BALTHUS
(1908 - 2001)
main page, here
VANISHED SPLENDORS
A Memoir.
By Balthus as told to Alain Vircondelet.
Translated by Benjamin Ivry.
Illustrated. 237 pp. New York: Ecco/HarperCollinsPublishers. $29.95.
By JOHN RUSSELL
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The French painter Balthus, who died in February last year at 92, had an irresistible fascination, when he chose to exert it. He had seigniorial good looks of a kind now rarely met with. He was consistently debonair, though not disposed to waste his time. His conversation was at once high-souled and mischievous. Confidentiality seemed to be its essence. We felt that it was for our ears only, even if he had been saying the same things to other people for half a century.
With his multinational leanings -- his sense of the high cultures of France, Italy, England and Switzerland -- he was a throwback to a ''vieille Europe'' as yet untouched by two world wars. To be with him was distinctly a privilege, and one that could last for a lifetime. (It could also be withdrawn, on the instant.)
Something of that privilege lingers in ''Vanished Splendors,'' which is based on a two-year conversation between Balthus in his late 80's and a French admirer, Alain Vircondelet, and benefits from the inclusion of telling and unfamiliar photographs. The book was published in France as ''Memoires de Balthus,'' which was a considerable overstatement, given that the conversations were not structured but fragmented. Balthus was in no shape, and may never have even aimed, to dictate ''memoirs.''
At that time he had trouble walking and seeing, and his voice came as a whisper. ''Vanished Splendors'' is a better title, even if many of the splendors that are discussed -- among them Balthus's own paintings -- are still very much with us. But we sense, nonetheless, that he is feeling his way, word by word and for the last time, through the long story of his life.
The talks took place in his Grand Chalet in Rossiniere. It was often thought that Balthus liked very big houses because he hankered after ostentatious living. But this was not the case. What he liked was very big houses in which he could live almost alone and see no one. If the house was isolated, his happiness was complete.
This was the case with the Grand Chalet, which is situated way up above Lausanne. People had often assumed that Balthus was ideally happy as director of the French Academy's Villa Medici in Rome, a post to which he had been appointed by Andre Malraux in 1961 when Malraux was France's minister of culture. Balthus in Rome had quasi-ambassadorial status and lived in a great palazzo whose garden Velazquez had painted. In that same garden, Balthus had a studio of his own for some years, and he also enjoyed putting the great house back into good shape.
But Rome palled for him when the automobile got the better of its ancient unhurried ways. And although he had been a key figure in Paris in the 30's, he didn't fancy the era for which the new Pompidou Center was the symbol. (So vituperative was he on that subject that when he invited the novelist Marguerite Duras to stay at the Villa Medici they quarreled so fiercely that she walked out.)
After spending 16 years in Rome, he found the house in which he was to live and die. It fulfilled all his dreams, and those of Setsuko Ideta, the beautiful, intelligent and gifted young Japanese woman whom he had come to know, and to marry, in Italy. (Pierre Matisse, his dealer in New York, agreed to put up the purchase price for the house in return for a number of paintings, and in 1977 Balthus and his family moved in.)
Balthus prized the Grand Chalet for its ''dozens of rooms and hundred windows,'' only a few of which he ever made use of. He loved the golden blond wood that covered every floor and creaked at every step. He liked to remark that Victor Hugo had stayed there when it was a country inn, and there were unconfirmed rumors about both Goethe and Voltaire. He had always liked houses with august associations; after World War II, he lived for some time in the the Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva, where Byron had been an earlier and rather grumpy tenant.
''Vanished Splendors'' confirms that what Balthus really wanted was to live simply in a very large house. Despite its enormous size, he wanted the Grand Chalet to have ''the charm of a farmer's house.'' And that is what he made of it. Servants were few but devoted. And since Balthus, when he was in Rome, had become ''a real specialist in home restoration,'' the workforce was minimal.
Before long, the little train that clambered up from Lausanne on a rack railway also endeared itself to him. Not only did he prize the train as a time-keeper; he always intended to paint the Rossiniere station. It was, he said, like a childhood memory kept intact, but he never got around to painting it.
