Clockwise from left: Balthus, Nicholas Fox Weber, Charlotte Fox Weber, Lucy Swift Weber, and Anna Valli, at opening in Lausanne, May 31, 1993
THAT SUNDAY CELEBRATION at Le Grand Chalet in 1993 was the last time I saw Balthus.
I received an invitation to the opening of his 1996 exhibition in Madrid but learned that he would not be in attendance. In any event, the more I progressed with this book, the more inclined I was to avoid direct encounters.
I did, however, see Harumi and Setsuko in May 1995 at the Asia Society in New York. The occasion was a reception to celebrate the publication of a book with a traditional Japanese tale that Setsuko had illustrated. In 1991, when I was staying in the room next to hers in Rossinière, Harumi had been an awkward teenager who seemed to spend most of the day rearranging her hair while listening to rock music. When she arrived at the Asia Society, it was clear that she had been transformed. Hair was still clearly a key issue for her, but now her black locks were highlighted with red and swept fetchingly to one side. Ravishing with her Asian-Polish looks, her striking profile and willowy figure, and her carefully cultivated personal style, Harumi had achieved the rare distinction of being, when she was only twenty years old, one of twelve women on the International Best Dressed list. She had turned into a poised and pleasant young woman with a high degree of self-command.
Shortly after being cited for her own stylishness, Harumi took a job in public relations for the Paris-based designer John Galliano and was the subject of a major article and picture spread in Mirabella. Her father’s interest in appearances had taken her far.
It was hard to have a word with the daughter of the Count and Countess Klossowski de Rola at the Asia Society, however, because she was perpetually engaged with one or another of her family’s very thin, very elegant friends. At the moment when I wanted to introduce my wife before we had to rush off to another event, Harumi was rapt in conversation with David Bowie and his sleek, leggy wife, Iman. It was while Katharine and I were waiting for a moment to break in that I heard the twenty-one-year-old tell Bowie how she wanted “to learn history, and to try to understand my father,” and the singer reply that the second goal was futile.
Setsuko that evening looked like a Kabuki doll. She glided around coyly, in her own orbit, not quite engaging with anyone. Her coat of pale white makeup was thicker than I had seen on her before, and her hair appeared more lacquered. She appeared completely artificial, encased in her stiff and elaborate starched white kimono with its obi. In spite of being so properly Japanese, she carried a Chanel evening bag; the combination made her resemble a rich tourist from Tokyo.
Balthus’s wife that evening seemed particularly cold to me—at first polite if formal, but then icy. Considering our long and friendly days and evenings together in Rossinière, this made me feel a bit strange. On the other hand, she had every reason to be distant. This was her first time in New York, and the occasion was her own opening, all of which could have made her nervous. Besides, I had fallen out of touch, and she could well have gotten word from one or another person that my approach to Balthus as a subject had become less than worshipful.
Then Setsuko read to me from her afterword to Izumi Kyoka’s “Tale of the Wandering Monk”—the story for which she had made the illustrations on view. Listening to her, I wondered if some of these words had, in fact, been dictated by Balthus:
It is said that illustrating a great literary work is like adding legs to a snake. While I fully understood the truth of this statement, I went ahead anyway because I wanted to immerse myself in Kyoka’s world, to live within its fantasy and if possible to depict it. I lost myself doing so, in much the same way that one falls in love, regardless of whether or not one’s love is requited.1
Not only was the command of English more at Balthus’s level than at Setsuko’s, but the legged-snake imagery and the slightly forlorn tone had a distinctly Balthusian aspect, as did the giveaway about living in fantasy.
But what was most memorable was the expression Setsuko wore on her heavily made-up face as she glared at me through her frozen smile and read, with rising voice, the last sentence of her afterword:
Thus, without being aware of it, I was transformed into some kind of monstrous animal who presumed to paint and even to write an afterword.
“You see, I can be an animal,” she said to me, her grin broadening. “I am not just an animal but a vicious one.” Whatever her intention was in making the declaration—which may have been no more serious than when we once all had a good laugh over Balthus handing her a note instructing her to tell a would-be interviewer on the phone that he was “a wicked old man”—I interpreted it as a warning.
