesse de l’onde / Et je la gouverne a mon gre.”
61. “Les Portraits de Suzy,” A Paris, 10 March 1933, unpaginated clipping,
Solidor press book, C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-Mer.
62. This was the first of three publications (Quarante Peintres, un modele;
Cent Peintres, un modele; Deux Cents Peintres, un modele); these catalogues pre-
serve traces of the collection, now mainly dispersed.
63. Joseph Kessel, in Solidor, Deux Cents Peintres, n.p. “Des murs la regardent
les quarante portraits qu’elle a inspires a quarante peintres de toutes les ecoles, de
toutes les races, de tous les pays. Quarante visages, qui sont a elle, confrontent le
veritable, le vivant qui en meme temps leur ressemble et les defie.”
64. “Portraits de Suzy.” “J’ai l’impression . . . que je me deplace devant des
miroirs deformants et pour n’etre pas trop depaysee je m’efforce toujours de
ressembler a mon dernier portrait.”
65. “La Memoire de Suzy Solidor,” radio broadcast, produced by Nadine
Nimier, 15 August 1978, RF Archives, Paris, 78C3095A72. “Quand je les vois,
comme ga, a cote de moi, ce n’est pas moi que je vois, c’est tous les artistes: je
revois Kisling, je revois Foujita, et tous les copains.”
66. Jean Cocteau, in Suzy Solidor, Quarante Peintres, un modele (Paris: Pierre
Morel, ca. 1938); Cocteau, cited by Michel Sineux, record jacket text, Suzy Soli-
dor Anthology: IdAmiguite faite chanteuse, n.d.
67. “Partir avant le Jour,” the theme song of the 1938 film Images of Paris,
was composed by Ted Grouya, who performed the duet with Solidor on a record-
ing released the same year.
68. Jay, “Suzy Solidor,” 73. Yvonne George, who performed at Cocteau’s
haunt, Le Boeuf sur le Toit, had ties to the club’s lesbian and male homosexual
coteries.
69. Unreferenced press clipping, Solidor press book, C-M Archives, Cagnes-
sur-Mer. “C’est non seulement une realisation emouvante, mais c’est aussi un ‘test’
precieux qui permet de controler l’artificiel, le ‘chique’ des fausses chansons de
marins actuellement a la mode et dont Mme Suzy Solidor incarne, avec d’ailleurs
un incontestable talent, le genre deplorablement faux.”
70. Sylvie, “Les Confidences de Suzy Solidor,” unpaginated, undated clipping,
Solidor press book, C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-Mer. ‘“Je passe mes vacances
a bord d’un voilier. J’y prepare des chansons. En pleine atmosphere. Et a la ren-
tree . . . ,’ les mots semblaient suspendus aux levres de Suzy Solidor. J’attends: ‘Le
cabaret me reprend. Le cinema aussi, maintenant. Ce dernier m’a mise en gout
avec La Gargonne. II est question pour moi d’un second film ou je jouerai le role
d’une femme voguant seule a travers l’ocean. Toujours la mer.’”
71. If Solidor could claim be the “most portraitured woman of her era,” she
could also claim the distinction of being one of the era’s most caricatured. The art
of caricature, as Wendy Reaves has shown, enjoyed its heyday in the 1920s and
1930s; very much associated with la mode and la moderne, the development of
this form of portraiture kept pace with the development of the modern cult of
celebrity (which was, according to Walter Winchel, “more a matter of press than
of prestige”). See Wendy Reaves, Celebrity Caricature in America (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1998).
72. My translation is a loose one. The original text of the refrain follows: “N’es-
pere pas m’attacher au rivage / Ma barque folle suit le flot / Je poursuis l’eternel
mirage / Qui fait rever les matelots. / A travers marees et rafales / D’un pole a
l’autre sans frayeur / Je vais ou nul n’a fait escale; / Je cherche Pile du bonheur.”
73. Solidor, Fil d’or, 186.
74. The author Albert T’Serstevens was known for travel narratives such as
Voyages aux lies de I’Amerique (1931) and maritime novels such as Les Corsaires
du roi (1924); he also composed the lyrics for Solidor’s hit “La Maison des
marins.”
75. T’Serstevens, in Solidor, Quarante Peintres, n.p. “Elle est faite pour chanter
ces chansons de marins, qui portent en elles la nostalgie du lointain, qui ont
l’odeur de l’iode, de la saumure et du doudron. Elle me fait penser, non pas a une
femme, mais un jeune matelot de Saint-Malo qui garde dans les yeux le bleu de
la mer, et sur tout son visage long et maigre, le lyrisme des grands voyages.”
76. Solidor, “Suzy Solidor revele son etrange destin,” 23. “One cannot re-
proach a fish for not being a bird.”
77. Ibid., 25. “Comment serais-je responsable d’une confusion qui, aujour-
d’hui, tantot me jette sur la rude epaule tutelaire d’un homme, tantot veut que je
prenne contre mon flanc a jamais sterile, que je caresse et que j’apaise une jeune
et faible creature, dont je ne sais plus tres bien parfois si elle est mon amie ou mon
enfant.”
78. Bernard Talmey, cited in Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 153.
79. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1903; reprint, London: William Heine-
mann, 1906), 198. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (also widely read
in France in the early twentieth century) maintained that “all women fall into the
same category, whereas each man is an individual unto himself; the physiognomy
of the former conforms to a generalized standard; that of the latter is in each case
unique.” Cesare Lombroso and G. Ferrero, La Femme criminelle et la prostituee,
trans. Louise Meille, as cited in Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer:
French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1996), 10.
80. Herman Melville, in tales such as White Jacket and, of course, Moby Dick,
painted an enduring picture of the homosocial seafaring life. If Melville’s work
was only belatedly translated into French, stories of the sea by established authors
such as T’Serstevens, Roditi, Cocteau, and Genet reached wide audiences.
81. Gilles Barbedette and Michel Carassou, Paris Gay 1925 (Paris: Presses de
la Renaissance, 1981), 80-81.
82. Jean Cocteau, Professional Secrets, trans. Robert Phelps (New York: Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 119-120.
83. Ibid., 120.
84. The couplet “Le del est bleu / La mer est verte / Laisse un peu ta braguette
ouverte” survives in the collective memory of Paris’s gay male communities to this
day, although its point of origin has long since been forgotten.
85. For an analysis of the gay cultural implications of early twentieth-century
ballet, see my essay, Latimer, “Balletomania: A Sexual Disorder?” in GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, 2 (1999): 173-197.
86. Pierre Barlatier, “Vedettes d’hier: Elies ne sont pas oubliees,” Le Soir, 1 July
1965, unpaginated clipping, BA, Paris, microfilm RO16340.
87. Ibid., n.p.
88. Ibid. “On s’arrachait les aquarelles de Dignimont representant, avec
vigueur et sans vaine sensiblerie, des marins dans des bars louches.” Dignimont,
known for this kind of genre painting, also produced a portrait of Solidor.
89. “La Chanson de la belle pirate,” 1936. “J’ai send vibrer en mon ame / l’ap-
pel du large et des dangers / et quittant mes habits de femme / sur un trois mat je
m’engageais / puis je fis serment sous la lune / d’etre chevalier de fortune.”
CONCLUSION
The epigraph is from Francois Leperlier, Claude Cahun, ecrits (Paris: Jean Michel
Place, 2002), 629-630. “They were forced, at the end of the day, to condemn us
without believing in our existance. ... As if with regret.”
1. Natalie Barney to Djuna Barnes, 13 January 1963; Djuna Barnes to Natalie
Barney, 16 October 1963; Barnes Archives, McKeldin Library, University of
Maryland, College Park.
2. Jean Chalon published an article titled “Natalie Barney” (Connaissance
des Arts, November 1965, 82-87) and began work on his biography, Chere
Natalie Barney: Portrait d’une seductrice (Paris: Stock, 1976). Francois Chapon,
curator of Barney’s papers, published a collection of writings the same year: Autour
de Natalie Clifford Barney (Paris: Universite de Paris, 1976). These initiatives
introduced lesbians of the new generation to Barney and her entourage and
raised awareness of their cultural and sexual-cultural significance as pathbreaking
predecessors.
3. A few of this community’s prominent citizens did their best to maintain
footholds in the chosen homeland. Sylvia Beach, for instance, remained in Paris;
Janet Flanner went home, but only to return to Europe as a war correspondent.
4. Fay, a Harvard University graduate and professor of American history in the
French university system, had promoted Stein’s writings in France, translating The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and assisting in the production of the French
version of The Making of Americans. Before the war, Fay, a member of the gay
male circle that revolved around Stein and Toklas, had been a regular visitor to
their Paris household. After the war, from his exile in Switzerland, he wrote a
memoir called Les Precieux, valorizing his role as the wartime protector of Stein
and Toklas. For an introductory exploration of this complex and (for Stein and
Toklas) compromising relationship, see Janet Malcolm, “Gertrude Stein’s War:
The Years in Occupied France,” New Yorker, 2 June 2003, 59-81. Malcolm draws
on a fascinating and thoroughly documented essay penned jointly by Edward M.
Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, “Gertrude Stein: September 1942 to September 1944,”
published as an appendix to the collection edited by these two scholars, The Let-
ters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1996).
5. All the citations in this paragraph are drawn from Romaine Brooks, “A War
Interlude” or “On the Hill of Florence during the War,” unpublished, unpaginated
manuscript, ca. 1940-1945, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington,
DC. Brooks did not subject her anti-Semitism to scrutiny, despite the significance
of her personal relationships with Jewish men and women —most notably, Ida
Rubinstein and Carle Dreyfus. Dreyfus, Barney’s brother-in-law and a curator of
the Louvre, rescued Brooks’s paintings from her Paris studio in advance of the
German Occupation and hid them in a safe location until the city’s liberation. Bar-
ney, who was half Jewish herself, also embraced positions that we would not hes-
itate to identify today as anti-Semitic. In 1941 she wrote an essay, for instance,
advocating a territorial solution to Europe’s “Jewish problem.” “La Question
juive et la terre promise” urged Jews to evacuate Europe and found a new home-
land upon their ancient holy lands. Fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, Bibliotheque
Litteraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, NCB.Ms86. During the final months of the war,
Brooks and Barney huddled in the basement of a neighbor as Allied bombs ham-
mered Tuscany. The Germans had set up antiaircraft artillery guns in Brooks’s gar-
den and requisitioned the first floor of the villa as a command post. Brooks and
Barney returned to this home early one morning, as the Allies advanced, and
found, to their dissatisfaction, that “no room had been made ready for us: the
ground-floor evacuated by the Germans during the night was uninhabitable and
our bedrooms were covered with fallen plaster caused by the detonations. No one
had thought to order the little maid to clean up a room.” Brooks, “War Interlude.”
6. Claude Cahun, “Le Muet dans la melee” (1948), in Francois Leperlier,
Claude Cahun, ecrits (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 2002), 627, 629-630. “La Gestapo
chercha quatre ans en vain. Si nous avions pu vivre parees contre toute perquisi-
tion, si soudaine fut-elle, ils n’auraient jamais cru, malgre leurs informateurs, qu’il
s’agissait de nous. Meme toutes preuves en mains ils n’en croyaient pas leurs yeux.
Ils restaient persuades que nous ne pouvions etre plus que des comparses, complices
de . . . X. Pour obtenir qu’ils cessent de nous interroger au sujet de nos affiliations
hypothethiques avec . . . X, ou avec l’lntelligence Service (!!!), il nous fallut leur

