Joan Miró and His Daughter Dolores, 1937–38, oil on canvas, 130.2 × 88.9 cm (photo credit 15.1)
WHEN I ASKED BALTHUS about Joan Miró, whose portrait he began the year after Derain’s, he offered nothing about Miró in his own right but immediately quoted the Spaniard as saying, “Je suis entièrement pour Balthus.”
This was how Balthus measured the people around him: whether he has felt them to be partisans or foes.
Esteemed like a god by Baladine and Rilke, Balthus has been unable to satiate his appetite for admiration since his youth. The craving for fealty has been the focal point of all of his relationships.
A joint interview with Balthus and Harumi appeared in the September 8, 1996, London Times Magazine. Color photos bespeak their glamorous life. The text dwells on the father and daughter’s shared fondness for amusing dinner parties and Barbara Cartland novels. But then Balthus issues the statement:
She had one great stroke of luck in her life—that her philosophy teacher took a keen interest in her. He was an admirer of my work, and when he discovered Harumi was my daughter he completely changed his attitude towards her. Through him she got interested in my art for the first time.1
Balthus does not think to mention his daughter’s own sense of fulfillment or happiness beyond the context of his own position. The vital issue is his own standing.
Yet it is understandable that it mattered considerably that Miró, an esteemed artist and a modernist, defended Balthus when he was not yet thirty years old. Having made incendiary paintings guaranteed to stir up intense controversy, Balthus knew that some people snickered at the mere mention of his name. Others denigrated him as a child molester. His supporters emerged as people of courage. And Joan Miró was one to be proud of.
AT THE TIME BALTHUS PAINTED Miró, both artists were represented by Pierre Loeb in Paris and Pierre Matisse in New York. Miró, fifteen years Balthus’s senior, was forty-five. He painted in a very different way than Balthus, but he had many qualities that Balthus greatly admired. Miró was witty and artistically adventurous. He had tremendous powers of invention and was certainly willing to jolt his audience. Like Balthus, he was roughly affiliated with Surrealism but not devoted to it. Moreover, the Spaniard was steeped in tradition.
Miró’s early style would visibly nourish Balthus’s work over the years. The 1919 Woman Before the Mirror gave a prototype, in reverse, of the layout Balthus used for various late works, among them the 1963–66 Turkish Room and the various versions of Cat at the Mirror; Miró’s representational early landscapes also had their echoes in Balthus’s work at Chassy.
When he painted Miró’s portrait in 1937, Balthus did not consider his subject either a close friend or an artistic comrade the way he had Derain, but there was nonetheless a genuine rapport between them. This was already apparent in the resemblance between his own 1937 Still Life and Miró’s Still Life with Old Shoe. Both Miró and Balthus were clearly preoccupied with the fragility and struggle that often lay beneath the surface of visual grace. Each had painted a canvas suggesting that pears and bottles of wine and kitchen ceramics might no longer be allowed to stand unimpeded in simple kitchens, that people might not continue to partake of daily life as they had. Each recognized the tenuousness of life and the havoc being wreaked on civilization.
When he and his young daughter Dolores sat for Balthus, Miró had only recently arrived in Paris as a refugee from Spain. The artists came from different worlds, but each knew what it was to be buffeted by circumstance, to be forced into exile, and to fight to survive.
As for Miró’s personality, Balthus told me he could not verbalize it. Miró was “indescribable.” Beyond that, Balthus’s recollections were quite terse: “He looked very intense. He was a very curious man. He never spoke a lot. He was probably very shy. And so was I. The little girl moved all the time.”
But then Balthus added an extraordinary remark. He said that “Miró’s art describes him very well.” The statement completely contradicted Balthus’s often repeated assertions to me about the separation between a person’s private self and his artwork, and about the need to accept paintings aesthetically rather than as guides to their creators. Having perpetually battled the idea of his own art as autobiography, he had no trouble applying the forbidden procedure to Miró.
