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TIME on Balthus
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Subject: 'TIME' Article
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 14:05:36 -0400
From: "Sandy Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
To: chtodel@gte.net
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Tuesday, April 24, 2001
A Foundling of the Louvre
BYROBERT HUGHES
It would be hard to make a case for Balthus, who died last
week at his chalet in Switzerland at the august age of 92, as
one of the great artists of the 20th century. He knew many of
them and swam in the same water as they did, but he was not a
giant fish like Picasso, Matisse or even his friend from early
days in Paris, Joan Miro. Nevertheless he was a good artist,
very good at times, though his later work fell far short of
his best, most of which was done in the 1930s-50s. And he was,
to all intents, the last celebrity of the old School of
Paris--not quite a central figure but able to turn his
marginality around so that it looked like aristocratic refusal
of a slightly questionable limelight. "Balthus," he told a
writer in the '60s, "is a painter about whom nothing is
known"--and he did make every effort to lay false trails for
would-be biographers.
In his last years, living in a grand house outside Gstaad, he
insisted on styling himself the "Comte de Rola"--a
genealogical fiction. His father Erich Klossowski was both a
painter and an art historian; his mother Elizabeth Spiro was a
painter who liked to be known as Baladine and had a long,
intense friendship with one of Germany's greatest modern
poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, who became young Balthus' mentor.
Thus from childhood Balthasar Klossowski, to give his actual
name, was steeped in an artistic milieu, and he grew up with a
considerable sense of himself as a prodigy. But young Balthus
never enrolled at an art school: he learned from impassioned
study and much copying of museum art.
The definitive influence on him, however, was the 15th century
Italian painter Piero della Francesca, whose cycle of murals
Legend of the True Cross Balthus saw on a visit to Italy in
1926. Piero's unique combination of physical intensity and
complex, abstract formality seems to have shaped Balthus'
deepest pictorial ambitions. But the streak of ambiguous
desire he brought to his imagery of the nude was peculiar to
Balthus, and it invested his work with a permanent scent of
scandal.
From the 1950s on, he was routinely compared to Vladimir
Nabokov because he was fascinated by the uninnocent sexuality
of young girls. How many times has one heard Balthus' familiar
images of pubescent females, naked in bare rooms or stretched
catlike in the firelight, called nymphets or Lolitas? For his
part, Balthus insisted that his nudes had no element of sexual
provocation. They were just form, color and glimpses of
domesticity. This was quite unpersuasive. Balthus' interiors
can have a chilly and highly stage-managed perverseness, as in
The Room, 1952-54, where the young girl sprawls on a chair in
utter abandonment, flooded with the light from a huge window
whose heavy curtains are being pulled back by a sinister
dwarf.
But Balthus' talents did not run to avant-garde ambitions. He
was entirely a figurative painter--there was no abstract phase
to his work--and his reverence for past masters, from Piero
and Poussin to Courbet and Manet, was so absolute that his
work is a virtually seamless homage to them, not so much in
subject matter as in studiously quoted poses and meticulously
conscious structures. His power of organization was awesome;
his spread of quotation, wide. What caused the individual
citations to hang together, though, was his eye for nature.
Nowhere is this clearer than in his huge composition of 1937,
The Mountain. Every one of the figures on this plateau of the
Bernese Oberland is quoted from somewhere else--the girl lying
down in the foreground comes from a Poussin, and so on. The
green-capped rocks are real, but they are also inspired by
Courbet's landscapes. But what so lifts the picture is its
soft, rapturous golden light, bathing every complicated shape
in clear air--and that was Balthus' own. He did not want to
hide his sources. He made no bones about being the child of
museums--the foundling, as it were, of the Louvre.[Image]
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