demontrer que nous etions pleinement conscientes et capables de nos ‘crimes.’ Un
peu de patience —de part et d’autre —y suffit. . . . Constatant que nous etions des
femmes, ces etres inferieurs . . . ; que nous avions a Jersey la reputation de bour-
geoises paisibles, qu’il etait impossible de nous faire passer . . . pour des ‘terror-
istes’; que, lors de notre arrestation —devant temoins jersiais —nous n’avions fait
aucune resistance; que vis-a-vis d’eux-memes, ce soir-la et au cours des interroga-
toires, nous n’avions qu’une hostilite froide, exempte de toute violence emotive
. . . ils y perdirent leur ‘aryien’: notre ‘idealisme’ passait leur conception cynique
de l’espece humaine. Cela piquait ce qui malgre tout subsistait en eux de curiosite
psychologique. ... A Jersey, ils durent, en fin de compte, nous condamner sans
croire a notre existence. En quelque sorte. Comme a regret.” In addition to these
memoirs, evidence of the couple’s actions —the propaganda tracts they posted on
barracks doors by night, the notes they wrote and slipped into soldiers’ shirt pock-
ets—has been preserved by the Jersey Heritage Trust. Letters (to Breton, to
Charles Henri-Barbier) describing their activities in some detail also survive in pri-
vate collections and public archives.
7. Suzanne Malherbe, “Sentenced to Death by Island Nazis: The Story of Two
Gallant Frenchwomen,” Jersey Post, 14 July 1945, unpaginated clipping, Jersey
Heritage Trust Archives.
8. Inscription by Claude Cahun on the back of a photo, shot by Moore in
1940, that pictures Cahun and her domestic employee Edna posing with a bar-
que, Defender Jersey. They had hidden the illegal boat from the Germans at the
request of the local fishermen. “II nous reste pas mal de films . . . nous en avions
tant qu’ils se seront lasse de les detuire . . . mais je n’ai jamais eu le temps ni le
courage de verifier exactement ce qui reste —sachant que mes preferes manquent.”
9. Cited in Jacques Robert, “Avec cent quinze tableaux et un chien ne d’un
lion et d’une chevre, Suzy Solidor va faire le tour du monde,” Paris Matin, 7
November 1947, unpaginated press clipping, Bibliotheque de 1’Arsenal, Paris, RT
10750. “Recevoir le client, c’est mon business!”
10. Ibid. “Mais que c’est elle qui l’a lancee en France, en des temps ou cette
Lily ne pouvait que faire figure d’espionne.”
11. Solidor, cited in “Je suis un vieux garôn dit Suzy Solidor: ‘Quand j’ai un
cauchemar je reve que je me marie,’” Samedi Soir, 25 December 1948, unpagi-
nated clipping, Solidor press book, C-M Archives, Cagnes-sur-Mer.
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INDEX
Note: Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations.