THE FIRST TIME BALTHUS AND I ever talked about his Miró portrait—when he was telling me his horror story about how Pierre Loeb had tricked him into selling it at a low price—he told me that Miró had come to him for posing sessions “every day for an entire year.” In subsequent conversations, he reduced the number to “forty” or “over forty.” He worked and reworked the painting, Balthus explained, in order to get the artist’s face more precise and the painting more complete. “I was fascinated by the expression of Miró. It was astonishing and childish. He was charming; I liked him very much; and yet he never said a word.… What was strange with Miró was that he never said a word and you did not feel embarrassed by his silence.”
After each of these descriptions, Balthus reiterated that a large part of the pleasure he took in painting the taciturn Spaniard derived from his awareness that Miró was both such an unlikely and genuine partisan of his work. Balthus said that Miró’s positive judgment surprised other people. His feeling of gratification probably contributed significantly to the uniquely serene ambience of Joan Miró and His Daughter Dolores. The portrait of the father and daughter betrays mixed emotions—and is fraught with the usual Balthusian undertone of mockery—but it displays profound tenderness and dignity. A beatific calm pervades. Miró is odd and funny-looking, and Dolores anxious and restless, yet clearly Balthus held his subject in rare high regard. Miró emerges with the inner strength of a saint, the painting an icon.
THIS DOUBLE PORTRAIT IS among Balthus’s most beautifully painted works. Thanks to James Thrall Soby’s public-spiritedness, as previously described, it now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For many years, it was regularly on view there. As of this writing, it is no longer in favor and is consigned to storage most of the time, but when we are lucky enough to see it, this magisterial picture is remarkable for the quiet strength that suffuses the viewer. John Russell, in his Tate catalog, accurately compares its composition to a sculpture of a Madonna and child. Joan and Dolores are statuesque. They exert a powerful dual presence. The lack of extraneous detail contributes to their aura of religiosity and purity; the stable, tranquil composition provides an atmosphere of grace and balance.
The canvas is a precisely halved rectangle with light gray-green above and a subtle charcoal brown-black below. The mutual boundary between those two colors is a wonderful Balthus touch: luminous, like a distant horizon line. By allowing a narrow stripe of canvas to be seen here and at the bottom, the artist keeps this background both light and distant. If the striped wallpaper in The Guitar Lesson suggests emotional conflagration, this setting conveys resolution and reserve. It soothes us, so that, in spite of Dolores’s distinct restlessness, equanimity prevails.
Yet for all its restraint, the portrait of Joan and Dolores Miró presents the relationship of father and daughter as emotionally loaded. While looking desperate to break free, Dolores also clings to her father—with a child’s instinctual longing for her parent’s protection even in awkward circumstances. Although he is extremely stiff and awkward, Miró holds her gently and protectively.
The two are further linked by their close resemblance to one another. Their thin mouths match. They both have unusually symmetrical faces, similarly flat. His cheeks are hollow whereas hers are like boards, but they have the same angled jaw. Up close, these features seem exaggerated, and Joan and Dolores are like porcelain dolls: emblems of people as well as people. Yet when we stand at a distance from the painting, the faces are real.
Balthus’s evocation of the actual world is remarkable. We know the degree to which Miró needs a shave. We are apprised of the spread of his collar, the thickness of his tie knot. We feel the pull of his suit jacket, the way his trouser legs wrinkle below the knee. Not only are the details distinct, but they have a poetic effect. Miró’s suede shoes, muted in tone, soft in form, convey their wearer’s quietude. Dolores’s, however, shine. They are the essence of a little girl’s Mary Janes, evocative of dressing up and important occasions—even if in this instance they are rendered absurd by Dolores’s huge legs, which dwarf them completely and would crush such delicate footwear in only a moment’s wearing.
