Spring, the Amazon, and the Warrior Poet

(L) Ida Rubinstein as Le Trajet (The Crossing)
and (R) Femme avec des fleurs (Spring)

While browsing an old exhibition catalogue, Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks, I found myself drawn to Romaine Brooks’s Spring (1912). Its pale, solitary figure, wrapped in a great black mantle embroidered with flowers, immediately took hold of me. Strange and dreamlike, it is sensual, melancholy, and vaguely otherworldly.

Ida Rubinstein, ca. 1911, by
Howard Gardiner Cushing

There was something familiar about the experience. Not long ago, while looking through a book on Tamara de Lempicka in search of her portrait of Suzy Solidor, I unexpectedly stumbled upon Gabriele D’Annunzio, knowing nothing of his connection to the artist. Now, while browsing Brooks, it was happening again.

Ida Rubinstein, the woman who would become Brooks’s great muse, lover, and subject in Spring, had already shared a famous artistic and personal relationship with D’Annunzio, performing the title role in his scandalous Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien in Paris, which Catholics were forbidden to attend under threat of excommunication.

In 2024, at the Morgan Library’s Crafting the Ballets Russes: The Robert Owen Lehman Collection, I had already encountered Rubinstein as Saint Sebastian in Léon Bakst’s illustration for D’Annunzio’s play, displayed alongside a portrait of her by Howard Gardiner Cushing.

Ida Rubinstein as St. Sebastian by Léon Bakst

Brooks herself moved in the same Decadent artistic world as D’Annunzio. When she exhibited La France Croisée in 1915, D’Annunzio supplied four accompanying sonnets. The two also had an affair, followed by a friendship that endured until his death.

Perhaps it is merely another coincidence, but none of these connections had occurred to me when I first opened the catalogue. Still, after Tamara de Lempicka, the encounter at the Morgan, and now Romaine Brooks, Il Vate seems remarkably unwilling to fade away.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, October 1st, Feast of St. Remigius