Abbott, Berenice, 34, 35, 107, 138, Austin, Jane, 33
154nn. 47, 48 autobiographical novelizing, 9
Academie des Femmes, 66, 156n. 71
Academie Franâise, 156n. 71 Bailie, Herve, 31, 32
Acosta, Mercedes de, 40 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 165-166n. 13
Acton, Harold, 61 ballet, gay cultural implications of,
Adler, Alfred, 18 181n. 85
AFFW See American Fund for French Ballets Russes, 60, 61, 133, 160n. 51;
Wounded Les Matelots, 133; Triumph of
Albert-Birot, Pierre, 80, 169-170n. 45 Neptune, The, 133
Allain, Patrice, 169n. 44 Ballets Suedois, 60, 120
Allan, Maud, 29, 76, 166n. 16 Barbezer, Maurice, 179n. 54
Alpine Gallery, 51, 160n. 54 Barbier, Charles-Henri, 165n. 5
Alsace, France, 21 Barlatier, Pierre, 178n. 43
amazon, 4, 37, 145n. 4 Barnes, Djuna: Abbott’s portraits of,
Amazons, 37 34; description of Barney, 39;
American Fund for French Wounded Ladies Almanack, 15, 23, 24,
(AFFW), 21-22 38-39, 39, 42, 138; letter from
Anderson, Margaret, 107 Barney, 18In. 1; Nightwood, 9,
Andrade, 129; Suzy Solidor, 130 129; non- association with Solidor,
androgynous energies, 146n. 12 107; remarks on legendary time,
Antheil, Georges, 40 137; return to United States, 138
anti-Semitism, 182n. 5 Barney, Natalie: Academie des Femmes,
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 40, 49, 158n. 156n. 71; affair with Liane de
23, 169-170n. 45 Pougy, 108; appreciation for
Aragon, Louis, 40, 80 Debussy, 160n. 51; Aventures de
Arletty, 110 Vesprit, 39, 41, 42; Romaine
UArt Vivant, 63 Brooks: Portraits, tableaux,
Arzner, Dorothy, 21, 35 dessins, 64-67, 65, 66; Brooks’s
Association des Ecrivains et Artistes letter to, 62; caricature of, 16;
Revolutionnaires, 138 Cinq Petits Dialogues grecs, 37;
202 INDEX
Barney, Natalie (continued) Benois, Alexandre, 161n. 61

classical revival, 77; comments on Benstock, Shari, 10, 160n. 55; Women
Brooks’s hypersensitivity, of the Left Bank, 10
159-160n. 50; cross-dressing, Berard, Christian, 120
155-156n. 70; description of Paris, Bergson, Henri, 82
42; dissolution of milieu, 136; era Berlin, Germany, 28, 35, 147n. 20
dubbed “our belle epoque,” 6; Bernhardt, Sarah, 33, 35, 40, 115,
expatriate, 103; labelling of 116
Brooks’s paintings, 51, 57; letter to Bersani, Leo, 149n. 30
Barnes, 18In. 1; letter to Brooks, Birnbaum, Paula, 151-152n. 16
158n. 19, 159n. 46, 163n. 78; Bizardel, Yvon, 163n. 79
living in Mytilene, 37-38; memoirs, Blanche, Jacques-Emile, 87-90, 89
30, 81; non-association with Solidor, Blum, Leon, 29
107; pacifist, 22; poem about Le Boeuf sur le Toit, 111, 180n. 68
Brooks and her ilk, 64; portraiture, Borgatti, Renata, 40, 66
107; pressure on Smithsonian, Boston, Massachusetts, 22
163n. 82; queen of Amazon Paris, Boston Evening Transcript, 64
39; relationship with Cahun and Boyer, Lucienne, 176n. 23
Moore, 80; reviews by Beaumont Bracquemond, Marie, 157n. 11
and Bizardel encouraged by, 163n. Brassa'i, Georges, 23-24, 25
79; salon, 38-41, 66, 134, 137, Brayer, Yves, 105-106; Suzy Solidor,
155n. 65, 156n. 74; society of the 106
future, 8; villa requisitioned by Brecht, Bertolt, 128, 169-170n. 45;
Germans, 182n. 5; women apart, 14 Beggar’s Opera, 128
Barthes, Roland, 68, 84, 85, 102, Bremond d’Ars, Yvonne de, 108-109,
117, 154n. 47, 164-165n. 4, 112, 176n. 13, 179n. 54
170nn. 49, 52 Brest, France, 133
bastard status, 176n. 16 Breton, Andre, 80, 166n. 15,
Bartol, Marion, 22 169-170n. 45
Bataille, George, 80, 97 Brooks, Louise, 117
Baudelaire, Charles, 53, 59, 108, 120, Brooks, Romaine: aestheticism as
159n. 37, 160n. 54; Femmes relates to lesbianism, 42, 45, 131;
damnees, 31 allegiance to privileged class, 139;
Beach, Sylvia: Abbott’s portraits of, anti-Semitism, 182n. 5; appreciation
34; birthday letter to Bryher, 15In. for Debussy, 160n. 51; associated
14; bookshop, 9, 36; comments with Whistler, 159n. 41, 159n. 45;
on Bryher, 23; comments on, 149n. associations with Wilde, 160n. 55;
41; foothold in Paris, 182n. 3; autobiography, 163n. 82; Azalees
lesbian elite, 61; letters from Ellis, blanches, 49-51, 50; Barney’s
149n. 40; non-association with comments on hyper-sensitivity,
Solidor, 107; relationship with 159-160n. 50; Le Chapeau a
Cahun and Moore, 80; set of fleurs, 25; Dame en deuil, 25; La
Ellis’s work, 16, 18 Debutante, 25, 27; defining
Beardsley, Aubrey, 76-77, 16In. 59 possibilities for women, 6; excerpt
Beaumont, Eon de, 155-156n. 70 from Montesquiou, 157-158n. 14;
Beaumont, Germaine, 163n. 79 exchange of portraits with Gluck,
Becat, Paul-Emile, 16, 149n. 41 161-162n. 65; feminine agency,
Bellmer, Hans, 99 question of, 177n. 27; La Lrance
Benjamin, Walter, 40, 52, 54, 62, croisee, 20-21, 21, 150n. 4, 159n.
157-158n. 14 34; Gramont’s comments about,
INDEX 203
103; independent income, 163n. avenus, 80-87, 83, 92-102, 98,

