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Therese Dreaming, 1938

The Mystic
. . . . . . . . . . . . .. .

The restless mastery of Balthus.

By Jed Perl

Catwork
By T im Nolan

T
THE GREAT MODERN ARTISTS ARE MYSTICS.

They forge a personal relationship with the main currents of artistic tradition. They transform generally agreed-upon ideas into private ideas, subjecting the authority of the past to a process of reaffirmation and renewal. Gershom Scholem, in the opening pages of On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, says that in the hands of the mystic person ality "the sacred text is smelted down and a new dimension is discovered in it. In other words: the sacred text loses its shape and takes on a new one for the mystic." Although an admirer of Scholem's writing will hesitate to make too easy an analogy between the nature of mystical experience in religion and in the arts, is it not the case

that Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Bonnard have "smelted down" the fimdamentals of pictorial art in order to discover new dimensions of pictorial art, losing an old shape and discovering a new one? Scholem himself might have accepted the analogy; at least he observes that "in a day when such mystical impulses seem to have dwindled to the vanishing point they still retain an enormous force in the books of Franz Kafka:' Of course Kafka had his own deep relationship with religious experience_, But Kandinsky and Mondrian certainly took an interest in forms of mystical experience, and Matisse, Picasso, and Bonnard, for all their modem skepticism, saw art as a matter of mystery and revelation. The last of the mystics who transformed twentieth-century art was Balthus, who died in 2001 at the age of ninety-two. Mystics are by turns revered, reviled, demonized, and ignored- and at one point or another in his very long career Balthus was regarded in all of those ways. It is only when we embrace his paintings as a daring mystic's reimagining of the history of art that we understand why he has been such a controversial figure. Let us begin with the most obvious of the misunderstandings that have stood in the way of a full appreciation of his achievement: his paintings of girls. Often dismissed as the work of a pornographer and a pederast, they can be properly appreciated only when we accept them as unabashedly mystical, the flesh a symbol of the spirit, the girl's dawning self-awareness an emblem of the artist's engagement with the world. Balthus's fascination with the life around him had nothing to do with documenting everyday experiences and everything to do with uncovering the hidden meanings of those experiences. Such meanings, so far as Balthus was concerned, were hermetic and occult, to be decoded like the images in the Tarot deck or the constellations in the night sky. Braque, a painter whom Balthus admired, urged artists to approach their canvases in the same spirit as a medium approaches her tea leaves. We must take Balthus altogether seriously when, late in life, he spoke of "the elucidation of mysteries" and a search for "the secret connections among all things:' He believed that the painters he admired most-Giotto, Masaccio, Poussin-demanded of themselves an almost supernatural precision. "How can one paint;' Balthus wondered, "except with this deliberate and mystical progress?"

The old cat keeps peeing around the house Various places for peeingthe back door-the bottom Of the stairs-right in front of the refrigerator The old cat manages to place himself always in my path He anticipates my path and settles there Right where my bare foot falls on him-and he cries Like a squeeze toy-runs awayto exactly the next place I'll be He already knows where I'll belike clockwork or catwork-to know In one's essence what will happenthat's why he waits for the Sun On the arm of the green chairgazing East-in his own good time

Balthus embraced a succession of mystical guises, a variety of masks, veils, and mirrors that he believed enabled him to reveal aspects of a deeper truth. Going through "Balthus: Cats and Girls: Paintings and Provocations;' the exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a sensitive visitor will have glimpses of Balthus the mystical magician. These begin with the somber realist visions of Therese and Therese Dreaming, from 1938, and condude with the anti-naturalistic opulence- by turns coruscated, burnished, and muted-of The Cup of Coffee and The Moth, from 1959 through 1960. "Balthus: Cats and Girls" is cause for celebration, the first museum exhibition in New York devoted to his work since the retrospective at the Metropolitan in 1984. It is also an extraordinarily frustrating event. Sabine Rewald, the curator at the Metropolitan who organized the show, is a rationalist, and therefore incapable of grasping the genius of this artist who is anything but a rationalist-who was one of the greatest dreamers of the twentieth century. Rewald has little or no patience for