Shoes of this sort are almost a signature element of Balthus’s work. Slippers like these gleam in his art of every period. They embody the light steps of girlhood. They are also one of those subjects Balthus could paint with consummate skill. Similarly, the patches of white light on Dolores’s dress and knees are among the artist’s fortes. Such luminous squares, very much like those in Derain’s later work, appear consistently throughout Balthus’s art. They succeed in making the act of seeing a miracle.
Yet while Balthus’s strong points are sublime in this portrait of Miró and his daughter, his problem areas are equally apparent. Miró’s right hand looks worse than arthritic; it is either a highly deformed human hand or not human at all. The relationship of Dolores’s left thumb to the finger next to it is completely wrong. Again we ask if the reason for these distortions is that Balthus really cannot paint hands or if, perhaps unconsciously, he wished to imbue people with a beastly side.
Joan Miró and His Daughter Dolores, 1937–38, oil on canvas, 130.2 × 88.9 cm (photo credit 15.1)
The sleeves—whether of the man’s suit coat, or short and puffed for the girl’s dress—are, however, painted impeccably. And the hair of both Mirós is rendered with exactitude and flair. With this painting Balthus emerges, to a new degree, as a master craftsman of supreme patience and unerring eye.
NO WONDER JAMES THRALL SOBY, Alfred Barr, and other contemporary observers all felt as they did about Joan Miró and His Daughter Dolores. Its quality is so high that, shortly after Balthus completed it and it was shipped to Pierre Matisse’s New York gallery, not only was the painting snatched up by the Museum of Modern Art, but it was also selected to appear in color on the April 1938 cover of the American magazine ARTnews. The attention to this canvas is particularly unusual in that its painter was, until that moment, unknown to all but a handful of people, and this exhibition on Fifty-seventh Street, his second solo show anywhere, was his first ever in America. But Balthus had won his success deservedly. Just thirty years old, he had mastered a sublime blend of restraint and richness—both visual and psychological.
In Miró and Dolores, Balthus has carefully evoked emotional complexity. Having distilled his impressions, deliberated without hurry, and worked and reworked his matte surface, he has imbued his imagery with a mixture of intense filial connectedness and anguished loneliness. The painting summons the qualities that drove writers like Jouve and Artaud and Camus to a frenzy of excitement about Balthus. Like the View of Montecalvello, which the artist completed forty-one years later, it is one of those occasions when Balthus has come to grips with both the longings and the comforts of earthly existence.
Here Balthus’s reverence for life, alongside his poignant revelation of the exigencies of human experience, is so palpable that the elements that disturb us in so much of his work—the trickery and insistent deception, as well as the pounding theme of domination—are naught compared with the genius.
BUT BALTHUS’S PARTICULAR SLANT is clearly in evidence as well. Linda Fairstein pointed out to me that “Miró is cupping what is about to be his daughter’s bosom.” Even though she is only eight and her breasts have not yet developed, this is not generally how the father of a girl that age would hold her. Beyond that, the girl is not just sitting on his lap; she is pressed against his inner thigh. The scenario is all the stranger—again this is Linda Fairstein—because of “the gross distortion of Dolores’s ungainly, misshapen legs.”
The play for power is a primary component of the sexual innuendo in Joan Miró and His Daughter Dolores—even if the tone is now far more muted than it was in Balthus’s paintings of a few years earlier. Freedom and its constraint meet head-on. Balthus’s Dolores is torn between the poles of childhood with her mix of restlessness and dependency, her eagerness to run loose and play coupled with the yearning to be warmly nestled by a parent. The artist evoked the cravings and pleasures, as well as the awkwardness and anxieties, of both of his sitters. Meanwhile, he imposed his own steely grip.
Balthus told me that Miró “loved to pose and didn’t move at all.” With a slightly sadistic grin, he added that Dolores behaved so badly that he “had to put her in a coal bag.” In the painting, rather than gloss over the painful truth of the child’s discomfort, Balthus illustrated it in its full intensity. Dolores appears not just a little bit fidgety; next to her stolid and resigned father, she is visibly anguished. It is as if Balthus delighted in stressing both the restlessness he inflicted and the curbs he imposed on it.