80; isolation in Nice, 136; Jean 100; confessions, 82-84; descrip-
Cocteau a Vepoque de la grande tion of encounter with Moore,
roue, 52; Legion of Honor, 64, 165n. 8; dream theory, 172n. 79;
159n. 34; letter from Barney, 158n. Ellis’s impact on, 17; expatriate,
19, 159n. 46, 163n. 78; measuring 102; feminine agency, question of,
success, 135; memoirs, 81,139; 177n. 27; hair style, 26; Jewish
modelling her fashions, 63-64, 63; identity, 174n. 99; lesbian elite, 61;
multinational lesbian roster letters to Monnier, 15On. 46, 164n.
portrayed by, 8; non-association 3, 168n. 39; marginality as form
with Solidor, 107; nudes, 158n. 18; of protest, 135; memoirs, 139;
outbreak of World War II, 137; non-association with Solidor, 107;
Peter, a Young Englishwoman, 62; outbreak of World War II, 137,
portraits, 25, 40, 43-67, 107, 114, 139-140; pen name, 20; photo-
157n. 8; Red Cross activities, 20, graphic works, 68-104, 165-166n.
151n. 7; remark on portrait sub- 13; portraiture, 107, 114, 144;
jects, 158n. 23; Romaine Brooks: relationship with Michaux, 170n.
Portraits, tableaux, dessins, 64-67, 58; relatives, 166n. 15; response to
65, 66; salons frequented by, 134; censorship, 29; self-representation,
Self-Portrait, 1-2, 2, 45, 46, 12-13, 164-165n. 4; Theatre
51-55, 61, 62, 144, 151n. 7; Esoterique, 169-170n. 45; trans-
self-representation, 12-13; Ena, lation of Ellis’s work, 171n. 64;
Lady Troubridge, 24, 26, 61; La untitled (after Flandrin), 72, 131;
Vie passe sans moi, 52 untitled (author portrait), 93-94,
Browne, Stella, 150n. 44 93; untitled (Cahun reading
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 33 LTmage de la femme), 75; untitled
Bruant, Aristide, 112, 113 (Cahun with mirror image), 95;
Bruce, David, 163n. 80 untitled (“duogram”), 70; untitled
Brummell, Beau, 55 (Moore with mirror image), 94;
Brummell top hat, 55, 57 untitled (star), 102, 103; utopian
Bry, Henri, 105 potential of alienation, 42; van-
Bryher: bans on Allan’s play, 29; guard movements, 134; Vues et
Beach’s birthday letter to, 151n. visions, 77-80, 79; wordplay,
14; Beach’s description of, 23; 172n. 81; and desire for egalitarian
Borderline, 18, 36; Beach’s patron, society, 6
18; Close Up, 18, 35; Development, Cahun, Leon, 166n. 15
9; expatriate, 36-37; lesbian elite, Caillois, Roger, 80
61; letters with Ellis, 162n. 67; Camille, Michael, 71
non-association with Solidor, Caminade, Pierre, 80
107; producer, 35; Two Selves, 9, Camx-Zoegger, Marie-Anne, 157n. 11
18; utopian potential of alienation, Cannes film festival, 120
42 Capri, 37, 147-148n. 22
Bryn Mawr, 153n. 37 Capri, Agnes, 176n. 23
Butler, Judith, 10, 170n. 54; Gender Capricorn, 176n. 23
Trouble, 10 Carco, Francis, 124
CARD. See Comite Americain pour
Cahun, Claude: article against homo- les Regions Devastees
phobia, 166n. 16; attendance at Cardot, Mireille, 170n. 58
Barney’s salon, 40; attribution of caricatures, 180n. 71
authorship, 169n. 44; Aveux non Carlyle, Thomas, 81
204 INDEX
Carolus-Duran, Charles-Auguste- I’impur, 9, 129; theatrical person-

Emile, La Lemme au gant, 54 ality, 35; Vagabonde, 120; works
Carpenter, Edward, 15, 30, 36, 66, illustrated by Lydis, 120
77, 146n. 12, 164n. 3, 167n. 19 Colin, Paul, 120
Carroll’s, 123 Coliseum, 60
Case, Sue-Ellen, 172n. 75 collage medium, 172n. 79
Castan, Paul, 169-170n. 45 Comite Americain pour les Regions
Castiglione, Comtesse de, 114 Devastees (CARD), 22, 151n. 8
Castle, Terry, 14 Commentator, 50
Catholicism, 161n. 59 Comoedia, 118
censorship, 29 Comtesse de Castiglione, 115
Chadwick, Whitney, 145n. 4 confessions, 82-86
Chagall, Marc, 169-170n. 45 Confessions magazine, 123, 125
Chalon, Jean, 181-182n. 2 Cottingham, Laura, 164-165n. 4
Chanel, Coco, 26, 31 Craig, E. G., 169-170n. 45
Chapelain-Midy, Roger, 120 Crane, Hart, 132
Chapon, Francois, 158n. 19, 181— Crevel, Rene, 80
182n.2 Croix de Chevalier de la Legion
Chauncey, George, Jr., 162n. 72 d’Honneur, 20
Chateau-Musee, 174n. 1 Croix de Feu, 138
Chez Elle, 176n. 23 cross-dressing, 24-26, 155-156n. 70,
Chez Suzy Solidor, 112, 174n. 1 162n. 72
Chicago Tribune, 69, 74, 82 Cunard, Nancy, 17
Choisy, Maryse, 4-5, 6, 26, 145-
146n. 6 daguerreotype, 172n. 70
Clark, T. J, 183n. 16 Dali, Salvador, 80
Claudel, Camille, 157n. 11 Damia, 128
Clermont-Tonnerre, Madame de, 27 dandyism, 159n. 37
closet, significance of term, 145n. 1 Danguin, Jean-Baptiste, 71, 72; Figure
Cocteau, Jean: admirer of George’s, d’etude (apres Flandrin), 71, 72, 73
126, 180n. 68; caricatures, 119; D’Annunzio, Gabriel, 57, 66, 150n. 4,
comments on camera, 34; descrip- 159n. 34, 163n. 80
tion of Solidor, 125; disappearance Dauberson, Dany, 123
of, 136; haunt at Le Boeuf sur le Daughters of Bilitis, 167n. 22
Toit, 111; homosexuality, 60; D’Aurevilly, Jules Barbey, 159n. 37
illustrations for homoerotic novel, David, Jacques-Louis, 114
178n. 39; importance of portrait Day, F. Holland, 73
genre, 113; literary celebrity, 66; Dayot, Armand, FTmage de la femme,
Le Livre hlanc, 120; poems by, 74, 75
124; portrait by Brooks, 52; de Balzac, Honore, 159n. 37
relationship with Cahun and De Gaulle, Charles, 139
Moore, 80; stories of the sea, de Lauretis, Teresa, 10, 149n. 30
18In. 80; vogue for sailors and De Stijl group, 160n. 52
red pompom, 132-133 Debussy, Claude, 59, 160n. 51
Colette, Sidonie-Cabrielle, 163n. 79; decadent school, 59, 170n. 52
association with Solidor, 107, 124; Dejean, Joan, Fictions of Sappho,
attendance at Barney’s salon, 40; 1546-1937, 5
Barney’s lover, 38; Ces Plaisirs, 51; Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie, 9, 38, 77;
Cheri, 120; decorated Solidor’s F’Ange et les pervers, 9; Sapho
country getaway, 121; Le Pur et desesperee, 38
INDEX 205
Delteil, Joseph, 169-170n. 45 Eluard, Paul, 80