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Balthus's mystical ambitions or for the mystical claims for his work that have been made over the years by writers such as Antonin Artaud, Guy Davenport, and jean Leymarie. My feeling is that Rewald's goal with this exhibition (she also organized the show of 1984) has been to cut Balthus down to a manageable size. She has set out to transform a wildly ambitious visionary-an artist who was not afraid to provoke scandal in his search for the truth-into a mid-level poetic talent. Rewald, who mounted "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s" at the Metropolitan in 2006, has a taste for a vein of chilly, sharply rendered realist visions in twentieth-century art. She may believe that Balthus's work of the 1930s and early 1940s, which is the central focus here, owes something to what was known in the 1920s as the New Objectivity, especially the work of Christian Schad. There is no question that Rewald's views need to be taken seriously. She is an impressive scholar, whose exhibition at the Metropolitan a few years ago, "Rooms with a View," about the open window as a motif in nineteenth-century painting, was a curatorial masterstroke. And although Balthus, this European artist, has historically held a special place in New York-it was a New York dealer, Pierre Matisse, who represented him throughout his career, and his first museum show was at the Museum of Modem Art from 1956 to 1957- the truth is that without Rewald's efforts on Balthus's behalf we would hardly know his work in New York today. She even had the good sense to mount a tiny salute at the Metropolitan, called "Balthus Remembered," when he died in 2001. The catalogue of "Balthus: Cats and Girls" is a beautiful piece of work, admirably levelheaded in its treatment of his involvement with his young models. Rewald presents valuable information about these women, especially Therese Blanchard, who was born in 1925 and whose working-class family lived near Salthus in the sixth arrondissement of Paris; Rewald speculates that Balthus might have met her at a bistro where her father was a waiter or at a restaurant where he was later a sommelier. 1f only Rewald's feeling for Balthus's work matched her familiarity with his life. Her great mistake, as I see it, is to imagine that it was in the paintings of the late 1930s and

early 1940s that Balthus was most truly himself. She does not understand that for Balthus there was never sud1 a thing as an essential or even a characteristic style. The overwhelming richness of his experiences left him no choice but to embrace a stylistic and thematic pluralism. When he pursued a particular style or motif, it was because he was articulating some fresh aspect of his mystical vision. To grasp the unity of his kaleidoscopic achievement we must be alert to what he referred to as "the secret connections among all things:' Museumgoers who leave this exhibition imagining that they have seen Balthus's art might be surprised to know that even as he was painting his portraits of girls he was also creating some indelible portraits of men, especially the painters Andre Derain and joan Mir6. His attentiveness to the experience of certain women was matched by his attentiveness to the experience of certain men, so that the paintings, when taken together, become a celebration of human variety- and, perhaps, of human duality. Who would imagine, knowing Balthus only from this show, that he was one of the greatest landscape painters of modern times? Again, he was operating dialectically, representing both the room, emblem of cuiture, and the landscape, emblem of nature. Although this exhibition goes up to 1960, it gives no hint that Balthus also created two of the century's defirtitive interpretations of urban life, The Street (1933) and The

claims guided her selection. Whatever the rationale, I do not think that museumgoers should have been denied the sensual gravitas of Balthus's fmal explorations of this enigmatic face-off between a girl and a cat, in which a hand-mirror plays a critical supporting role. Given the controversies that have accompanied Balthus's career, I was curious as to how "Balthus: Cats and Girls" would be received. There was apparently some anxiety about this at the Metropolitan, where at the last minute the exhibition, already subtitled "Cats and Girls," grew another subtitle: "Paintings and Provocations." As Rewald explains in the catalogue, this was "in acknowledgment that his paintings of adolescents might offend some viewers:' In light of such worries, it has been interesting to see how mild the critical reception has been. To be sure, there have been a few rumblings about the absence of The Guitar Lesson (1934), a painting of a female music teacher sexually assaulting a girl that Balthus long ago dismissed as a youthful caprice. But generally the better-known critics who have weighed in- Roberta Smith in The New York Times and Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker-seem to like Rewald's diminishing assessment. Rewald has transformed a master for the ages into a period piece, which sits well with some sophisticated museumgoers, who were probably never comfortable with either Balthus's titanic ambitions or his idiosyncratic eroticism.

Balthus's work has no particular "look." You need to keep looking.

Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre (19521954). Rewald will respond that what she is offering is a thematic treatment of his achievement. Fair enough, except that she entirely ignores the final series of paintings of a girl and a cat, completed only in the 1990s. I realize that there might have been challenges involved in borrowing these works, but it is difficult to imagine that the Metropolitan Museum of Art could not have obtained at least one or two. I can conclude only that Rewald meant to edit and to truncate even the thematic concerns that she
Meanwhile, the Gagosian Gallery, just blocks away from the Metropolitan, has mounted a show of Polaroid photographs that Balthus took late in life as preparations for paintings, mostly of a girl who has now, as an adult, signed off on their public display. The show has a portentous title: "Balthus: The Last Studies." Whatever excitement the gallery hoped to stir- there was a little feature in Vanity Fair-the show is at most a fascinating footnote. We see Salthus using photographs as aides-memoire, much as Degas, Bonnard, and Vuillard did

The King of Cats, 1935

before hlm. I imagine that Balthus enjoyed those echoes of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century painting practice. I also suspect that he found in the tight frame and the softened yet heightened color of the Polaroid some of the same charm that drew Walker Evans to the medium late in life. But for gallerygoers who come to these Polaroids without some larger understanding of Balthus's achievement, they will only serve to add to Rewald's portrait of Balthus as a slippery and perhaps sordid young man a portrait of Balthus as a silly and perhaps pathetic old man.
THE METROPOLITAN SHOW, WHICH

certainly represents a number of high points in the first half of Balthus's career, also serves to remind us how mightily he sometimes struggled to make a painting do what he wanted it to do. Going through the exhibition, we see Balthus continually testing the limits of his facility and his craft as he explores fresh aspects of his vision. Salthus's work has no particular "look." (You need to keep looking.) His smaller studiessome of the sketch-like heads of Therese, for example, which could be characterized as brilliant student work-are unabashedly experimental, the products of an artist who was always self-critical, eager to test the limits of his virtuosity. Balthus was constantly pushing hlmself, shifting his attention, readjusting his ambitions. This mystic struggled mightily to find what he was after. He tried different ways of handling paint, modeling form, structuring light and space. Museumgoers may feel especially alert as they track his shifting approaches and techniques. Artists admire- and are challenged byBalthus's open-ended approach to questions of style and craft. Anybody who tal<es a long look at Therese Dreaming, in which Balthus arranged the young model's legs so as to reveal a glimpse of white panties, will see that the artist's attention is far too inclusive to be characterized as pornographic. Balthus brings to of a shock than the shuttered look of her those intimate details precisely the same head, seen in profile, with the eyes so scrupulosity that he brings to every other tightly (grimly, almost angrily) closed as to inch of the canvas. The still life on the ta- repel the promise of the dream to which ble, the girl's upraised arms, the wicl<er of the title alludes. the chaise on which she is seated, the pilRewald is very good at teasing out possilow that supports her back: each element ble sources for the poses in Therese Dreamdemands the same unequivocal attention ing and other paintings. She reproduces a as the space between her legs. This is not Man Ray photo-collage from 1935, which to say that the spread of the thirteen-year- recapitulates the image of a little girl from old's legs and the light glancing off her a Pears Soap advertisement from 1901. underwear isn't a shock. But it is no more At times, though, the significance of the

most important sources eludes her. While she mentions Balthus's passionate engagement with Courbet's naturalism a halfdozen times in the course of her catalogue, I do not think she grasps the full import of Courbet's influence. What interested Salthus about Courbet was the melancholy of his materialism-the ennui that fascinated the Surrealists and de Chirico (who wrote a fine essay about Courbet). Balthus's realism has nothing whatsoever to do with the blunt-force approach we know from the