Reflecting back on Dolores Miró, who was seven when he began the painting and eight when he finished it, Balthus said that the child’s single redeeming trait was that on one occasion in the course of those more than forty posing sessions, she asked her father why he didn’t paint the way Balthus did. Quoting her, he raised his eyebrows in satisfaction. But otherwise the child was simply a nuisance because of her inability to hold her pose.
The battle of wills between the little girl and her thirty-year-old portraitist had the makings of legend. James Thrall Soby has written in his unpublished memoirs that Miró’s wife, Pilar, told him that “Balthus got so upset by Dolores’s restless energy that he held her dangling out his studio window until she promised, sobbing wildly, to hold still when she and her father posed again.” According to Soby, Pilar would forever after suffer palpably at the mere mention of Balthus’s name. How the kindly Miró tolerated Balthus’s mistreatment of his daughter—or why Pilar did not prevail in rescuing Dolores from her misery—remains an open question. It may only be a matter of the difference between the current regard for children’s rights and the virtual lack of it in the 1930s. But for the girl’s mother, this was not just a case of a child being kept in line; it was torture.
IN NOVEMBER 1993 I MET with Dolores. She had traveled to New York from Majorca for her father’s large exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Fifty-five years had passed since Balthus painted her.
We agreed to rendezvous in the lobby of the Parker Meridien Hotel. After phoning her room, I awaited her opposite the elevator bank, assuming I would readily recognize her as an older version of the person in Balthus’s portrait. But it was she who spotted me first; I was unable to identify the small, awkward child wearing that starched English dress in the woman who now introduced herself to me as Miró’s daughter.
The elegant creature before me looked like a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Paloma Picasso. Her carefully made-up face was fine-boned and strikingly exotic. Her hair was a tangerine gold. More diamonds sparkled off her than I had ever seen at 10:30 in the morning. She wore a white silk blouse under a stylish black jumper. In one hand she held a cigarette with its ash dangling; in the other a supple leather clutch that, when she later opened it, proved to be full of makeup.
Her jewelry conjured store windows in Cannes and Palm Beach: large earrings in which the ovals of small diamonds framed enormous, softly rounded corals; rings and bracelets from a treasure chest. But there was nothing haughty or pretentious about the artist’s daughter. The diminutive Dolores was affable and outgoing. If Balthus had painted her to be an awkward and inhibited child, the grown woman was gracious, friendly, and helpful.
We sat in the hotel restaurant. Immediately she wanted news of Balthus. Her father had seen little of him since 1938, and she and her mother—who was still alive—had completely lost touch with him. Dolores had the impression that “Balthus was a Russian prince before the Revolution.” She had read about his large house and his young wife in the French Vogue, and she was curious to learn more.
But for all the warm inquiry, there had been nothing happy about the experience of posing for him. “He was quite awful.” She recalled how restless she had been, at ages seven and eight, during the sittings of two to three hours’ duration, and remarked that Balthus did nothing to put her at her ease. In fact, he made it worse. “He had a big sack—a sailor’s bag” into which he threatened to stuff her if she did not keep still. I told Dolores about the artist’s claim that he had actually put her into a coal bag. This, she laughed, was an exaggeration. But he had, indeed, terrified her, for she really thought he would put her in that sailor’s bag. “Il m’a menacé. It was a joke, but he was a very serious man and I was very scared. He was not easy. He had a very rough voice. He was very hard. He never joked with me. He never entertained me. He only gave me a few cookies.”
The main difficulty with the pose for this painting, Dolores recollected, was that she had to sit on her father’s lap at such an angle that it was impossible for her feet to stay stationary. It was “a very uncomfortable position—I was slipping. I remember that he had parquet”; it was too slippery for her to steady her feet on it.