ANY PUBLIC APPEARANCE of Balthus or his wife in the nineties was an event. It was rare that they ventured from their mountain retreat into the larger world, and when they did so, people made note. Friends described Balthus’s arrival at the opening of the great Poussin retrospective in Paris in 1994; the seventeen-year-old who had once spent long days working away unnoticed copying Echo et Narcisse was now the aged celebrity whose elegant outfit—with a silk scarf visible from across the large room—and slow gait attracted all eyes at dinner at Le Grand Palais.
The architect Gae Aulenti provided a marvelous account of the occasion when Balthus was awarded the Imperial Prize in Japan. This event had taken place in the fall of 1991, and Balthus and Setsuko had often referred to it in our phone calls because of Balthus’s need to rest up for the journey first, and then to recover from it, which affected his availability to receive me for another long visit in Rossinière, presumably with Jean Leymarie—the trip which in the end I never made. Prince Masahito Hitachi presided over the ceremony—at which speeches were given by, among others, Jacques Chirac and Helmut Schmidt. Balthus, who was receiving the award medal in painting, was the first of the five honorees.
Aulenti, who was to receive the medal for architecture, was struck by the way that Balthus, although naturally “very tall—I think he was one meter ninety,” was further elevated by the unusual leather clogs with thick wooden heels that he was wearing with his evening clothes—the same footwear he had had on for the Award Recipients’ Audience with Their Majesties the Emperor and Empress of Japan at the Akasaka Imperial Palace. “Balthus went in front of the prince to take the prize, and he had more height because of these shoes. And the Japanese prince was very short.” The architect’s attention was further drawn to these black clogs because of the “violet socks” Balthus was wearing.
Aulenti and I were having lunch in Milan in January of 1999 when she described this. Balthus’s behavior had left an indelible impression. The architect moved a beer stein next to an ashtray to indicate the height difference. She then tipped the empty stein to demonstrate what happened next. “Balthus kneeled in front of the prince at ninety degrees.” Once he had lowered himself to the ground, he was down “for two minutes. In the complete silence you could hear his bones: crack, crack, crack. It was like something out of a Japanese play, Noh theater.”
Now Aulenti, looking distinguished as ever with her short gray hair and tailored black jacket and pants, rose from the table and, in the middle of the restaurant, reenacted what happened next. From her prone position she explained, “He couldn’t get up.” The suspense was palpable as the notables assembled in Tokyo looked on, while no one uttered a sound. It was as if Balthus was stuck.
Then, ever so slowly, he rose. By Aulenti’s calculation, it took the artist “three minutes to come back.” She and everyone else who was present felt enormous relief. As she imitated Balthus taking that seemingly interminable time to straighten up his body, she said it seemed as if he would never rise again. In Gae Aulenti’s eyes, “the most elegant man in the world,” Balthus, had stolen the show.2
ON FEBRUARY 29, 1996, Setsuko gave a masked ball at Le Grand Chalet, in honor, the invitation said, of the twenty-second birthdays of both Balthus and Harumi. Acknowledging her husband’s actual number of years, she invited eighty-eight people. Over a hundred showed up, however—among them complete strangers, safely hidden behind their requisite face-coverings. The cats, Pulcinellos, vampires, and American Indians whom the host and hostess actually knew included Balthus’s children and their family and friends; Balthus’s local physician, Dr. Valli, and his daughter Anna, Balthus’s current adolescent model—looking far beyond her years in a slinky low-cut white dress; Jean Leymarie; Tana Matisse; various art dealers; a plastic surgeon renowned for his face-lifts on international socialites; and a few people with impressive titles—like Nicolas Romanov, a real Romanov related to the Russian czars. But for the most part the guests were what one old acquaintance in attendance termed “demimondaines.” Neither Pierre Klossowski nor any of Balthus’s friends of the pre-nobility era were in evidence.
Balthus himself appeared at 9 p.m., when the curtains opened on a theater stage that Setsuko, dressed as a cat, had improvised. He wore “an ancient red kimono and a gold Venetian mask of the 17th century.”3 One friend who was there told me that she found the getup frightening, in part because it gave its wearer a beak even more pronounced than his own real nose, a sort of gross parody.