Desbrueres, Michel, 15In. 7 England: lesbianism in, 5; reviewers
Desnos, Robert, 80, 107 from, 36
Desnos, Youki, 80 Epstein, Jacob, 161n. 59
Diaghilev, Sergei, 60, 161n. 61 Ernst, Max, 80
Die Dame, 23, 28 L’Eternel Menage a trois, 13
Dietrich, Marlene, 141; Morocco, 117 Eulenberg, Philipp zu, 155-156n. 70
Dighton, Robert, 55, 56; Beau expatriate, 36-37, 42, 102
Brummell, 56 Exposition des Artistes Americains, 57
Dike, Anne Murray, 22
Doan, Laura, 14-15, 28, 146-147n. Fairbanks, Douglas, 134
17; Fashioning Sapphism, 14 F.A.M. See Femmes Artistes Modernes
Doane, Mary Ann, 94 Fantasio, 12
Domergue, Jean-Gabriel, 108, 118, Fargue, Leon-Paul, 80
119, 120, 177n. 35 Farjeon, Herbert, 60
Doolittle, Hilda. See H.D. Fay, Bernard, 138, 182n. 4
Douglas, Alfred, 68, 160n. 55, 161n. Federal Art Project, 138
59, 164n. 3 Federation Sportive Feminine, 152n.
dream work, 172n. 79 19
Dreyfus, Carle, 182n. 5 female homosexual, 4
Drouin, Henri, 31, 33, 145-146n. 6 female invert, 3-4
Dryer, Richard, 177n. 28 Femina, 28, 31, 55, 57
Dulac, Germaine, 27, 35, 107, 152n. 22 feminine agency, question of, 177n. 27
Dunand, Jean, 120, 124 feminism and lesbianism, 30, 171n. 69
Duncan, Isadora, 40 femme peintre, 46-47
Durand-Ruel Gallery, 50, 178n. 41 Femmes Artistes Modernes (F.A.M.),
d’Yd, Berthe, 169-170n. 45 33, 49, 157n. 11
Ferrero, Guiglielmo, 49
Ederle, Gertrude, 154n. 51 Ee Figaro, 63
Edzard, Dietz, 120, 178n. 41 Fitzroy, A. T., 60, 160n. 56; Despised
Egoist, 16 and Rejected, 60
Eliot, George, 33 Flament, Albert, 43-44, 59
Ellerman, Winifred. See Bryher Flandrin, Hippolyte, 131; Figure
Ellis, Havelock: Beach’s comments d’etude, VI, 72, 73
about, 149n. 41; case studies, 88, Flanner, Janet, 9, 34, 40, 107, 182n. 3
145n. 5; comments on female Foresta, Merry A., 168n. 33
educational institutions, 30; Forester, E. M., 77
homosexuals, characterizations Fort, Paul, 80, 124
of, 162n. 67; introduction of Foucault, Michel, 86, 149-150n. 43,
Narcissus, 89-90; lesbians, char- 167-168n. 32; History of Sexuality,
acterizations of, 171-172n. 69; A, 86
letters to Beach, 149n. 40; letters Foujita, 108, 119, 124, 125
with Bryher, 162n. 67; Revaluation Ereewoman, 16
of Obscenity, The, 17; sexologist, Frehel, 128
15-18; Sexual Inversion, 61, 77, Freud, Sigmund, 18, 86, 90, 17 In. 67,
90-92; Studies in the Psychology 172n. 79
of Sex, 16-18; terminology used, Freund, Gisele, 107
3-4; theories on sexuality, 86; Friesz, Othon, 118, 120
translation of work by Cahun, Front Populaire, 138
171n. 64 Fuller, Foie, 35
206 INDEX
Galerie Bernheim, 47, 157n. 8 Gubar, Susan, 42, 102, 174n. 101
Galerie Tremois, 178n. 40 Guillon, Jacques, 152n. 22
Galiano, Juan Valera y Alcala, Genio Guy, Alice, 35
y figura, 88
Gallatin, Albert E., 177n. 26 hair styles, 26-28
Garbo, Greta, 40, 116-117; Mata Hall, Radclyffe: attendance at ballets,
Hari, 177; Queen Christina, 117 61; attendance at Barney’s salon,
Garelick, Rhonda, 55 40, 41, 156n. 74; homosexual
Gamier Opera, 60 advocate, 171-172n. 69; Le Puits
gender, meanings and applications of de solitude, 108, 121; Troubridge’s
term, 148n. 25 lover, 24; Well of Loneliness, 9, 17,
gender, spacialization in painting, 18, 29, 146-147n. 17
158n. 24 Hanau, Marthe, 31
Genet, Jean, 178n. 39, 181n. 80 Harvard University, 182n. 4
Geneva, Switzerland, 35 Haut-de-Cagnes club, 113, 174n. 1
genius, condition of, 146n. 12, 167n. Havet, Mireille, 7, 23, 43
30 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle): Asphodel, 9;
gentleman’s glove, 159n. 35 attendance at Barney’s salon, 40;
George, Yvonne, 126-127, 180n. 68 Bid Me to Live, 29; comments
Gerard, Francois, 114 about Bryher’s screen image, 35;
Germany, 36-37 Bryher’s lover, 29; expatriate,
Gever, Martha, 149n. 30 36-37; HER, 9; non-association
Giacometti, Alberto, 80 with Solidor, 107; Paint It Today,
Gide, Andre, 40, 77, 155n. 67, 164n. 3 9, 41; poet narratives, 38
Gilbert, Sandra, 42, 102, 174n. 101 Heap, Jane, 80, 107
Gilmore, Leigh, 85 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 15, 18, 91, 150n.
Gitterman,Tom, 177n. 30 44, 164n. 3, 171-172n. 69
Gloeden, Wilhelm von, 73 L’Histoire de Poeil (Georges Bataille),
Gluck, 61, 161-162n. 65 97
Gluckstein, Hannah. See Gluck Holly, Michael Ann, 142
Goebbels, Joseph, 141 Hollywood, California, 21, 35, 117,
Goldman, Golda, 69, 70, 74, 82, 107 120, 154n. 47
Goldwyn, 177n. 29 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 172n. 70
Goll, Ivan, 169-170n. 45 Homer, 37
Goupil Gallery, 50 homoeroticism, 155n. 67
Gourmont, Remy de, 40, 108; homophobia, 166n. 16
L’Amazone, 108 homosexuals, 3, 59-60, 145n. 5,
Gramont, Elisabeth de: description of 146n. 12, 171n. 67
Brooks, 53; Romaine Brooks: Hours Press, 17
Portraits, tableaux, dessins (Brooks), Howard, Brian, 61
64-67, 65, 66, 103; hair style, 27; husband, responsibilities of, 146n. 16
non-association with Solidor, 107; Huxley, Aldous, 80
portrait by Brooks, 40, 66; relief Huysmans, Joris-Karl, A Rebours, 44
effort during World War I, 22
La Grande Mademoiselle, 112, 179n. internal dialogism, 165-166n. 13
54 International Studio, 62
Gray, Eileen, 22, 160n. 52 Italy, 36
Gray, John, 16In. 59
Gris, Juan, 169-170n. 45 Jagose, Annamarie 12
Grouya, Ted, 180n. 67 Jay, Karine, 150n. 2, 175n. 7
INDEX 207
Jay, Karla, 160n. 55 Little Review, 107

