"I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century"
About this Quote
A casual line that quietly declares allegiance: Ferlinghetti isn’t just “reading a book,” he’s building a lineage. Dropping Romaine Brooks into conversation works like a password among the artistically initiated. Brooks remains a cult figure - glamorous, queer-adjacent, psychologically cool - and Ferlinghetti’s offhand admiration (“wonderful painter”) signals a taste for outsiders who made elegance out of alienation.
The phrasing “early in the last century” matters. It’s a sly temporal hop that compresses modernism into something almost recent, as if the 1910s and 1920s are still within arm’s reach. Coming from Ferlinghetti - Beat-era publisher, poet, and lifelong connector of subcultures - that compression reads as a refusal to let the past fossilize. He treats art history less like a museum and more like a living conversation you can still join.
There’s also a quiet politics in choosing Brooks. Her portraits are all restraint and defiance: muted palettes, hard-edged silhouettes, women posed with an autonomy that feels contemporary. To call her “wonderful” without qualification is to push back against the way the canon often requires you to argue for marginal figures. Ferlinghetti doesn’t plead her case; he normalizes her importance.
Contextually, this is the Beat sensibility in its mature form: curiosity over credentialing, attention aimed at the overlooked, and a faith that reading - not networking, not branding - is how you stay awake. The sentence’s modesty is the flex.
The phrasing “early in the last century” matters. It’s a sly temporal hop that compresses modernism into something almost recent, as if the 1910s and 1920s are still within arm’s reach. Coming from Ferlinghetti - Beat-era publisher, poet, and lifelong connector of subcultures - that compression reads as a refusal to let the past fossilize. He treats art history less like a museum and more like a living conversation you can still join.
There’s also a quiet politics in choosing Brooks. Her portraits are all restraint and defiance: muted palettes, hard-edged silhouettes, women posed with an autonomy that feels contemporary. To call her “wonderful” without qualification is to push back against the way the canon often requires you to argue for marginal figures. Ferlinghetti doesn’t plead her case; he normalizes her importance.
Contextually, this is the Beat sensibility in its mature form: curiosity over credentialing, attention aimed at the overlooked, and a faith that reading - not networking, not branding - is how you stay awake. The sentence’s modesty is the flex.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Lawrence
Add to List