Clockwise from left: Balthus, Nicholas Fox Weber, Charlotte Fox Weber, Lucy Swift Weber, and Anna Valli, at opening in Lausanne, May 31, 1993
What was most apparent was the degree to which the birthday boy was now in his wife’s wraps. “On the one hand, she’s good for him, protecting him,” my friend remarked astutely. “On the other hand, she surrounds him with these mundane people she likes. They are decorative, but very few of the real old friends were there.”
There was a remarkable birthday cake crafted by the cook of the Embiricos, wealthy Greek shipping people and art collectors who live in Lausanne. Its topping was a three-dimensional version of The Méditerranée’s Cat. The multicolored, hardened frosting was sculpted charmingly into a primitive version of the imagery of that painting: the cat tucking into his lobster feast, the girl waving from the boat. Twenty-two candles flanked this playful assemblage.
The main occupation of most of the guests was taking photos, or having them taken of themselves with Balthus and the cake. The shots of Balthus during dinner all show him next to the woman considered “the real queen of Italy”—Marina Doria di Savoya, the wife of Victorio Emanuelle. With her hair pulled back sleekly, the bejeweled noblewoman looked the epitome of the rich titled Europeans of the nineties. What with the Romanovs also represented, one would be safe in assuming that the artist’s mentor, the hero of his childhood—Rilke—who was equally drawn to celebrities and people with titles, would have approved.
Meanwhile, no one was heard to say “Many happy returns.” The guest of honor, who looked painfully tired and haggard, his skin tone a very pale gray, escaped upstairs at an early hour, bringing the event pretty much to a close before midnight.
Writing this in April 1999, I have as recently as a month ago heard from mutual acquaintances that Balthus is still at work. While they claim he is not nearly as robust as reported in the popular press—where the aged artist is credited with daily sessions in the studio—they say he has been working for several years on a still life. But it is a struggle, and Cat at the Mirror III—the painting that had its world premiere in 1993 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne—may well prove to be the last large canvas he ever completes (color plate 16). And at least at present it is the only major work he has ever failed to sell.
Cat at the Mirror III is the painting I first saw in the studio in Rossinière in 1991. Then, although Balthus had been working on it for some two years, he had painted in only the child’s head, roughly indicated the cat, and sketched a few other details on top of a rudimentary pencil grid. The other major forms were indicated, but only summarily. The raw material had rich potential at this early stage, and it appeared that this large canvas would become another great Balthus.
Finished, it looks more like “paint by numbers.” In the period when I saw this picture on its easel, Balthus had told me that he could no longer see well enough to draw. This painting does, indeed, appear to be the work of someone with impaired eyesight. Cat at the Mirror has a vibrancy; it is rich in rhythms and full of nonstop motion; but it reflects blunted vision.
The painting has few of the subtleties of most of Balthus’s work. It is missing the beautiful little passages, the quiet and precise details. The waist of the central figure is disconcerting: the child’s body is severely disjointed, as if cut in two, and its parts do not cohere. The distortion of the child’s body is not the typical Balthus maneuvering of the type where we feel there is an agenda behind it. It seems, rather, that Balthus really could not control what he was doing. He filled in the parts of the painting dutifully, piece by piece, but he could no longer achieve the graceful relationship of the different shapes we know from his successful work.
The colors of this awkward composition are those bright tones of the spectrum known by ophthalmologists to appeal to elderly people—generally over the age of eighty—who can no longer respond to more muted tones. Whereas other aged painters made that transition to the advantage of their work, in Balthus the results are unfortunately garish. The only explanation for these Day-Glo colors is that, with the aging of his eyes, Balthus could no longer perceive the subtleties of hue that had always been such a major element of his work.
The results of the clunky forms and jarring palette is that Cat at the Mirror III looks in some ways more like a copy of a Balthus than the real thing. There are details that are true Balthus: the catlike cat, at once mischievous and adorable; the child’s exquisite face. The underlying verve reflects an impressive life force given the age of the maker. What it is missing, however, is the artist’s former taste and quietude. The painting simply does not hold a candle either to the old-masterish works of the thirties, to those dazzling, Mozartian compositions of the Chassy period, or even to the recent misty Montecalvello.