Among moments from his past, many in this book may be unfamiliar even to the enthusiast. It emerges, for instance, that everything that happened during his period of military service in Morocco had matured his work and given it its true meaning. His service with a cavalry unit, the Seventh Spahi Regiment, in Morocco from 1930 to 1932 led directly to his passion for Eugene Delacroix. He experienced at first hand and for weeks on end ''the jagged and fierce landscapes, brilliant light and savage colors'' that Delacroix had experienced just 100 years earlier. To the end, Delacroix's travel sketchbooks were among Balthus's ''all-time preferred bedside reading.'' And when Setsuko prepared his colors for him, Delacroix was her mentor.
In Balthus's view, most of modern art was ''assembled by pseudo-intellectuals who neglected nature, and became blind to it.'' He had been friendly with Mondrian, but never forgot the evening when he remarked about the ''twilight glow'' and Mondrian simply pulled the blinds, saying that he didn't want to see it any more.
Balthus detested surrealism, but he recognized Joan Miro's ''playful nobility, his lightness, humor, and derision about the human condition. . . . He invented a lot, and in his figures and forms, an innocence, youth, and human truth come through.''
These memoirs were made for a French audience, and therefore have a legitimate bias. But it is only fair to Balthus to say that he had a lifelong, though selective, streak of Anglomania. He loved the language, the literature and the idiosyncratic ways of his English friends, some of whom had pioneered an enthusiasm for his work. He spoke well of the Rolling Stones when one of his sons was friendly with them. And on quite another level, his illustrations for ''Wuthering Heights,'' though incomplete, have a terrible power. Passing through Rome, I once gave him a monumental new edition of Hogarth's prints. I soon heard from Setsuko that he ''looked at them all day and never put them down.''
It is clear from this book that Rossiniere served Balthus well till the very end. After his funeral service in its tiny church, Setsuko and his children walked in all simplicity behind the Swiss country sleigh that bore his coffin to a plot of land that had been acquired the night before. We also learn that in the village church ''cardinals jostled one another.'' That, too, was Balthus.
John Russell writes frequently about art and culture for The New York Times.
Erotic
works in ethereal light
Balthus paints his art in
terms of angels in memoir
Reviewed by
Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Vanished Splendors
A Memoir
By Balthus; as told to Alain Vircondolet; translated by Benjamin Ivry; introduction by Joyce Carol Oates
ECCO PRESS; 237 PAGES; $29.95
Like everyone else who has ever commented on his art, Balthus (1908-2001) returns repeatedly in his memoir to the question of his work's erotic content.
A self-taught painter who considered Piero della Francesca and Poussin his masters, Balthus made many pictures that describe adolescent girls in unarguably suggestive poses.
Most of the paintings have other remarkable qualities too: an eerie light, a considered compositional poise and plush, muted color. But the pictures' ambiguous provocations blind many viewers to their artistry.
"Some have claimed that my undressed young girls are erotic," Balthus writes. "I never painted them with that intent, which would have made them anecdotal, mere objects of gossips. I aimed at precisely the opposite, to surround them with a halo of silence and depth. . . . That's why I think of them as angels, beings from elsewhere, whether heaven, or another ideal place that suddenly opened and passed through time, leaving traces of wonderment, enchantment, or just as icon."
Anyone who has read "Balthus: A Biography" (2000) by Nicholas Fox Weber will suspect the painter's memoir of being a last manipulative flourish.
Like the bio, the memoir leaves a reader wondering whether Balthus is guilty of willful denial, of a failure of self-knowledge or of merely trying to skew his art's posthumous reception.
As if taunting the reader, Balthus writes, "I've always had a naive, natural complicity with young girls," naming several of his models. He then mentions the source of his memoir's title, the "paradise of vanished splendors" evoked by Lewis Carroll, another artist still under suspicion of ephebophilia.
More than a hundred pages later, Balthus mischievously adds: "When I speak of angels and the troubling grace of some of my young girls, don't forget that the most dazzling, radiant, fallen and glorious angel was Lucifer."
Readers of the memoir will appreciate Weber's conclusion in the biography. "His only real perversion," Weber writes of Balthus, "is in depriving himself of the acknowledgment of the excitement of neurotic thought that is so central to his being and his work."
For several reasons, Balthus does not use the word "angel" lightly. First, it chimes with the professions of Roman Catholic faith that punctuate "Vanished Splendors." Born Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, Balthus was raised an unobservant Protestant and discovered Catholicism as an adult.