Jersey, Isle of, 137, 139 Lombroso, Cesare, 18In. 79
Jewish identity, 174n. 99 London, England: ballets, 133;
Jincart, 110, 111, 134; Suzy Solidor, Brooks’s exhibit, 50, 51; Brooks’s
111, 134 studio, 60; Close Up correspon-
dents, 35; fashion, 28; significance
Kertesz, Andre, 151-152n. 16 of Brooks’s portrait, 2
Kessel, Joseph, 125, 175n. 7 Loti, Pierre, Mon Frere Yves, 134
Kisling, Moise, 108, 125 Louis XVI, 155-156n. 70
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 171-172n. Louys, Pierre, 38, 40, 77, 108, 120,
69 16On. 51; Chansons de Bilitis, 77;
Krauss, Rosalind, 99 Poesies erotiques, 120
Kris, Ernst, 167n. 30 Lucchesi, Joe, 158n. 18
Krull, Germaine, 34 Lurât, Jean, 169-170n. 45
Kurz, Otto, 167n. 30 Lydis, Mariette, 119, 120, 125
Lyon, Phyllis, 167n. 22
Lacan, Jacques, 80, 90, 95, 96
Ladies Pictorial, 28 Mac Orlan, Pierre, 80
Lanvin, 108 Mackenzie, Compton, 8, 147-148n.
Laprade, 134 22; Extraordinary Women, 8
Lartigue, jacques-Henri, 126; Suzy MacPherson, Kenneth, 36
Solidor, 127 Maeterlinck, 169-170n. 45
Laurencin, Marie, 34, 40, 49, 108, Magaud, Antione, 171n. 62
119, 157n. 11 Magre, Maurice, 124
law of asylum, 176n. 18 La Maison des Amis des Livres, 16, 20
Leduc, Violette, 176n. 16 Malcolm, Janet, 182n. 4
Leblanc, Georgette, 80 Malherbe, Marie-Eugenie, 74, 165n. 8
Leblond, Marius-Ary, 56, 178n. 40 Malherbe, Suzanne. See Moore, Marcel
Legion of Honor, 64, 159n. 34 Mallarme, Stephane, 59, 160n. 54
Lemaire, Doris, 121, 178n. 47 Man Ray, 80, 81, 125, 154n. 48,
Lempicka, Tamara de, 23, 24, 49, 167n. 30, 168n. 33
118, 120, 157n. 11, 177n. 33; mannish lesbian, 61
Self-Portrait, 24; Suzy Solidor, 119 Marbury, Elizabeth (Bessie), 22, 23,
Leperlier, Lranôis, 164-165n. 4 150-151n. 5, 155n. 65
lesbian body, 172n. 75 Mare, Rolf de, 60
lesbian, defined, 3, 6, 37 Margueritte, Victor, 28-29, 110, 120;
lesbian effect, 5 La Femme en chemin, 29; La
lesbian identity, 1-3, 23 Gargonne, 28-29, 110, 120, 126
lesbian self-representation, 11-12 Marianne, 118
lesbian specificity, 147n. 20 Mars, Colette, 123, 141
lesbianism and feminism, 30 Marseille, Lrance, 133
lesbianism and masculine Martin, Dell, 167n. 22
characteristics, 171-172n. 69 Marval, Jacqueline, 120
Lesbos, 37 Masses, Beltram Y, 124
Lewis, Sinclair, 40 Le Matelot, 134
Liebenberg Round Table, 155-156n. Matlock, Jann, 162n. 72
70 Mauclair, Camille, 45-46
Lifar, Serge, 133 Max, Edouard de, 40
Limur, Jean de, 110 Medaille de la Reconnaissance
literary professions, 33 Lrangaise, 21
208 INDEX
Medan, France, 121 Esoterique, 169-170n. 45; untitled

Meille, Louise, 18In. 79 (after Flandrin), 72, 131; untitled
Melville, Herman, 132, 181n. 80 (author portrait), 93-94, 93; un-
Mercure de France, 15, 76, 166n. 16 titled (Cahun reading L’lmage de
Mermoz, Jean, 179n. 54 la femme), 75; untitled (Cahun with
Meskimmon, Marsha, 164-165n. 4 mirror image), 95; untitled (Moore
Meyer, Richard, 172n. 72 with mirror image), 94; untitled
Michaux, Henri, 80, 170n. 58 (star), 102, 103; utopian potential
Le Mirliton, 112 of alienation, 42; vanguard
mirror, symbolism of, 171n. 65 movements, 134; Vues et visions,
mirror with a memory, 172n. 70 77-80, 78, 79; wordplay, 172n.
Modern Language Association, 10 81; desire for egalitarian society, 6
modern woman, 4 Mops, 80
modernity, 183n. 16 Morand, Paul, 26, 40, 66; Journal
Mon Cine, 118 d’un attache d’ambassade,
Monnier, Adrienne: Abbott’s portraits 1916-1917, 26
of, 34; bookshop, 9, 16; Cahun’s Morel, Jean, 177n. 30
letters to, 17, 20, 150n. 46, 164n. Moreno, Marguerite, 80
3, 168n. 39, 171n. 64; impact of Morgan, Anne, 22, 155n. 65
World War I on women, 137; Morris, Violette, 25, 152n. 19
lesbian elite, 61; library, 77; non- Moscow, Soviet Union, 35
association with Solidor, 107; Murat, Princesse Lucien, La Vie
suggestion to Cahun to write amoureuse de Christine de Suede,
confession, 82-84 la reine androgyne, 66
Le Monocle, 23, 28 Musee National d’Art Moderne,
Montaigne, Michel de, 168-169n. 43 163n. 80
Montesquiou, Comte Robert de: Musidora, 35
attendance at Barney’s salon, 40; Mussolini, Benito, 138
Brooks’s supporter, 44, 49, 56, 58, mythology, 37
157-158n. 14; dandy-aesthete, 59 Mytilene, 37, 39
Montfreid, Henry de, 134; Aventures
de mer, 134; Les Secrets de la mer Nantes, France, 13, 20, 70, 76, 166n.
Rouge, 134 15
Montmartre, Paris, 133 Napoleonic Code, 7, 146-147n. 17
Montparnasse, Paris, 23, 133 narcissism, 92-93, 171n. 67
Montreal, Canada, 141 Narcissus, introduction of the figure
Moore, Marcel: attribution of author- of, 89-90
ship, 169n. 44; Aveux non avenus, New Freewoman, 16
80-87, 83, 92-102, 98, 100, New Women, 45-46, 157n. 5
citation collection, 164n. 3; dream New York City, New York, 2, 35,
theory, 172n. 79; expatriate, 102; 138, 141
fashion design, 76; feminine Newnham College, 30, 153n. 35
agency, question of, 177n. 27; Nice, France, 136
marginality as form of protest, Noailles, Anna de, 114
135; non-association with Solidor, Nordau, Max, 161n. 59
107; outbreak of World War II, novelizing, 9
137, 139-140; pen name, 20;
portraiture, 107, 114, 144, Officier de la Legion d’Honneur, 22
164-165n. 4, 165-166n. 13; Les Ondes, 118
self-representation, 12-13; Theatre Orloff, Channa, 140
INDEX 209
Packard, 179n. 54 queer theory, 10-11, 149n. 30