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and formal. The girl on the floor is no or- nineteenth-century portraits of children, dinary girl. She is seen in profile, in a pose cats can suggest "potential evil" and "lathat brings to mind Ancient Egyptian wall tent female sexuality; ' she seems reluctant painting and Archaic Greek bas-relief. The to pursue the theme's larger metaphysgirl in The Salon announces a motif, the ical implications. Rewald the rationalist female figure almost crawling across the would probably recoil from the grandiosfloor, which more than a quarter-century ity of Alain Vircondelet, who interviewed later culminates in two of Balthus's most Balthus in his later years and argues in a austere works, japanese Girl with Black Mir- new book, Balthus and Cats, that a eat's ror and japanese Girl with Red Table (both "gaze contains a profound knowledge completed in 1976). But this motif of the gleaned from the depths of time, possessBALTHUS NEVER AGAIN DID ANYTHING figure on the floor can be understood only ing at once the humility and pride to acthat looks like those paintings of Therese dialectically, an emblem to be counterposed knowledge by a look alone that it is unique from the late 1930s. And it is not easy to with another emblem in Balthus's mystical and singular: These admittedly extravagant generalize about the direction-or rather, universe, namely the motif of the table and claims are very much to the point. Balthus's the directions-his work took in the 1940s. chair. For if the table and chair-essential cats are descendants of the sacred felines Rewald's biographical approach to the elements in paintings of solitary figures of ancient Egypt - which brings us back to paintings, which emphasizes a succession playing cards including The Game of Pa- the girl on the floor in The Salon and her of young women as models (and perhaps tience (1943) and The Fortune Teller (1956)- ancient Egyptian pose. The final room in the Metropolitan exhimuses) for particular works, cannot ac- suggest homo ludens and civilized play, count for the larger thematic currents that surely the crawling figures from The Salon bition provides at least a few glimpses of link paintings that Balthus created over to japanese Girl with Black Mirror suggest the glories of Balthus's later decades. Works periods of decades. The unity of Balthus's not so much culture as nature, the figure such as The Moth and The Cup of Coffee are achievement is embodied in the series of as magnificently animal, a triumph of feline nowadays often dismissed as overly decorasigns and symbols that take on a mystical grace. There is a cat in the second version tive, as if the dark power of Therese Dreamimport as they reappear: the table, the of The Salon, sitting up on its haunches, ing were the only power that counted. It is chair, the window, the tree, the mirror, the arguably less catlike than the girl. Balthus is a criticism that years ago was often lodged cat, the card game, the closed eyes, the attentive to shifting identities, the human as against the work of Matisse and Bannard. spread legs, the arched back, the confron- animal and vice versa. Which brings us to I wonder if the death in 1947 of Bannard, tation between a boy and a girl, the figure Balthus's later explorations of the theme of who had been something of a mentor to turned away, the figure walking away. In the girl and the cat, where the two of them Balthus when he was young, might have his beautiful book, A Balthus Notebook, Guy face off, both comfortably ensconced on a precipitated this fresh stylistic turn in SalDavenport reproduces The Blanchard Chil- chaise or a couch, with the mirror between thus's work in the 1950s, when he lived in a dren opposite The Painter and His Model, them raising the question of who resem- chateau in the Morvan, a region in central completed more than forty years later, and bles whom. Is the girl like a cat? Or is the France. Imagine the supple nocturnal chiarone immediately realizes that the paintings cat almost human? oscuro of Georges de La Tour united with contain a nearly identical table and chair, Rewald has some useful things to say the prismatic Cubist surface play of Georges the chair having only somewhat shifted its about the iconography of the cat. As a child Braque, and you begin to have some sense position in relation to the table in all that Balthus created an extraordinarily preco- of the unearthly achievement that is The time. What do the table and chair symbol- cious series of forty ink drawings, the sto- Moth, in which a naked woman stands in a ize? Considering that Balthus once spoke ry of a friendship between a boy and a cat bedroom, the only illumination an oil lamp. of himself as a carpenter hammering on named Mitsou, who eventually vanishes, As for The Cup of Coffee, while some might the same nail, perhaps they symbolize the leaving the boy alone with his tears. Pub- accuse Balthus of reducing the young wompower of pictorial structure, the essential lished in 1921 when Balthus was thirteen- an to an element in the decor, I would say sturdiness of the art of painting, which is with an introduction by none other than that what happens is precisely the reverse. only slightly altered from year to year. It Rilke, who was a close friend of Balthus's The woman's head is the still center of the is in the nature of such mystical symbols mother-Mitsou has long been admired painting, with the patterns of rugs, upholthat their meanings remain simultaneously by students of the livre d'artiste. Rewald stery, tablecloth, and paneled wall creating resonant and obscure, something we grasp has discovered the original drawings, until a fireworks of tessellating arabesques that only through the act of looking. now believed lost, and they are exhibited represent nothing less than the glorious Let me suggest a few themes that link in public here for the first time. She also play of this beautiful woman's imagination. works from the 1930s and early 1940s to includes an early self-portrait in which Salworks done as much as half a century later. thus appears as a slim dandy with a gigan- THOSE WHO ARRIVE AT THE METROPOLITAN In the two versions of The Salon (1941-1943), tic tabby snuggling his leg; beside him is a with a few vague impressions of Balthuswhere one girl is asleep on the couch and portfolio inscribed "A Portrait of H.M. the the dark good looks, the unconventional the other is reading on the floor, Balthus's King of Cats;' the title derived from a nine- sexuality-may have a hard time seeing sharp-edged chiaroscuro is already being teenth-century English fairy tale. Although his paintings as anything but the products transformed into something more hieratic Rewald points out that in eighteenth- and of some goth-vampire European art-world canvases of Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, and Philip Pearlstein, where the pictorial style is nakedly straightforward, an exact analogy to the frank nudity of the figures. For Balthus, naturalism was itself unnatural. It was an artifice in the sense that it was for Flaubert. The realism of Therese Dreaming is so impeccable as to become unreal. The painting is a dream about a girl dreamingchildhood seen through a glass darkly.