"Painting is a means of acceding to God's mystery, of extracting some radiance from His Kingdom," Balthus writes in one of many passages that define his sense of his art. "A painting is the same thing as a prayer . . . a moment torn from the disaster of passing time."
Such passages alternate with others in which Balthus emphasizes the humility of his discipline. "It's like making a hole in the ground," he writes, "like sawing wood."
Viewers of Balthus paintings discover that they do achieve an air of almost mystical timelessness not seen anywhere else in modern art. Perhaps the nearest thing to it is the calm of Giorgio Morandi's still lifes.
The second echo of "angel," when Balthus uses it, recalls Rainer Maria Rilke, the great poet who was his mother's lover for several years after the breakup of his parents' marriage.
In his "Duino Elegies," Rilke repeatedly invokes "the Angel," a figure for the mind's transcendent capabilities.
Rilke recognized an artistic prodigy in Balthus and gave him every encouragement. He even wrote an introduction to a narrative series of woodcuts Balthus made at age 12 and arranged for its publication. Rilke's blessing endowed Balthus with some of the self-confidence that expressed itself in aristocratic pretensions and disdain for much of modern art and life.
The memoir fumes with spleen at points, as when Balthus writes that "a majority of morons make so-called contemporary art" and that "the haste of contemporary painters is atrocious insofar as it rejects the necessary craftsmanship that painting requires from those dedicated to it."
Yet despite his frequent distasteful posturing, his vacillation between insistence that he controls the meaning of his work and insistence that no one can fathom it, Balthus speaks frequently in a wise, touching voice that only a devoted painter could find.
"When I arrive at my studio each morning," he writes, "I am seized by the same fear, the same worry about the light, my interlocutor, that is different from day to day, changeable as are life and the wind. It's a painter's necessity, by which he attains fulfillment."
Even the reader who does not find Balthus sympathetic will sympathize with his desire to be an ally of light in a dark time.
E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.
November 28, 1999, Sunday
BOOK REVIEW DESK
Balthus
A Biography.
By Nicholas Fox Weber.
Illustrated. 644 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $40.
THIS book begins with a sticky scene. The child who will become Balthus, the virtuoso painter of teenage girls, is at his sixth birthday party. He urges his little guests to ''eat badly,'' to dive into the cake. But he abstains. When the adults see the mess, all the chocolate-covered children are punished while Balthus goes free. Nicholas Fox Weber, the author of ''Balthus: A Biography,'' uses this birthday scene to introduce the painter's naughtiness and to hint that if he, the author, ends up smearing himself, it will be Balthus's fault.
At 91, Balthus still wants to be known as ''a painter of whom nothing is known.'' That is not the case, though. Balthus is known not only as a painter of pubescent girls but also as one of the century's great figurative masters, a realist never won over by Cubism, Surrealism or any other modern movement. He is also known as a pretentious snob who has buried the facts of his life and invented a romantic counteridentity.
He calls himself Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, lives in Switzerland in Le Grand Chalet with his wife, Setsuko, and claims ancestors from Lord Byron to the Polish king Stanislaw August Poniatowski. Over the years he has found a series of young women (occasionally teenagers) to live with, and a series of grand mansions to live in. He once joked to his friend Alberto Giacometti that he ''needed a chateau more than a workman needed a loaf of bread.''
In 1990, Weber, a self-described Balthus fan and the author of ''Patron Saints'' and other books on art, set out to find the inner Balthus. His narrative begins innocently enough, with some biography. Balthazar Klossowski was born in Paris on Feb. 29, 1908, to Erich Klossowski, a Polish intellectual with noble ancestors, and Elizabeth Spiro, a Polish Jewish artist whose father was a cantor. The Klossowskis were friends with Pierre Bonnard, Paul Valery and Andre Gide. But Balthus and his older brother, Pierre, who became a scholar of the Marquis de Sade, did not have an easy ride. Their parents separated when they were young, and the brothers bounced back and forth between Switzerland and Germany.
Balthus was an inventive boy, loved by his mother and adored by his mother's lover, Rainer Maria Rilke. At the age of 11, he started his first major work of art, 40 pen-and-ink pictures telling the story of a boy (himself) who finds a cat, adopts it, leashes it and finally loses it. Rilke, the first in a line of idiosyncratic father figures for Balthus (Antonin Artaud and Andre Derain came later), was so taken with the drawings that he wrote a preface and found a publisher for them. The book was called ''Mitsou.''
