Hide/Seek: Self-Portrait by Romaine Brooks

Discussion by Jonathan Katz, co-curator of “Hide/Seek“ and Chair of the Visual Studies Doctoral Program at SUNY-Buffalo. In this self-portrait, Romaine Brooks uses a complex set of codes and pictorial conventions to assert her membership in the elite group of lesbians living in Paris between the world wars. Brooks’s upper-class status and financial independence permitted her a rare freedom of expression. Her position on a balcony, the threshold between public and private space; her sleek androgynous atti