Balthus, R.I.P.

[Dave Monroe]

... and yet more from John Russell, "Balthus, Painter Who Caused a Stir,
Dies at 92," New York Times, Monday, February 19th, 2001.  Forgot this
stuff in my rush to Rilke this morning ...

But above all, Balthus was known for paintings of equivocal figure
subjects, very young women in poses or situations that were regarded as
enigmatic or suggestive or both. Often these subjects were caught
between dream and waking. Sometimes there were more explicitly sexual
elements, and these caused a minor scandal as early as 1934, when he had
his first one-man show at the Galerie Pierre in Paris.

Though never wholly discarded, the element of erotic provocation became
more oblique in his later work. ("I used to want to shock," he once told
a friend, "but now it bores me.") In 1955, he even agreed to tone down
an erotic incident in "The Street" (1933), a painting that had been
bought by James Thrall Soby, one of his earliest American admirers, who
later bequeathed it to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

"I really don't understand why people see the paintings of girls as
Lolitas," he told the chief art critic of The New York Times, Michael
Kimmelman, in 1996. "My little model is absolutely untouchable to me.
Some American journalist said he found my work pornographic. What does
he mean? Everything now is pornographic.   Advertising is pornographic.
You see a young woman putting on some beauty product who looks like
she's having an orgasm. I've never made anything pornographic. Except
perhaps `The Guitar Lesson.' "

That large painting, exhibited in the 1934 show at the Galerie Pierre,
depicts a girl naked below the waist and slumped over the knees of a
bare-breasted woman, who evidently is her teacher. A guitar is on the
floor and a piano is in the background. But the figure of the girl, it
has been pointed out, most directly echoes the dead Christ in the
15th-century Avignon Pietà in the Louvre; it's a link, it has been
argued, that by its blasphemy heightens the shock.

"I absolutely never thought of that, never," Balthus protested in the
1996 interview. "I'm Catholic. I'm a member of the Order of St. Maurice
and St. Lazare!"

[...]

Despite a lifelong horror of being photographed or interviewed, he
became more accessible in his later years, though still deeply concerned
with his privacy. He once said about himself, "Balthus is a painter
about whom nothing is known." The often-quoted statement implied that
whatever people thought they knew about him or his work was wrong.

... Rilke, equivocal, enigmatic, suggestive, Lolitas, pornography,
interviews, photographs, privacy, hm ...