Weber loves ''Mitsou'' too, but not for the reasons Rilke did. Rilke's preface to ''Mitsou'' was all about elusiveness. Weber thinks ''Mitsou'' reveals the suffering boy within the secretive old man. ''The final image, of the little boy crying, wiping away his tears with his hands'' after he loses his cat, ''was a vivid self-portrait,'' Weber writes. ''It was both the first and the last time he would let the world see him quite so helpless.''
After ''Mitsou,'' Weber suggests, Balthus began to reinvent himself. His life and his art became desperate attempts to control anything that might abandon, hurt or disappoint him, especially women. ''As a child he lost Mitsou,'' Weber explains, and he did not want that to happen again; ''he would make his prey submit.'' One way of doing that, Weber intimates, was to depict his subjects submitting.
At 16, Balthus began copying Nicolas Poussin in the Louvre and Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. After 10 years he found the subject matter that engaged him for the rest of his life: sleeping or self-absorbed teenage girls, nude or partly nude, often in erotic or sadomasochistic scenes. In 1934 he had his first show, which included his most notorious works: ''The Guitar Lesson,'' a painting of a music teacher who has thrown her pantyless student over her knee and is playing her like a guitar; ''The Street,'' a Paris scene with strange, somnambulistic figures walking by as a young man grabs a girl between the legs; and ''The Window,'' a picture of a girl backed against a window by an unseen attacker.
This is the point where Weber's book turns into something other than biography. At the outset Weber believed that Balthus had really ''decided to open up.'' But Balthus did not bare his soul the way Weber had hoped. Balthus would not admit that he lusted after little girls. He would not admit that he was angry at his mother for being preoccupied with Rilke. He would not even admit that he was half Jewish.
So Weber stopped talking to him. ''To keep my freedom -- once I realized I was writing about someone as unscrupulous as he is brilliant, almost as talented at lying as he is at painting -- I pretty much stopped meeting with Balthus,'' he writes, but given Balthus's distaste for biographers, it seems just as likely that he threw Weber out.
Ultimately, Weber wings it without his subject's help. Assuring himself that ''Balthus is the same as a painter and as a person,'' he psychoanalyzes Balthus through his art -- for nearly 400 pages. The paintings certainly invite a psychoanalytic gaze, but Weber does not carry it off. He uses every work to prove the same obvious character flaws: the artist is a narcissist, a lecher, a liar and a cruel and seductive fantasist.
Weber starts with Balthus's first masterpiece, ''The Street.'' He spends many pages trying to establish that the Paris street represented in the painting is not the one Balthus claims it is. Why does he pursue this boring line of inquiry? To prove that Balthus is a liar.
By the time his analysis of ''The Street'' is over, Weber has found that the passers-by in Balthus's painting are looking straight ahead in order to warn us, as Balthus would, that ''we, too, should look straight ahead and not see what is going on,'' and that some of their heads are giant because they are ''wise and infantile in much the way he is.''
With his simple and punishing brand of psychobiography, Weber not only turns every painting into a string of homilies, he also confuses life and art. At one point he suggests that Nabokov's famous pedophile, Humbert Humbert, is a better man than Balthus. At least, Weber writes, Humbert ''assumes guilt'' and ''knows the connection between who he really is and how he behaves,'' while Balthus ''perpetually equivocates.'' Weber seems to have forgotten that Humbert is fictional and Balthus is real.
Weber is especially distasteful on the subject of the girls. He calls the girl in the painting titled ''Alice'' ''a jaded, worn-out tart,'' a ''snarling hussy'' whose ''pudenda, and one of her substantial breasts, are on full view.'' This is the language of someone so enraged that he blames the figures in the paintings for their sexual poses.
