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. He called himself “Balthus,” a frenchified version of a childhood nickname. His parents were Poles (his mother a Jew), and he died in Switzerland. But he was born and spent much of his career in Paris, and he is known as a French painter — the last survivor of the great age of French painting.
Whatever the art world was for, Balthus was against. He was that rarest of commodities in artistic circles, a non-conformist. His perversity was so thoroughgoing that in the end it looked like integrity, except when it was disgusting. He liked cats and little girls. He was against cubism, abstraction, surrealism, all forms of politicized art, and the twentieth century in general. Until late in life, he was against the idea of celebrity. He disliked having his photograph taken and, although his finest works are portraits, he rarely made self-portraits. According to his most famous pronouncement, which he used on several occasions, “Balthus is an artist about whom nothing is known.”
He was in favor of Piero della Francesca and Gustave Courbet, of portraits and nudes, still-lifes, landscapes, and, above all, himself. He believed in art and greatness. From childhood on he seems to have regarded himself as a great man. He flirted with disaster like a reckless test pilot all his life, and got into frequent artistic crack-ups. “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; a beautiful model half-undressed can be disturbingly beautiful, but a sexualized little girl half-undressed is disturbingly vile. Like the Japanese recipe for blowfish, “disturbing” is arguably delicious up to a point, but beyond that point it becomes fatal. Balthus lacked a firm enough, wise enough hand to prepare this doubtful dish. Too many of his paintings are merely toxic.
So why should we concern ourselves with his work? His draftsmanship is cramped and timid, an inadequate foundation for his big ambitions. He has no color sense, and his work tends to be overbearing and profoundly humorless. The best you can say for most of his paintings is that they are no good.
The answer lies in his gift for painterly architecture; 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. His best portraits are as good as twentieth-century portraits can be. 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.
His Therese Dreaming (1938) is all too characteristic. The painting is part of the small “Balthus Remembered” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York through May 27. 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. The composition is arresting: stillness coiled tight; a snake about to strike. The girl is asleep, yet each leg and arm is sharply bent; she seems menacing, and her dreams must be menacing too. The cat crouches low, pent-up and ominous.
Perhaps this makes the painting sound like a haunted house, a dark masterpiece. It isn’t. There is something wrong. The girl’s bare legs and crumpled skirt and exposed panties aren’t narrative details. They are the whole point, the painting’s unequivocal focus; the jutting knee is dead-center. Balthus has painted this little girl in the spirit of Degas approaching a middle-aged whore. Before we even have time to be morally offended, we are aesthetically revolted. (“We’re fed up with Balthus and his little girls,” the artist Alberto Giacometti is supposed to have said.)
And Balthus can easily produce revulsion without resorting to half-naked children. 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. In his own distinctive way, Balthus was a master of this language.
Take The Mountain (1937), usually described as one of his masterworks. What is it about this large picture that makes it so exceptionally awful? 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. (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.) There is a sleeping girl at Antoinette’s feet, a crouching mountaineer to her left and smaller figures in the background. The setting is Alpine and rocky.
Often Balthus’s figures are deliberately distorted: the heads too large, the hands and feet too small. Such distortions are not bad in themselves. (In Attic black-figure painting they have a fleet, story-book charm.) But here, as in many other Balthus paintings, the effect is grotesque — as it is supposed to be. The faces are swollen in a way that seems to crowd out thought. The crouching mountain-man is sullen and nasty. Five of six figures have canes, to emphasize their wooden stiffness. 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.
Yet this same snarling grotesqueness can produce powerful results when it is kept under control. 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. They are painterly versions of the FBI’s Most Wanted posters.
His portraits of the painters Andre Derain (1936) and Joan Miro (1938, with his daughter) are brutally unpleasant and monumentally effective. Derain stares balefully, with a pint-sized hand pressed histrionically to his chest and a half-undressed model with downcast eyes seated behind. Miro’s face poses some sort of gigantic, desperately urgent question. Both men are trapped in the cross hairs; both pairs of eyes bore straight ahead, both faces glisten as if soaked with sweat (although no sweat is visible). Both paintings are done in sickly yellowish tones. They make your skin crawl, and they are brilliant.
And not all of Balthus’s successes are sickly. The figure in Girl in a White Dress (1955) is in her twenties — Frederique Tison, Balthus’s live-in model at the time. 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 effect is overwhelming. This is a beautiful painting, possibly the artist’s most beautiful.
But in the end his art rests on draftsmanship, and his draftsmanship is weak. 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.
Balthus’s life makes good reading. 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. Balthus the adult was openly contemptuous of the fashionable art scene. But Picasso liked his work. (Picasso had a taste for the grotesque, but rarely let it overwhelm his art.) He was friends with Giacometti; the powerful New York dealer Pierre Matisse — son of the painter — took him on and stuck with him. He was hardly isolated.
In the end he seems like a man who never grew up but (unfortunately) had been none too charming as a boy. “When I was young,” he said, “I always felt like a little prince.” He had the virtues and shortcomings of a spoiled brat all his life.
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 infatuated with aristocracy in a way that suggests a child in his Knights-of-the-Round-Table phase. He wanted to live in a chateau; “I have a greater need for a chateau,” he said, “than a laborer for a loaf of bread.” He wasn’t kidding. (He was never kidding.) And he did acquire a beat-up jalopy chateau, second-hand. 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. He called himself the “Count de Rola.” Eventually he became famous and rich enough to live and be treated exactly as he liked.
The “Count de Rola” fantasy might have been harmless play-acting: Every artist makes up heroic stories about himself. But there could be more to it, and it may offer a clue to his art. “Balthus felt ashamed of his mother,” writes James Lord, who knew Balthus (and everyone else). (Lord’s essay on Balthus is in his Some Remarkable Men from 1996; John Russell wrote another essential Balthus piece, which appears in his 1999 Matisse: Father & Son.) 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.
In this light, the aristocrat fantasy seems less like whimsical silliness and more like a defensive jab to protect a vulnerable sore point. And then, naturally, one thinks of the systematic distortions that make his figures grotesque. Did he put in those distortions as a maneuver to hide his technical weakness? Was he insisting: “My figures look strange because I want them to”? (And how could I be a Jew? I’m a Polish nobleman!)
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. He snuck out the back door. In the end he gave us many terrible paintings and a few fine ones. He was no great artist.
But perhaps he was a notable minor one. An artist’s peculiar vision is his only source of power. But as he sets off for distant shores, he expects to be blown around by the prevailing artistic winds. Few artists have ever been blown around less than Balthus. He sailed straight. He worked among some of the most powerful and winning artistic personalities of all time, but they had virtually no effect on his painting. From start to finish his art embodied his own vision and no one else’s. 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. His artistic personality was a clenched fist, shut tight.
It’s easy to believe that he would have been a better painter had he had been a more open-hearted one. Yet his absolute refusal to be swayed by fashion or anything else is a strange and admirable thing. 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.
David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
