Balthus: The Man Behind the Curtain

Balthus made his name with a painting that was seen by virtually no one. Offered his first solo show by the Galerie Pierre in 1934, he chose to exhibit six pictures, four of which were extraordinarily sexual even by Parisian standards. Yet the most discussed canvas was hidden in the back room, behind a curtain.

At the time, Balthus was just 26 years old, self-taught and impoverished. His painting style would evolve considerably over the remaining five and a half decades before his death in 2001, and his fortune would soar along with his reputation. Major museums would acquire his pictures of prepubescent girls in various stages of undress, often accompanied by leering cats, and he would be honored with lifetime retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over that period, he would come to be considered as beguilingly mysterious as that early shrouded canvas, a man cloaked in rumor on account of his vaunted secrecy. "Balthus is a painter about whom nothing is known," he famously telegraphed the curator of his 1968 Tate retrospective. Caginess was his modus operandi.

In truth, Balthus—born Balthazar Klossowski—was a painter about whom plenty was known. He was known, for instance, to be a Polish count, a relative of Lord Byron, the illegitimate son of Rainer Maria Rilke and a Romanov. He was born in 1907, 1908 and 1911. That is to say, most of the information gleaned from interviews with the conspicuously elusive artist and reported in the press was patently false. His biographical confabulation has been the subject of nearly as much writing as his actual life, and his petty fraud has been attributed to playfulness by some, psychosis by others. Probably it was a mix. What is far more significant, though, is how this evasive character has, like the curtain covering the painting in the back room of the Galerie Pierre, contributed as much as any pigment to the profound impact of his art.

Balthus’ most improbable claim was that he had no sexual interest in his prepubescent female subjects. He repeatedly said he could not fathom why anyone would consider his imagery erotic. Questioned about paintings such as Girl With a Cat (1937) and Therese Dreaming (1938)—each showing a child with her skirt hiked up—Balthus habitually responded by claiming that was how little girls naturally sat, and accusing his audience of perversity: "The problem is the viewer’s longings and interests, not mine." Even more incredibly, he expressed shock at spectators’ response to The Room (1952–54), a spectacularly strange painting of a young girl sprawled out on a settee, legs spread, head thrown back, naked except for her shoes and socks, flesh illuminated by the daylight cast through a window dramatically undraped by a glowering dwarf. Interrogated by his biographer, Nicholas Fox Weber, Balthus dismissed speculation that the girl was "dead or unconscious, victimized or sexually satiated," asserting that she was "just a nude" and that if the painting expressed anything, it was a general awakening.

Responses to Balthus’ position have, predictably, ranged from outrage to resignation, yet all have ignored the purpose his protestations served. The artist was as calculating with his own image as with the imagery on his canvases. To understand his apparent disingenuousness, we must consider why he chose to paint children in the first place. He gave many reasons, including the fact that little girls dress interestingly, but the most revealing explanation is one reported by the art historian Gilles Neret. "The future is incarnate in adolescence," Balthus said. "The body of a woman is already complete. The mystery has disappeared." This seems consistent with his painted depictions, in which the figures seem to exist in the sexual equivalent of a quantum superposition, subject to complex urges still unfathomable to them. They offer themselves to the adult viewer without understanding quite what they’re giving because it can be apprehended only retrospectively: Purity is never manifest until it has been lost. By capturing this transitional moment, Balthus comes closer than any other artist to invoking tenuous innocence, and his fervent denial of the girls’ eroticism in spite of their blatant sexuality makes us look at them in a state of uncertainty equivalent to their own. Mystified, we enter into their mystery.

This helps explain why he often referred to these girls as angels or icons and claimed to be a religious painter. "A painting is the same thing as a prayer," he wrote in his posthumously published memoirs, "an innocence that is finally grasped, a moment torn from the disaster of passing time." The religion he claimed was Catholicism, though his mother was Jewish, and he had more mistresses than a Renaissance pope. And while his pictures often did have origins in traditional Christian iconography and were painted using techniques that would have been familiar to the Old Masters, they bore little resemblance to anything one might encounter in a church. In this essentially secular faith, the mystery of mysteries is encountered in the maturing body.

Perhaps the most extreme example was the painting behind the curtain at the Galerie Pierre, called The Guitar Lesson (1934). As many art historians have pointed out, the design almost exactly mimics the "Villeneuves-les-Avignons Pietà" (circa 1470) in the Louvre, where the young Balthus taught himself to paint by copying the work of Poussin and Piero della Francesca. But in place of the sacrificed Christ is a prepubescent girl, dress pulled up, back arched over the knee of a grown woman who pulls her hair with one hand while the other hand strums her sex as if it were a stringed instrument.

This early masterpiece’s themes of innocence and sacrifice are inevitably religious; however, the religion is not Catholicism any more than Balthus’ mother was a countess. Balthus’ religion, like his biography, was his own invention, pieced together from the world around him. What could be more Catholic than a curtain to separate the mysterium tremendum from the unworthy? What could be more pornographic?

And at some level, Balthus probably believed his own fiction. His elusive mutability provided him with a means of saving himself from the disaster of passing time. "The best way not to fall into second childhood is never to leave childhood to begin with," he wrote in his memoirs. There’s a good reason why Balthus could empathize with the adolescents in his paintings. For his entire life, he remained one himself.

By: Jonathon Keats
09/01/2008