Sometimes he even sees sex when it isn't there. In an analysis of the painting called ''The Card Game,'' Weber writes that the candle on the table ''patently depicts the drive 'to dip your wick.' ''One of the illustrations for ''Wuthering Heights'' features Heathcliff moodily leaning on a chair and Cathy kneeling on the floor writing. Weber rightly points out that Heathcliff is a Balthus self-portrait, but then goes off the deep end. He says that Cathy has ''the wanton hair of a wench'' and that ''the position of her head beneath Heathcliff's crotch invites the prospect of fellatio.'' The cat in the portrait ''Therese Dreaming'' is ''Balthus salivating,'' Weber writes. ''He is lapping up the young girl whose legs are spread and crotch presented.''
At some point, you have to start wondering whether Balthus isn't right: ''Everyone is excited because you can see the little girls' underpants. . . . The problem is the viewer's longings and interests, not mine.''
But what are Weber's interests? The author paints himself as a truth-seeker, a rebel who violated Balthus's wish to remain ''a painter of whom nothing is known.'' But he comes across as a rejected son who wants vindication at any price. Near the end of the biography, Weber brings his own daughters -- one of whom he weirdly describes as being ''in the throes of Balthus's golden age'' -- to meet the artist. What can he be thinking?
Sarah Boxer is a reporter for the Arts section of The Times.
Published: 11 - 28 - 1999 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 10
VANISHED SPLENDORS
A Memoir
By Balthus. As told to Alain Vircondelet. Translated by Benjamin Ivry.
237 pages. Ecco/HarperCollins. $29.95.
By HOLLAND COTTER
The French artist Balthus, who died last year at 92, was
the last grand figure painter in a European classical tradition. Or he was a
good enough craftsman with a picaresque style and a gift for self-promotion.
Actually it is possible to see him as both, though almost everyone seems to
agree on one thing: he was a major piece of work.
Some, maybe much of that work was fiction, or at least creatively edited truth. The same might be said of "Vanished Splendors: A Memoir," an episodic string of musings that Balthus dictated at the end of his life to the writer Alain Vircondelet. As biography, the book isn't much: stingy on details, generous with mushy, un-fact-checkable pronouncements on religion, time and art. Naturally these are worthy subjects, but coming from a tireless self-mythologizer they tend to sound like valedictory spin.
The Balthus myth was many-layered. He was born Balthazar Klossowski in 1908 in France. Both his parents were Polish émigrés and painters, which for Balthus was not enough. He said his mother was descended from the Russian Romanovs; she was the daughter of a cantor. And although he ceaselessly advertised that she had taken Rainer Maria Rilke as a lover, which was true, he denied that she was Jewish to the end of his life.
As an artist he was something of a prodigy, and he attracted attention early, notably for his sexually charged paintings of adolescent girls. Although he describes himself as a sort of Byronic loner (he said he was related to Byron), he also hung out with everyone who was anyone in the Paris, where — if he must say so himself — he was fervently admired by Picasso and Giacometti. Picasso, he recalls, "covered me with compliments so outrageously flattering that I've forgotten them all." He and Giacometti were indeed friends, and Balthus invokes his name with ostentatious reverence, though for whatever reason the relationship went sour.
After World War II, Balthus the poor and proud avant-garde painter of surreal erotica became someone else: Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola, a reclusive Roman Catholic aristocrat-artist who lived with a Japanese wife and many cats in a chateau high in the Alps. There he made art as a spiritual balm for a troubled world.
The wife, the cats and the Alps were all real. The rest is open to question. As to reclusive, he cannily imposed an extended embargo on interviews, thus acquiring a Garboesque allure, useful during the decades when figurative painting was out of fashion internationally. Later he gave interviews aplenty, usually in the controlled environment of his Alpine home, a former hotel.
As to the title; well, maybe it wasn't legit, but it did suit his attraction to grand, not to say grandiose, things: big spaces, high places. His "conversion" to Catholicism — Balthus's father had been Catholic — also fits this picture. In the memoir, Balthus speaks of being a huge fan of Pope John Paul II, whom he met and claimed as a soul mate. (Mr. Vircondelet, as it happened, has written a biography of the pope.) Though one wonders what the pope made of some of this artist's paintings, which have struck more than one observer as being borderline pedophilic.
Balthus strenuously condemned this view of his art, and he does so again in the book: "I always reject stupid interpretations that my young girls are the product of an erotic imagination. To suggest this is to misunderstand the particular attention I pay to their slow transformation from an angelic state to that of a young girl, to finding and capturing the moment of passage."