Palais de Tokyo, 120 Querlin, Marise, 145-146n. 6
Palmer, Eva, 38
Pankhurst, Emmeline, 30, 40 Rachilde, 15-16, 40, 166n. 16
Paris, France: audiences in, 2; corre- Radio-France, 110
spondents in, 35; interwar period, Radio-Paris, 141
8, 14, 20-42; lesbian specificity, Raffalovich, Andre, 15, 161n. 59,
147n. 20; no-man’s land, 156n. 74; 164n. 3
statements of lesbian artists, 6 La Rampe, 118
Paris de nuit (Georges Brassai), 24 Rank, Otto, 18, 171n. 65
Paris-Lesbos, 39, 41, 42, 66, 138 Reaves, Wendy, 180n. 71
Paris Matin, 141 Recamier, Madame, 60, 114
Pascin, Jules, 120 Red Cross, 20-21, 37
Pater, Walter, 167n. 19 Revue Frangaise, 31
Pelletier, Madeleine, 25 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 40
Perdriat, Helene, 120 Rimbaud, Arthur, 108, 164n. 3
Petain, Henri Philippe, 138 Robert, Jacques, 141
Petit Palais, 163n. 80 Roberts, Mary Fouise, 10, 33;
Phare de la Loire, 76 Civilization without Sexes, 10
Phelan, Peggy, 94, 99 Robeson, Eslanda, 36
photographers, 34, 164-165n. 4 Robeson, Paul, 36
Piaf, 110 Rocher, Suzanne. See Solidor, Suzy
Picabia, Francis, 119 Roditi, Edouard, 132, 18In. 80
Picardy, France, 22 Roger-Marx, Claude, 51, 59, 160n. 51
Pierson, Pierre-Fouis, 114, 115 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 84-86, 99,
Pills, 176n. 23 102, 168-169n. 43, 173n. 85;
pin-up, 177n. 35 Confessions, 84-86, 99
Le Pirate noir, 134 Rouveyre, Andre, 15, 16
Pitoeff, Georges, 169-170n. 45 Royere, Jean, 9
Pitoeff, Fudmilla, 169-170n. 45 Rubinstein, Helena, 114
Plaisirs de France, 118 Rubinstein, Ida, 38, 66, 182n. 5
Fe Plateau, 84 Russian Ballet. See Ballets Russes
Plato, 77, 164n. 3; Symposium, 77
Poe, Edgar Allan, 59 Sackville-West, Vita, 18, 80-81
Poirel, Sarah Bernhardt, 117 Saint-Malo, France, 13
Pollock, Griselda, 158n. 24, 183n. 16 salons, 155n. 65
Pougy, Fiane de, Idylle saphique, 108 Salon des Independants, 63
Prevert, Jacques, 124 Salon of 1934, 157n. 11
Primack, Jacques, 176n. 17 Salon painters, 45-47
professional spheres, 30, 154-155n. 53 Sand, George, 33, 152n. 22
Proust, Marcel, 38, 40, 51, 59, 170n. sapphist, 3, 37
52; A la Recherche du temps Sappho, 5, 37, 155n. 63
perdu, 38-39, 51 Sauvage, Marcel, 178n. 41
Pruna, Pedro, 133 Schwob, Fucie. See Cahun, Claude
pseudonym, 167-168n. 32 Schwob, Marcel, 69, 76, 166nn. 15,
psycho-synthetic energies, 146n. 12 16; Vies imaginaires, 76
Fe Puits de Solitude (Solidor’s Schwob, Maurice, 74, 150n. 3, 165n.
country house), 121 8, 166n. 15
puns, 172n. 81 Scott, Joan, 9, 148n. 25
puppet theater, 169-170n. 45 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 145n. 1
210 INDEX
Self-Portrait (Man Ray), 167n. 30, relationship with Toklas, 174n.

168n. 33 101; salon, 155n. 65
Sevigne, Mme de, 33 Stewart, Susan, 176n. 24
sexology, 14 Stopes, Marie, 150n. 44
sexual behavior, scientific study of, 16 suffrage, 30, 147n. 20
sexuality, expert opinion on, Suleiman, Susan, 86, 165-166n. 13
145-146n. 6 Surcouf, Robert, 107, 109-110, 175n. 6
Shakespeare, William, 164n. 3 Switzerland, 36, 37
Shakespeare and Company, 16, 18, 23 Symonds, John Addington, 15, 77,
Shaw, Jennifer, 164-165n. 4, 170n. 51 167n. 19
Silverman, Debora L., 157n. 5
Simon, Odette, 7, 146n. 16 Tabet, 176n. 23
Singer, Winaretta, 155n. 65 Talmey, Bernard, 131
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Tarn, Pauline. See Vivien, Renee
1, 64, 144, 163nn. 80, 82 television as performance venue,
Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 87 176n. 19
sodomy, 149-150n. 43 theater professions, 33
Solidor, Suzy: ambulance driver, 20, Theatre Esoterique, 84, 169-170n. 45
107, 150n. 2, 175n. 7; anniversary Theatre National Populaire, 120
gift from Bremond d’Ars, 176n. Thiout, Jacques, 120
13; bastard status, 176n. 16; third sex, 162n. 67, 164n. 3
Barlatier’s description of, 178n. 43; Thomas, M. Carey, 153n. 37
caricatures of, 180n. 71; Escale, tissue of quotations, 170n. 49
132-134; expatriate, 42; feminine Toklas, Alice, 21, 138, 174n. 101,
agency, question of, 177n. 27; Fil 182n. 4
d’or, 110; Haut-de-Cagnes club, Touchagues, Louis, 120
113; outbreak of World War II, Toulon, France, 132-134
137, 140-141; Paris-Lesbien, 123; Traub, Valerie, Renaissance of
portraits, 105-135, 144; Quarante Lesbianism in Early Modern
Peintres, un modele, 125; self- England, The, 5
representation, 12-13; television travel narratives, 180n. 74
as performance venue, 176n. 19 Troubridge, Una 24-25, 40, 61
Solomon Godeau, Abigail, 114, T’Serstevens, Albert, 129, 134, 180n.
164-165n. 4., 177n. 27 74, 18In. 80; Les Corsaires du roi,
Soupault, Philippe, 169-170n. 45 134; Memoirs of a Buccaneer, The,
Spiess, Camille, 146n. 12 134
Spitz, Ellen Handler, 159n. 33
St. Anne’s Hospital, 86 Ulrichs, Karl, 15, 164n. 3
Stalin, Joseph, 139 uranian, described, 164n. 3
star system, 177n. 28 Usher, John, 158n. 22
Stein, Gertrude: activities during
World War I, 21; attendance at Vache, Jacques, 166n. 15
Barney’s salon, 40; Autobiography Vachet, Pierre, 145-146n. 6
of Alice B. Toklas, The, 9, 27; Valadon, Suzanne, 157n. 11
disappearance of, 136; non- Valery, Paul, 107, 108, 124
association with Solidor, 107; van Caulaert, Jean-Dominique, 131
praise for Weininger’s book, 29; van Dongen, Kees: illustrator of
promoted by Fay, 182n. 4; refuge Ea Gargonne, 28; Passe-temps
in eastern France, 138; relationship honnete, 47-48, 48, 157n.8; plates
with Cahun and Moore, 80; for La Gargonne, 120; portrait of
INDEX 211
Brooks, 47-48, 48, 157n. 8; Gentle Art of Making Enemies,

