Mysterious Balthus
GELERNTER, DAVID
Mysterious Balthus The painter as individualist. BY DAVID GELERNTER Well into his forties he was largely unknown, but by the time he died—this year, on February 18, at age ninety-two—Balthasar...
...a beautiful model half-undressed can be disturbingly beautiful, but a sexualized little girl half-undressed is disturbingly vile...
...The painting is part of the small "Balthus Remembered" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York through May 27...
...Perhaps this makes the painting sound like a haunted house, a dark masterpiece...
...The figure in Girl in a White Dress (1955) is in her twenties—Frederique Tison, Balthus's live-in model at the time...
...Both men are trapped in the cross hairs...
...He flirted with disaster like a reckless test pilot all his life, and got into frequent artistic crack-ups...
...The best you can say for most of his paintings is that they are no good...
...In Attic black-figure painting they have a fleet, story-book charm...
...the powerful New York dealer Pierre Matisse—son of the painter—took him on and stuck with him...
...In this light, the aristocrat fantasy seems less like whimsical silliness and more like a defensive jab to protect a vulnerable sore point...
...This is a beautiful painting, possibly the artist's most beautiful...
...she seems menacing, and her dreams must be menacing too...
...It centers on a young lady in gray, hips cocked and hands pressed together overhead with the palms upward, as if she were fending off a blimp...
...BY DAVID GELERNTER Well into his forties he was largely unknown, but by the time he died—this year, on February 18, at age ninety-two—Balthasar Klossowski was the most celebrated artist in the world...
...His best portraits are as good as twentieth-century portraits can be...
...The crouching mountain-man is sullen and nasty...
...The colors (grays, browns, and sky blue, with emphatic oranges and yellow-greens) suggest the customer-waiting lounge in a down-market tattoo parlor: One feels that they could not possibly have been chosen on purpose...
...Like the Japanese recipe for blow-fish, "disturbing" is arguably delicious up to a point, but beyond that point it becomes fatal...
...Before we even have time to be morally offended, we are aesthetically revolted...
...He disliked having his photograph taken and, although his finest works are portraits, he rarely made self-portraits...
...An artist's peculiar vision is his only source of power...
...He was against cubism, abstraction, surrealism, all forms of politicized art, and the twentieth century in general...
...Picasso had a taste for the grotesque, but rarely let it overwhelm his art...
...From childhood on he seems to have regarded himself as a great man...
...Miro's face poses some sort of gigantic, desperately urgent question...
...And he did acquire a beat-up jalopy chateau, second-hand...
...Whatever the art world was for, Balthus was against...
...His best drawings have poise and quasi-feminine grace, but ordinarily— as in the 1953 Study for the Dream I— they are tentative and halting, full of awkward passages at exactly the predictable places (hands, foreshortened limbs, facial features) and utterly lacking in the boldness or fluency that might have redeemed them...
...He wasn't kidding...
...Was he insisting: "My figures look strange because I want them to...
...Balthus the adult was openly contemptuous of the fashionable art scene...
...In the end he seems like a man who never grew up but (unfortunately) had been none too charming as a boy...
...In the end he gave us many terrible paintings and a few fine ones...
...When I was young," he said, "I always felt like a little prince...
...Balthus's life makes good reading...
...The effect is overwhelming...
...But in the end his art rests on draftsmanship, and his draftsmanship is weak...
...He was hardly isolated...
...both pairs of eyes bore straight ahead, both faces glisten as if soaked with sweat (although no sweat is visible...
...His parents were Poles (his mother a Jew), and he died in Switzerland...
...He was infatuated with aristocracy in a way that suggests a child in his Knights-of-the-Round-Table phase...
...And Balthus can easily produce revulsion without resorting to half-naked children...
...And not all of Balthus's successes are sickly...
...He snuck out the back door...
...The setting is Alpine and rocky...
...Yet this same snarling grotesqueness can produce powerful results when it is kept under control...
...He called himself "Balthus," a frenchified version of a childhood nickname...
...Did he put in those distortions as a maneuver to hide his technical weakness...
...He was in favor of Piero della Francesca and Gustave Courbet, of portraits and nudes, still-lifes, landscapes, and, above all, himself...
...He was no great artist...
...But perhaps he was a notable minor one...
...It isn't...
...The legendary connoisseur James Lord—the last of the great Americans-in-Paris— reports that the lady is Antoinette de Watteville, whom Balthus courted, married, and left for a younger woman...
...He has no color sense, and his work tends to be overbearing and profoundly humorless...
...He had the virtues and shortcomings of a spoiled brat all his life...
...Few artists have ever been blown around less than Balthus...
...In any case, instead of confronting his technical limitations head-on and turning them into great art, as Cezanne and Matisse did, as Cornell and Pollock did, he ran away...
...Balthus evidently felt (just as his admirer and friend Dora Maar did) that a Jewish parent was no great asset in the world of twentieth-century French art...
...Often Balthus's figures are deliberately distorted: the heads too large, the hands and feet too small...
...And how could I be a Jew...
...The "Count de Rola" fantasy might have been harmless play-acting: Every artist makes up heroic stories about himself...
...He worked among some of the most powerful and winning artistic personalities of all time, but they had virtually no effect on his painting...
...the jutting knee is dead-center...