Fair enough. And it might well have been illuminating to hear him talk further in this vein, particularly as "erotic imagination" is the very thing that gives his work a certain pertinence to new figurative art today. But no. Most of his other comments on his work in "Vanished Splendors" come sugar-coated with sanctimony. His art, he says, is a form of praying, an act of "unadorned humility," a sacrament, a connection to the divine, a sacred injunction. The book backs this up by including a photographic portrait of the artist dressed, it would seem, as a Shinto priest and another in which he casts his eyes heavenward like a Baroque saint.
Fortunately, such self-reverential theatrics are tempered by some down-to-earth score settling. Barbs are directed at old colleagues (Artaud, Chagall, Cocteau); modern culture is reviled pretty much right across the board. Abstract painting is a fraud; new music and poetry are beneath contempt. Museums have been ruined through popularity. (He says they should be off limits to hoi polloi.) Art, as a practice and an experience, is an entitlement strictly for the elite: "I owe my long, lonely studio days to a way of thinking and seeing that dates back to feudalism and disciplined aristocracy."
In a sense, the Balthus in this book is as much a performance artist as a painter. And like certain personalities who at some point in their lives make a decision to be larger than life, he could be almost disarmingly preposterous, as when he tells Mr. Vircondolet: "Surely due to my Christian belief, I am totally indifferent to society's seductions, the notorious personality cult that the modern world imposes on artists."
Many people who knew Balthus considered him to be a man of memorable charm. But few of his best paintings are charming — that is their strength — nor is this fascinatingly fatuous book. Unsurprisingly, its real revelations come not in the artist's moments of supposed candor, but in his shrewdly dismissive appraisal of former friends he had long outlived.
When he speaks of the writer Georges Bataille, he comes close to describing himself: "There was something puerile about his projects, an overdeveloped sense of secrecy that gave him the air of a guru. He would have gladly been pope of a self-created religion, and I couldn't follow him intellectually in his wanderings." How far readers of "Vanished Splendors" will want to follow Balthus in his is the question.
Jan. 10, 2003, 11:04AM
Balthus' angels
Memoir reveals enigmatic man, thoughtful painter
By NORA SETON
VANISHED SPLENDORS:
A Memoir.
By Balthus, as told to Alain Vircondelet.
Ecco, $29.95; 272 pp.
Few characters in recent history have fashioned a personality so profoundly enigmatic as Balthus, the painter.
Born Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola in 1908, he died in 2001. During the last two years of his life he spoke with Alain Vircondelet about painting and art. The result is Vanished Splendors: A Memoir. Balthus' reclusive life and provocative painting have led many biographers into feverish and voyeuristic speculation. This book, the first "authorized" chronicle, renders the unauthorized biographies limp. Finally we have his own words, translated beautifully by Vircondelet.
The precise beauty that Balthus brought to the canvas is there on the page as well. His spirituality is ardent; his points are fine; his language is poetry.
Vanished Splendors is less autobiography than Balthus' musings about painting, which he has spread over the course of 107 chapters -- small almost journal-like entries, some a few pages, others no more than a paragraph. It is a memoir of process. Reading it changes the way one views Balthus' bewitching canvases and contemplative, patient figures.
At the time of these ruminations Balthus was old and nearly blind, a slight figure wandering the vast rooms of the Rossinière chalet in Switzerland. "My eyesight does not always permit me to make out the landscape," he says. "The condition of light is enough to satisfy me. This snow-augmented transparency, a dazzling apparition. To retranscribe its passing."
Memories, reflections
He drifts from memories to reflections. He brings to life his days running the Villa Medici in Rome. He describes his Japanese wife, Setsuko, as silent companion to his hours. He recalls his father introducing him to the works of Piero della Francesca and Paul Cézanne, the two painters whose color and light were pivotal in defining his own painterly life. He considers the choices other famous painters have made.
But finally it is his method of painting that laps likes waves over the shores of this text. Over and over we hear of the slow course, the solitary hours, the deep and silent inhalations in the studio as the light through his windows changes. Some days there is only one brush stroke to be made.
"Painting has taught me to reject time's frenetic wheel. Painting lives outside time. I am trying to attain the secret of painting's quietude."
Some of the fun moments in this memoir are Balthus' reflections on his place in the history of art. He rejects, for instance, any connection with the surrealist movement, discredits the intellectualization of art and bemoans the transformation of great painters like Mondrian.