But what is inferior artistically can still represent an act of love and devotion. When I first saw the completed Cat at the Mirror III in Lausanne, it struck me above all as the achievement of a loyal husband. Friends of Balthus’s intimated to me that the artist needed another few million dollars in order to assure Setsuko’s well-being after his death, and that he made this large canvas accordingly to achieve that goal. The assumption was that it would invariably attract a lot of attention, and sell.
Certainly in 1993 there were enough rich people who would jump at the chance to buy a painting so unquestionably Balthusian—with the trademark androgynous girl, mischievous cat, and lust under wraps. Even if Balthus’s fellow painters, his disciples from the Villa Medici, and other astute viewers would see how flawed the canvas was, there was little question of its marketability in a world that buys Vuitton bags for their emblem and Cartier jewels for the trademark “C.” It seems well within Balthus’s power to take advantage of such a situation for the benefit of the woman who has brought him such pleasure in the closing epoch of his life.
…
THE YOUNG MODEL for this last painting, Anna Valli, attended the opening in Lausanne. Although she was not in evidence when Balthus arrived, once lunch was served and the crowd had thickened, she hardly ever let go of the artist’s hand.
When the two of them posed for photographs in front of Cat at the Mirror III in its back gallery, Anna was like a parody of a Balthus girl. Her presence as she clung to the artist turned him into a caricature of the old pedophile. The nymphet with streaming blond hair wore a black A-line dress loosely laced in front—far too adult and sexy for her ten years. She looked totally smitten, and her presence was disturbing. Together they made, like a bad joke, the ultimate sick Balthus tableau: the old lecher and the knowing Lolita. Grinning as if she were his trophy, Balthus seemed to cultivate to the fullest the image he had repeatedly told me was totally without basis.
Naturally, the village girl was proud to be attending this opening and posing with the world-famous Balthus in front of the painting that depicted her. One could understand her unabashed delight in her stardom. But the sight of the two of them cavorting together, with Setsuko standing nearby and looking on approvingly, was alternately ridiculous and nauseating.
What also became noticeable in this public display was that although the girl had unquestionably been the model for this large canvas of dubious distinction, a great difference existed between the actual child and Balthus’s invention. For the creature in Balthus’s painting is androgynous. It resembles the doctor’s daughter, but it looks equally like photos of the teenage Balthus and some of his early self-portraits. Moreover, gazing at the hand mirror, the subject is again the Narcissus about whom Rilke wrote the poem he dedicated to his young friend.
The child in Cat at the Mirror III is, also, very feline-looking: a companion and soul mate to the cat who is its opposite number in the canvas. Additionally, in part because of the hair, this is Antoinette. The figure is a perfect compendium of Balthus’s obsessions. A cat, a little girl, himself, his first love: there are no boundaries between Balthus and his subjects.
One painting depicts both the subject and the creator of Mitsou. And it evokes the stage in his life where Balthus on one level has remained forever: the age at which he first got to know Rilke—when, as a prodigy and genius, he first began to savor as well as circumvent his beautiful, unbearable existence.
…
ALAS, BALTHUS’S GAMBLE did not pay off. Cat at the Mirror III failed to attract a buyer at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, or in the exhibition’s subsequent venue in Japan. Balthus had the painting returned to his studio, where he amended its surfaces lightly.
Then, in the summer of 1994, Cat at the Mirror III became, to an embarrassing degree, a marketable commodity. For three weeks it appeared in an exhibition of its own at the Lefevre Gallery on Bruton Street in London.
The location could hardly have been more convenient: just around the corner from Old Bond Street where shops like Asprey and Versace sell their high-priced goods to a rich international clientele. It is natural enough for world-class art to be in the same arena as other expensive merchandise, but what was unusual—in fact, astonishing—about the promotion of Cat III was the glossy and expensive twenty-page brochure produced as a sales tool for this single painting.