...He called himself the "Count de Rola...
...But he was born and spent much of his career in Paris, and he is known as a French painter—the last David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Balthus has painted this little girl in the spirit of Degas approaching a middle-aged whore...
...A girl of maybe eleven sleeps on a bench with one leg drawn up (her skirt and slip have fallen crumpled to her waist), hands joined on her head, a cat lapping milk at her feet...
...But there could be more to it, and it may offer a clue to his art...
...It's easy to believe that he would have been a better painter had he had been a more open-hearted one...
...And his vision barely changed over a lifetime: Many viewers have been struck by how much the paintings he made in his eighties resemble paintings he made in his twenties...
...a snake about to strike...
...The answer lies in his gift for painterly architecture...
...They make your skin crawl, and they are brilliant...
...They are painterly versions of the FBI's Most Wanted posters...
...The faces are swollen in a way that seems to crowd out thought...
...Five of six figures have canes, to emphasize their wooden stiffness...
...The amazingly straight course he cut through the gross tumult of the twentieth century was a remarkable achievement, a work of art in itself: his greatest, by far...
...His artistic personality was a clenched fist, shut tight...
...many of his pictures are imposing and impressively composed—graceless yet with a formidable, brooding presence, like a Mussorgsky opera or a grimy nineteenth-century British jail...
...Lord's essay on Balthus is in his Some Remarkable Men from 1996...
...Such distortions are not bad in themselves...
...He sailed straight...
...And then, naturally, one thinks of the systematic distortions that make his figures grotesque...
...What is it about this large picture that makes it so exceptionally awful...
...His draftsmanship is cramped and timid, an inadequate foundation for his big ambitions...
...Too many of his paintings show an artist's big bold imagination, a precocious child's technique, and a little boy's dirty mind...
...He was never kidding...
...I have a greater need for a chateau," he said, "than a laborer for a loaf of bread...
...There is a sleeping girl at Antoinette's feet, a crouching mountaineer to her left and smaller figures in the background...
...And occasionally he stops grinding his teeth, quits struggling to produce masterpieces, and lets go a picture (as you might release a captured songbird) that is as pale and lovely as the first hesitant daffodil after a dirty winter...
...In middle age he decided that he had actually been a Polish nobleman all along, and gradually came to insist on being addressed by his phony title...
...But here, as in many other Balthus paintings, the effect is grotesque—as it is supposed to be...
...But Picasso liked his work...
...Some people have a taste for the grotesque—for oriental theater masks and German folk tales, for medical curiosities in bottles, or TV shows about techniques of execution or bizarre diseases...
...John Russell wrote another essential Balthus piece, which appears in his 1999 Matisse: Father & Son...
...His perversity was so thoroughgoing that in the end it looked like integrity, except when it was disgusting...
...The cat crouches low, pent-up and ominous...
...He was that rarest of commodities in artistic circles, a non-conformist...
...The girl is asleep, yet each leg and arm is sharply bent...
...Derain stares balefully, with a pint-sized hand pressed histrionically to his chest and a half-undressed model with downcast eyes seated behind...
...Too many of his paintings are merely toxic...
...He wanted to live in a chateau...
...Yet his absolute refusal to be swayed by fashion or anything else is a strange and admirable thing...
...I'm a Polish nobleman...
...So why should we concern ourselves with his work...
...survivor of the great age of French painting...
...They are the whole point, the painting's unequivocal focus...
...Balthus felt ashamed of his mother," writes James Lord, who knew Balthus (and everyone else...
...His Therese Dreaming (1938) is all too characteristic...
...There is something wrong...
...Balthus's portraits tend to be good likenesses, and they represent a new genre in portraiture: the interrogation portrait, which turns the subject into a suspect and makes the viewer feel like a policeman wielding a spotlight...
...He liked cats and little girls...
...The girl's bare legs and crumpled skirt and exposed panties aren't narrative details...
...We're fed up with Balthus and his little girls," the artist Alberto Giacometti is supposed to have said...
...His mother was an artist and a friend of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and Rilke took the boy on, encouraged his painting, and introduced him to important artists...
...Until late in life, he was against the idea of celebrity...
...In his own distinctive way, Balthus was a master of this language...
...Both paintings are done in sickly yellowish tones...
...Balthus lacked a firm enough, wise enough hand to prepare this doubtful dish...
...He was friends with Giacomet-ti...
...From start to finish his art embodied his own vision and no one else's...
...Eventually he became famous and rich enough to live and be treated exactly as he liked...
...Disturbing" was his favorite way to paint— and disturbing is a word with two senses: A surreal landscape by Giorgio de Chirico can be disturbing, but a freak show is also disturbing...
...But as he sets off for distant shores, he expects to be blown around by the prevailing artistic winds...
...According to his most famous pronouncement, which he used on several occasions, "Balthus is an artist about whom nothing is known...
...Take The Mountain (1937), usually described as one of his masterworks...
...His portraits of the painters Andre Derain (1936) and Joan Miro (1938, with his daughter) are brutally unpleasant and monumentally effective...
...He believed in art and greatness...
...She has pulled her blouse off over her head without unbuttoning it, and sits quietly with the blouse softly binding her forearms, her breasts and shoulders bare...
...The composition is arresting: stillness coiled tight...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 32