"I knew Mondrian well, and miss what he depicted early on, some fine trees for example. ... And then one day he fell into abstraction. On a lovely day toward evening, when the light was barely starting to fade, I went to see him with Giacometti. Alberto and I looked at the magnificence happening outside the window, a setting of twilight glow. Mondrian pulled the shades, saying he didn't want to see it anymore. I always regretted his transformation and upheaval."
A significant voice
Despite his unrivaled seclusion, Balthus was a significant voice among the luminaries of 20th-century art. His life was casually and inextricably involved with the great painters and dealers of his time. He acquired Rossinière, for instance, through a trade of several paintings to Pierre Matisse, a friend, art dealer and son of the famous painter Henri Matisse.
Alberto Giacometti was "a brother, a friend." Balthus kept a photograph of him in his studio. "[T]his way I work in Alberto's shadow, under his benevolent, meaningful gaze."
On Picasso: "He told me: `You're the only painter of your generation who interests me. The others try to make Picassos. You never do.' "
No, Balthus never did. He had a vision, chose a solitude and never veered from his course. Each morning he sensed the light. He entered his studio and began the process by thinking, praying, smoking, sharing space and light with his canvas. His religion commanded his hand. His spirituality was one with his art.
Disturbing images
Here's where the rub begins, because Balthus was memorable for creating disturbing and erotic images, often using young girls. For those who view his paintings, it is almost impossible for the brain to take in his claim of innocent, devotional intent.
"That's why I completely reject the erotic interpretations that the critics and other people have usually made of my paintings," Balthus responds.
"I've accomplished my work, paintings and drawings in which undressed young girls abound, not by exploiting an erotic vision in which I'm a voyeur and surrender unknowingly (above all, unknowingly) to some maniacal or shameful tendencies, but by examining a reality whose profound, risky, and unpredictable unreadability might be shed, revealing a fabulous nature and mythological dimension, a dream world that admits to its own machinery."
And: "This only proves [the critics] understood nothing about my work. It was always about approaching the mystery of childhood, its languid grace at ill-defined borders. I sought to paint the soul's secrets, the obscure and luminous tension of their partially blooming matrix. I might say it's about the crossing. The uncertain worrisome time when innocence is total and will soon give way to another age, more determinedly social."
Maybe. Maybe that is how this curious, eremitic man saw the unfolding of young girls into women. After reading Vanished Splendors I am dumbstruck by Balthus' poetic articulation of the process of his painting, and also by his prose about light and color.
Sincerity, oddity
So I feel forced to concede my impression of his paintings to his -- to his interpretation and intent. I left this memoir convinced of the sincerity of his purpose and only more convinced of the oddity of his mind.
"Some have claimed that my undressed young girls are erotic. I never painted them with that intent, which would have made them anecdotal, mere objects of gossip. I aimed at precisely the opposite, to surround them with a halo of silence and depth, as if creating vertigo around them. That's why I think of them as angels, beings from elsewhere, whether heaven, or another ideal place that suddenly opened and passed through time, leaving traces of wonderment, enchantment, or just an icon."
There is no question that Balthus was a genius. Vanished Splendors confirms the superior elegance of his intellect. Then how is it that his image of young girls was so at odds with common perception? Maybe Balthus, who chose isolation in multiple layers of his life, was choosing against the kind of social enlightenment that flowered after Freud.
"In any case, one always paints oneself and one's own personal, secret story; otherwise there is nothing but technique and facility."
Just so.
Nora Seton is a writer and reviewer in Houston. Her books include The Kitchen Congregation.
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By BALTHUS
One must learn to watch for the light; its change of direction, vanishing, and
transitions. Start to learn about the light's condition in the morning, after
breakfast and reading the mail. This is one way to know if you will paint today,
if the progress into the painting's mystery will be intense. Also, if the light
in the studio will be good for penetrating inside.
Nothing has changed at Rossinière. It's like a real village. I spent my whole childhood facing these Alps. Facing the mournful brown mass of Beatenberg's fir trees, against the snow's immaculate whiteness.
Basically, we came here because of my nostalgia for the mountains. Rossinière helps me to move forward, to paint.
That's what painting's about. I can almost say without exaggeration, that's all that it's about.
