ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 16, 1996 TAG: 9601160022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
For the first five years of this decade, Tara Tappert was holed up in her South Roanoke apartment - writing, researching and meticulously documenting the life of acclaimed portrait painter Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942).
Tappert remembers being so immersed in the chronicling of Beaux's mysterious life that a neighbor once approached her with, ``What are you doing in there?''
Now, thanks to the efforts of the Roanboke scholar, Beaux once again seems to be everywhere on the national art scene.
``Cecilia Beaux and the Art of Portraiture,'' an exhibition of the artist's work, is on display through Jan. 28 at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
Tappert, a 46-year-old Roanoker and former curator of the Art Museum of Western Virginia, is guest curator of the show and author of the accompanying 150-page catalog that documents Beaux's life and work.
She has led symposiums on Beaux, who in 1898 was pronounced ``the greatest woman painter of modern times.'' She has written articles on her for several magazines, including American Art Review. She has conducted roundtable discussions on the painter on radio and television, and her scholarship has been featured in The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Now recognized as the national expert on Cecilia Beaux, Tappert is fascinated by the painter - not just as an artist, but as a professional woman in a time when women weren't allowed to be professionals.
``She was in the absolute highest echelons of the American art world from the 1890s to the 1930s, but she has a life that still speaks to professional women today,'' Tappert says.
From the first time Tappert viewed one of Beaux's paintings in 1974, an enigmatic portrait of a woman and her black cat called ``Sita and Sarita,'' she was hooked on unraveling the mystery behind the artist.
There were the bold, confident brush strokes of her work, often compared to such masters as John Singer Sargent and James Whistler. There were the two books, one an autobiography and one a family biography written by Beaux's niece. Both revealed little beyond the public persona that Beaux carefully orchestrated.
``Reading all that had been written about her, looking at her paintings, you walked away and you thought, `Who was this woman?' She was extremely guarded'' about her personal life, Tappert explains.
What was known were standard (read, boring) biographical details: She was born in Philadelphia to a mother who died 12 days after her birth and a father who soon fled to France. Beaux was raised by her maternal grandmother in ``genteel poverty'' among women who gave music lessons and a rich uncle who sent her to art school.
She began her career painting the likenesses of children on china plates, a period that later embarrassed her.
``I hoped that some of them would wear out their suspending wire and be dashed to pieces,'' she wrote of her first pieces.
Although not considered a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, Beaux made a name for herself at a time when women married and raised families instead of having careers. - and the two were mutually exclusive.
Beaux, who never married (despite several proposals), milked her high-society family connections for commissions to paint portraits of some of America's wealthiest families, including then-First Lady Edith Roosevelt and her daughter, Ethel.
Her portraits recorded the good news of the Gilded Age - men in silk suits, women in fabulous furs, mothers and daughters who surely never dipped a hand into dish water.
She flattered them with her brush strokes; they flattered her with their patronage.
Above all, Beaux abhorred ugliness. She once told a niece who was being inspected as a prospective portrait subject: ``That's a forehead that will go to Bryn Mawr and not one for painting.''
Meaning: The niece was brainy but not beautiful - and definitely not fit to sit for one of her aunt's paintings.
``I admire her, but I find her unbelievably difficult, too,'' Tappert says with the familiarity of a biographer - or a family member - who knows too much about her subject.
``She held to the belief that most women should marry and have families - but not her, because she was inordinately talented, which she was. But she did have every break.''
An award-winner on several continents, Beaux was extremely political, sometimes even sitting on juries for shows she had entered. Once, Tappert says, when she didn't win an award in a San Francisco show, ``she became a tempest in a teapot'' and initiated a letter-writing campaign in protest.
``I like that,'' Tappert says. ``She knew how to work the system. She had this buoyant spirit - and she didn't let anything get in her way.''
Tappert knows Beaux.
She knows, for instance, that Beaux would approve of the National Portrait Gallery building where Tappert has gathered much of her work. It's an opulent antebellum structure replete with columns, arches and vaulted ceilings.
She knows, too, that Beaux would be none too happy with some of the curator's findings. While Beaux's papers and diaries are voluminous, they make no mention of romance - though she did write in her autobiography: ``The little God of love was constantly above,'' tempting her with gentleman callers.
``I don't think she'd be too happy with me; I really had to dig up her secrets,'' Tappert explains.
Tappert's former career as a law librarian and her Ph.D. in art history had primed her to be a thorough digger, but it was Beaux's refusal to divulge anything beyond her public persona that fueled the biographer's intrigue.
An ad in The New York Times Book Review turned up two former associates, including one young man who'd visited the artist on her deathbed. Tappert interviewed the man, now in his 80s.
``The man described her as wearing a becoming scarf about her head and resting with a cashmere coverlet and a periwinkle blanket,'' Tappert explains, chuckling. ``Imagine: Here is an 87-year-old woman who had the attention of a young man in his 20s!''
Beaux's story is all so very ``Room With a View,'' Tappert thinks - full of sexual tension, but devoid of action. Beaux's home in Gloucester, Mass. - replete with the opulent, high-style 19th-century adornments that have come back into vogue - would make a perfect setting for one of those beautiful Merchant Ivory films.
Tappert has a literary agent who's hawking her 450-page biography of Beaux. The Smithsonian's press backed out of publishing it in conjunction with the show (printing instead the smaller, less costly catalog version).
She's also working on a second Beaux project for the National Museum for Women in the Arts - in between the free-lance research and archival jobs that help support her long-term projects.
The only one of four daughters to go to college - and the only one who hasn't had children (though she was married once) - Tappert feels a close kinship with Beaux and her career path.
A law librarian for 10 years before getting her Ph.D., Tappert says remaking her career as a kind of free-lance art biographer has put her on an uncertain but more exciting path - both professionally and personally.
``The struggle for the validation of being a professional woman, there's still some of that we have to do,'' she says.
Tappert will lecture on Cecilia Beaux at noon Thursday at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (202) 357-2700.
LENGTH: Long : 140 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS/Staff. 1. Tara Tappert isby CNBfascinated by the life and works of Cecilia Beaux. She is now
considered the national expert on the American artist. 2.
"Self-Portrait #3 is an oil on canvas painted by Cecilia Beaux in
1894. The portrait has been remounted on Masonite. 3. "Man with a
Cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker)" was painted by Beaux in 1902. color.