dandy. You have only to look at the outrageously elegant self-portrait with which the exhibition begins, painted in 1935 when Salthus was all of twenty-seven, to realize that from a very early age he knew how to cut a figure. That gift never left him. Rewald is by no means the first writer to respond to Balthus's steel-plated ego by attempting to unmask an all-too-human figure behind the fa<;ade of the swaggering aesthete. Critics like to play a game of gotcha with Balthus, pointing out that it was sheer fantasy on his part to claim to be a Polish count and that, whatever he might have said to the contrary, it is an incontrovertible fact that his mother was jewish. But the critics who find Balthus insufficiently sober or forthright, while certainly not wrong to call his bluff, have almost invariably misunderstood the nature of that bluff. Balthus's entire worldview is rooted in Oscar Wilde's belief that art is the supreme truth. Those who dedicate themselves to the religion of art, an untruth that reveals the truth, often feel they are not constrained by conventional definitions of fact and fiction. We are entitled to reject such beliefs, but we must understand that they were the air that Balthus breathed. He was born in the twilight of the fin de sii'de. His father was an artist and an art historian, his mother was a painter, and as a very young man he was introduced to family friends who included Rilke, Gide, and Bonnard. (It was Rilke who suggested he be known only by his nickname; he was born Balthasar Klossowski.) Rewald's biographical approach firmly situates Balthus in the Europe of the 1930s, his darkening interiors reflecting the mood of a continent on the brink of catastrophe. But because she is so out of sync with his mystical inclinations, she doesn't know what to do with the information that she has uncovered. If Rewald seems bemused by Balthus's tall< about the timelessness of art, it is because she fails to understand that that timelessness can only be discovered in one's own time. As much as he owed to Giotto, Duccio, Piero, Caravaggio, and Courbet- all frequently mentioned in relation to his work- it was the Symbolist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that forever shaped Balthus's worldview. The Symbolists, grappling with the dangers of modernity long before the arrival of World War I, saw art as the only possible salvation, the revelation that redeemed a catastrophic reality. Balthus's art would be unimaginable

The Moth, 1959-1960

without the precedents of Beardsley, are not autobiographical so much as they Gauguin, Proust, Rilke, the artists in the are oracular: indelible visions that cannot circle around La Revue Blanche, and the possibly be captioned or encapsulated. incendiary fantasies of the Ballets Russ- Time becomes timeless. Narrative bees. In succeeding decades, without ever comes myth. When Balthus represents abandoning the enthusiasms of his youth, himself in his canvases, it is often as a figBalthus grappled with the shifting cur- ure with his back to the viewer, the artist rents of European life, not as a journalist unknown and unknowable, determined but as a magician. The Passage du Com- to leave us alone with the mystery of a merce Saint-Andre, his immense painting painting that is probably also a mystery of a tiny street not far from the Boulevard to him. More than a decade has passed St. Germain with its legendary cafes, is since his death, and this mystic is still the definitive representation of Existential leaving his admirers wondering what it all Paris. As for japanese Figure with Black means. Who knows? Maybe he has spoMirror and japanese Figure with Red Ta- ken after all. Maybe the purpose of paintble, those profound responses to classical ing is no more and no less than to make japanese painting, their appearance in the us wonder. Maybe it is as simple, and as late 1970s may in years to come be seen difficult, as that. as reflecting Europe's deepening awareness of the power of Asia. ]edPerlis theartcriticforTHE NEW REPUBLIC Balthus reveals a great deal about his and the author, most recently, of MAGICIANS time and his place, but the revelations AND CHARLATANS (Ealcins Press Foundation).