There's a kind of inherent peace here. Everything incites us to be silent: powerful peaks and weighty snow enveloping us in white heaviness; simple, friendly chalets placed on mountain pastures; jingling cowbells; a punctual little railway snaking along the mountainside.
So, let's check the state of the light. The coming day will help the painting advance, the one that has been in progress for so long. Perhaps a single touch of color, after long meditation in front of the canvas. Just that. And the hope of conquering the mystery.
The studio is a place for work. Indeed, for labor. It's a professional, essential place. I collect myself here, in this place of illumination. I recall Giacometti's studio. Magical, crowded with objects, materials, papers, and the general impression of being close to secrets. I feel much admiration, respect, and affection for Giacometti. He was a brother, a friend. That's why I keep a photograph of him here. I don't know who took it or where it comes from, but this way I work in Alberto's shadow, under his benevolent, meaningful gaze.
Today's painters must be told that everything plays out in the studio, in the fullness of time.
I love the hours spent looking at the canvas, meditating in front of it. Hours which are incomparable in their silence. In wintertime, the heavy stove snores. Familiar studio noises. The pigments mixed by Setsuko, the rubbing of brush on canvas, and everything returns to silence. The secret entry of forms onto the canvas is prepared, with barely sketched-in changes that topple the painting's subject into something vast and unknown. The tutelary image of the peaks appears through the studio's enormous window. From the Montecalvello castle that I own near Viterbo, at the back of the landscape, Monte Cimino can be seen with its pathways through black fir trees, clutched to the mountainside. The same story unfolds both here and there, of power and mystery. Like a world receptive to its own darkness, where I know one must linger in order to attain them.
One must know how to tame and acclimatize time, to extract meaning from it. Arriving at a possible revelation through the time that is devoted to a canvas. To live in hope of finding it, with that frame of mind and attitude. My work is always done under the influence of spirituality. That's why I expect so much from prayer. It invites you to follow the right way. I am an ardent Catholic. Painting is a means of acceding to God's mystery, of extracting some radiance from His Kingdom, of making it possible to capture a shared light. This is not a vain desire. A humble one, rather. That's why I love Italy. When I first visited it as a young man of fifteen or seventeen, I immediately loved the country for the people's kindness and its tender landscapes. I've always considered Italy an enchanted land. Infused with spirit.
A painting greets our eyes from every window at Montecalvello. A painting is the same thing as a prayer: an innocence that is finally grasped, a moment torn from the disaster of passing time. It is immortality captured.
I have the reputation of taking perhaps a dozen years to complete a painting. I know when it's finished. That is, when it's accomplished. When no further touch or trace of color will happen to correct a world that has finally been attained, a secret space finally perceived. So ends the plentiful prayer offered silently in the studio. So ends the silent contemplation. An idea of beauty has been reached.
I often insist on the necessity of prayer. To paint as one prays. By doing so, to accede to silence and what is invisible in the world. I am not sure of being followed or understood in this statement, given that a majority of morons make so-called contemporary art, artists who know nothing about painting. But that doesn't matter. Painting has always taken care of itself. In order to reach it even slightly, I'd say it must be ritually seized. To snatch what it can offer as a form of grace. I must employ religious vocabulary as the most apt and closest to what I mean. To join with what is essential in this sacred world through a humble, modest availability that is also presented as an offering.
Painting must always occur in this state of deprivation. Fleeing worldly currents, facilities, and vertigos. My life began in the deepest poverty, with demands I had placed upon myself. I had that sort of will. I recall my solitary days in the rue de Furstenberg studio. I knew Picasso and Braque, and saw them often. They had a great liking for me. For the atypical young man I was, different, bohemian, and savage. Picasso paid me a visit. He told me: "You're the only painter of your generation who interests me. The others try to make Picassos. You never do." The studio was perched high on the sixth floor. You had to want to visit me. It was a strange place, where I lived far from the world, immersed in my own painting.
I think I've always lived that way. In the same existence, and yes, in the apparent bareness of today. I am stretched out on the meridional line, along the chalet's windows that receive the four o'clock sunlight. My eyesight does not always permit me to make out the landscape. The condition of light is enough to satisfy me. This snow-augmented transparency, a dazzling apparition. To retranscribe its passing.