portrait of Solidor, 108-109, 109, The, 59
119 Whitman, Walt, 64, 164n. 3
Vasari, Giorgio, 167n. 30 Wilde, Dolly, 22, 160n. 55
Vauxcelles, Louis, 47, 50, 53 Wilde, Oscar, 22: aesthete, 51;
Veblen, Thorstein, 159n. 35 associations with Brooks, 160n.
Velazquez, 54, 57 55, 163n. 80; Cahun’s defence of,
Verlaine, Paul, 59, 108, 124, 160n. 166n. 16; citations in Cahun’s
54, 164n. 3; Femmes, 108 manuscript, 164n. 3; dandy-
Verve de Venise (Blanche), 87-90, 89 aesthete contemporaries, 161n. 59;
Versailles, France, 22 decadent school, 59-60; homo-
Vertes, 108, 120 eroticism, 155n. 67; imprisonment
Vienna, Austria, 35 for sodomy, 150-15In. 5; novel
La Vie Parisienne, 105-106, 106, about, 160n. 56; opinion of
110-112, 119-126, 141, 176n. 23, Brooks, 62; Plato’s Symposium as
179n. 54 reference, 77; recital of Douglas’s
La Vie Parisienne, 118 line, 68; Salome, 29, 76, 169-
Villefranche, France, 133 170n. 45; Solidor’s reading of, 108;
Villon, Francois, 108 support from Marcel Schwob,
Viot, Jacques, 166n. 15 166n. 15; trials of, 146-147n. 17;
virago, 4 Whistler attributed remark to,
visible invisibility, 12, 149n. 34 163n. 77
visual arts professions, 33 Wilhelm, Kaiser, 155-156n. 70
Vivien, Renee, 37-38, 40, 41, 77, 108 Wittig, Monique, 10
Vogel, Lucien, 34-35 Wolfe, Elsie de, 22, 66, 155n. 65
Vogue, 28, 35, 60, 62 Wolff, Charlotte, 37, 150n. 44
Vu, 7, 28, 34-35, 151-152n. 16 Woolf, Virginia, 18, 29, 33, 36,
80-81, 153n. 35, 154-155n. 53;
Wagner, Anne, Three Artists (Three Orlando, 18, 80-81; Society of
Women), 143 Outsiders, 36
Wanger, Beatrice, 169-170n. 45 wordplay, 172n. 81
Washington, D.C., 1 World War I: impact on women’s
Wegner, Gerda, 13 lives, 7-8, 11, 20-42; lesbians’
Weill Gallery, Berthe, 33 work in war relief efforts, 21-22
Weininger, Otto, 29, 131, 181n. 79; World War II, 136-137
Sex and Character, 29, 131 Wyld, Evelyn, 22
Weiss, Andrea, 160n. 52
Wellesley College, 30 Yacovleff, Mikhail, 120
Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 51, Yourcenar, Marguerite, 40, 156n. 71
55, 57-60, 58, 114, 159n. 41,
159n. 45, 163n. 77, 163n. 80., Zinowiev, 121, 122, 178n. 43; Figure
177n. 26; Arrangement in Grey de proue, 126; Suzy Solidor, 122
and Black, 57; Comte Robert de Zola, Emile, Nana, 131
Montesquiou-Fezensac, 55, 58;
'
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tirza True Latimer earned her Ph.D. in art history at Stanford University.
She has published work from a lesbian feminist perspective on a range of
topics in the fields of art history and criticism, the decorative arts, and
performance. Latimer lectures in art history, feminist studies, and gender
studies at various San Francisco Bay Area institutions and is currently
organizing an international exhibition on Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
9999 05200 400 7
of the
Sale of this
m, material "*'*■
s material benefits the Library
GENDER STUDIES/CULTURAL STUDIES
“Women Together/Women Apart is an eloquent and highly readable explo-

ration of women artists and performers which makes a valuable contribution
to a growing body of scholarship on lesbian subcultures and identities in the
interwar period.”
—Laura Doan, author of Fashioning Sapphism:
The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture
What does it mean to look like a lesbian? Though it remains impossible to

conjure a definitive image that captures the breadth of this highly nuanced
term, today at least we are able to consider an array of visual representations
that have been put into circulation by lesbians themselves over the last six or
seven decades. In the early twentieth century, though, no notion of lesbianism
as a coherent social or cultural identity yet existed.
In Women Together/Women Apart, Tirza True Latimer explores the revolu-
tionary period between World War I and World War II when lesbian artists
working in Paris began to shape the first visual models that gave lesbians a
collective sense of identity and allowed them to recognize each other. Flock-
ing to Paris from around the world, artists and performers such as Romaine
Brooks, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and Suzy Solidor used portraiture to
theorize and visualize a “new breed” of feminine subject. The book focuses
on problems of feminine and lesbian self-representation at a time and place
where the rights of women to political, professional, economic, domestic, and
sexual autonomy had yet to be acknowledged by the law. Under such circum-
stances, same-sex solidarity and relative independence from men held impor-
tant political implications.
Combining gender theory with visual, cultural, and historical analysis,
Latimer draws a vivid picture of the impact of sexual politics on the cultural
life of Paris during this key period. The book also illuminates the far-reaching
consequences of lesbian portraiture on contemporary constructions of lesbian
identity.
TIRZA TRUE LATIMER recently earned her Ph.D. in art history at Stan-
ford University. Her research and curatorial interests include visual studies
and gender studies.
Cover photograph: Portrait of Janet Flanner by Berenice Abbott, ca 1927.

Courtesy of Commerce Graphics.
ISBN Q-bllS-BS'lS-k
Cover design by Karolina Harris
0 0
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY
9 78 0813 535951

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Women

TIRZA TRUE LATIMER

Rutgers University Press

Latimer, Tirza True.

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the

Copyright © 2005 by Tirza True Latimer

Design by Karolina Harris

Manufactured in the United States of America

ONE: Lesbian Paris Between the Wars 20

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 185

their collections with me, as did Arlette Albert-Birot. Fran^oise Flamant

A series of grants, large and small —all of them generous —enabled my

his book began as the story of one portrait—Romaine Brooks’s

and thus to participate in a visual culture whose history can be traced

Fig. 1. Romaine Brooks, Self-

“un portrait psychologique.”3 What does that mean? At what point do

Cannot do: vote in any election, obtain a passport without author-

nature of the country’s economic base from rural/agrarian to urban/indus-

leverage and parlayed their successes, in a circular manner, into proof of

of both communicating and dissimulating same-sex desire, lesbians of the

L'tTCRNCL ntflA QC A TROli

Fig. 2. Gerda Wegner,

nfllI LEI ELEHEMTI HE IOMT HLU£LEI nEHEI

All four women reinvented identities by adopting stage names, pen

century.36 Doan, arguing from another position, cautions that nineteenth-

Rachilde, also attended), and at the literary gatherings presided over by

Fig. 3. Andre Rouveyre, caricature of

on the conventions of gender and notions of sexual normality. The new

the circumstances attendant upon its issue suspicious. We believed

Not surprisingly, Hall, in The Well of Loneliness, represents this kind

lesbians I discuss here shared little else —certainly no common vision of

Lesbian Paris Between the Wars

Pour apporter quelque chose,

espite the reactionary thrust of campaigns to restore order to

France croisee of 1914—which depicts a Red Cross nurse against a back-

Fig. 4. Romaine Brooks,

Elizabeth (Bessie) Marbury, in her memoirs of the war years, noted a

club’s cross-dressing clientele in an album bearing the title Paris de nuit

Fig. 5. Tamara de Lempicka,

contrast to the feminine subjects of the portraits exhibited by Brooks

Fig. 6. Georges Brassai, untitled

Fig. 7. Romaine Brooks, Una,

Fig. 8. Romaine Brooks,

From our contemporary vantage point, it is tempting to interpret such sar-

Legion of Honor. “All publicity is good publicity,” according to a capi-

The ranks of enterprising women infiltrating professional spheres in Paris

subscribed. Herve Bailie, to name just one of many popular caricaturists

Fig. 10. Flerve Bailie, caricature of “la juene fille

producers of modern culture was indeed one of the period’s distinguish-

remained open to elaboration from fresh perspectives. As the interwar

to “bring to France a new format: [photographically! illustrated coverage

between politically neutral Switzerland and Germany, served as the set-

Then the Unknown Woman, persuasive and formidable, terrible and

Barney’s Aegean “colony” foundered, as did her romance with Vivien.

Albert, a homosexual chauffer in Proust’s employ); Proust portrays this

Fig. 11. Djuna Barnes,

a social register, a genealogy? An interior floor plan artlessly defines a

Fig. 12. Natalie Barney, Le

from elsewhere,” Barney prefaced the collection of literary portraits that

A new star makes a new heaven.

— Natalie Clifford Barney,

t i he lesbian society portraitist Romaine Brooks, an outstanding

psychologique” (the 1923 self-portrait) that she had propped on an easel

Fig. 13. Romaine Brooks,