In that brochure, the artist who has repeatedly told the world that he should be someone “of whom nothing is known” is shown in numerous black-and-white photographs. We see him in his Missoni cardigan: in one shot standing in front of his forty-five-room chalet, in others sitting with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and—in two particularly contrived-looking photos—beaming in the presence of his young female model. In one of these, Anna looks at him flirtatiously with a coy grin, while he leers at her with what seems to be unrepentant desire. In another, she leans on his shoulder, and they both smile lasciviously as if in the throes of romantic passion. It is as if the aim of these photos is to say, “This is Balthus, the Lolita guy; you know, the one with young girls.” There are also numerous photographs taken inside Balthus’s studio—the place supposedly so off limits—and three commanding shots of Le Grand Chalet in all its splendor.
The text of the brochure reads like a flyer for an expensive foreign car. Cat at the Mirror III is presented as the ultimate luxury model, the prize. Underneath a reproduction of the finished artwork appears the following statement: “This is the largest and final version of a series of paintings by Balthus, called ‘Le Chat au Miroir.’ The first, measuring 180 cm × 170 cm, was painted between 1977 and 1980. The second version measures 200 cm × 170 cm, and was painted between 1986 and 1989.” This one measures 220 by 195 centimeters. We expect to learn its wheelbase and 0-to-60-mph speed as well.
The earlier versions of Cat at the Mirror, and details of this one, appear in full color in the brochure, interspersed throughout an “introduction” by Jean Leymarie printed in both French and English. Like all of Leymarie’s writings on the artist, it touches trenchantly on the real issues of Balthus’s art—the relationship of the girl, the cat, and the looking glass; the significance of Eastern symbolism in that mirror; the questions raised. But then there are Leymarie’s statements that sound like pure advertising hype. “Almost square, it is the largest of the three works, the most daring, and in his [Balthus’s] demanding eyes, the most interesting.” Leymarie ends his commentary with a solipsism of the type that might well suit Balthus but serves little other purpose: “Each of Balthus’s paintings is an autonomous world, brought slowly to completion, from which we feel the magical spell without being able to solve the mystery. The mystery for him is in the unveiling and the consecration of the real world.” Rilke could get away with such contradictions; Leymarie—and, through him, Balthus—does not fare as well.
Balthus in 1990, by Henri Cartier-Bresson (photo credit 24.3)
By the time of the exhibition that Harumi Klossowski de Rola helped organize at the Accadèmia Valentino in Rome, held there at the end of 1996 and into 1997, Balthus had further worked Cat at the Mirror III. But the fingers of the right hand, now lengthened, and the right leg—now dangling rather than resting on a stool—still look like cartoons of body parts. The art, like the man, resembles patchwork: appealing pieces put together from hither and yon, but lacking cohesion. The palpable stiffness and sheer affectation of the least successful of Balthus’s work done after World War II, especially the post-Chassy paintings and drawings, are epitomized by this picture.
THE ASKING PRICE FOR Cat at the Mirror III for the past few years has reportedly been about $4.5 million. There have been no takers as yet, although apparently the marketing effort has widened; at the Accademia Valentino, the canvas was presented “Courtesy Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zürich, and the Lefevre Gallery London,” two of the most effective commercial establishments anywhere. But whatever its shortcomings, I hope the painting gets it and that Balthus succeeds in gallantly providing the lovely and supportive Setsuko with the lifelong financial security he wants her to have. Worse paintings have sold for more money; and for all its flaws and childlike aspects, this colorful canvas reflects an energy and a spark admirable in someone Balthus’s age. It also makes clear his decency as a provider who had never forgotten the reality of financial hardship. The hype, the photos, even the painting itself, are probably testimony as much to Balthus’s true love for his wife and daughter as to his willingness to manipulate the public any way he can.
Puss was now a splendid sight. The high boots with the tops turned down became him beautifully. The hunter’s pouch was handsomely embroidered and made him look like a bold and gallant huntsman.
He tossed the sack over his shoulder, bowed low, and said: “See you later, master, and you may now call me Puss in Boots.”
“Where are you going?” Hans asked anxiously.
But the cat was already out of the door and had vanished into a field of waving grain.
—Puss in Boots4