Simply thinking about it brought a look of consternation to Dolores’s face. She then demonstrated her problem for me by stretching out her legs at the angle required by Balthus and showing how her feet were perpetually sliding from underneath her. She illustrated this, as if the wretched experience had only occurred yesterday.
After a few sessions, Dolores explained, Balthus developed a system to keep her from moving. He put down nails on the floor against which she braced her toes. This contrivance, of course, made her all the more miserable. Telling me so, she now splayed her legs forward uncomfortably. Not only was she locked in a physically uncomfortable position, but she felt very much alone, because her father would generally sleep while she sat there. For him, it was an ideal way out of the situation, but Dolores had no means of escape.
WHEN DOLORES IMITATED her painful pose, I expected to see beefy legs—proportioned like those in the painting. The considerable girth of the child’s bare legs is plain above the schoolgirl’s shoes and ankle socks in her portrait. It came as no surprise that the sophisticated woman before me now sported sheer black stockings and very delicate, sharply pointed, soft black leather high heels, but I was amazed when I observed her dimensions. Dolores was such a tiny woman that her legs were not much longer now than they had appeared when she was eight, but they were remarkably slender. The girl could not, in truth, have had anything remotely like the beefy limbs she has in the painting—given how delicate her legs were now, when she was in her sixties. Balthus had taken considerable liberty with her proportions when he painted her. It was clearly part of his agenda to render her graceless.
Referring more to the atmosphere than to details like her shape, Dolores told me that she felt that the impression given by Balthus’s painting was not accurate. “I wasn’t a sad child. I was gay.” The outfit that to her eye Balthus has made look like a stiff uniform was, in fact, a source of considerable pleasure to her. “It was a very smart dress. My mother dressed me very well. I was very spoiled by my parents. They bought me the best things; this was from a very smart boutique run by two English ladies.”
Glancing at a glossy reproduction of the double portrait, Dolores Miró also commented on the inaccuracy of the representation of her father. “He looked like a cat there. He was so tired. It’s not the normal expression of my father, because he had alive eyes.” Nor was he, in fact, catlike.
But the dour tone of the double portrait had its elements of truth. Recalling that time period, Dolores said she felt she had no choice other than to do what was expected of her. Looking at her own glum face in the painting, she recalled that this was a different era from now—a time when children simply did as they were told. “I did not ask questions. That’s the way it was. I was posing for Balthus!”
In a similar vein, she said that although her father was very kind, if she was uncomfortable, it did not especially concern him. “He was a very tender father. But he didn’t play very much with me. Parents were very severe back then. You did what your parents wanted you to do.” And so, after school, although she was tired and unhappy, day after day she sat for Balthus with her feet braced. “I was nailed to the spot. I couldn’t move.”
BEYOND BEING UNCOMFORTABLE during these posing sessions, it was a generally awkward time in Dolores’s life. Her family had fled Spain for Paris earlier that same year because of the rise of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Paris was difficult; she was at a new school and did not speak French.
Balthus, indeed, makes Miró and his daughter look like refugees. They are out of place. Dolores appears not only ill at ease but also, appropriately, in flight. Yet she looks worse off than she was. Not only did Balthus make her legs clunky, but he also flattened her face; he chose to render her grotesque.
And while Dolores appears about to take off—with her knee bent in a familiar Balthus posture, as if she is trying to get off the stage—she is held captive. Captive by her father, and captive by Balthus.
Why are they so frontal, so formalized? Why must Balthus invariably distort the world? Of course he paints beautifully. Dolores and Joan are an impressively stolid, sculptural pair, like an Iberian wooden statue but with the massing nicely broken up by all the little rhythms. The visual harmonies are delightful—his tie is the same orange as the piping of her dress. But they are somehow mocked and dehumanized, belittled, for all the triumphant visual beauty.
AS ALWAYS, BALTHUS RENDERED the world more according to his own vision than in response to how it really was. He made Dolores miserable, and then painted her as such. It was his choice to present a lithe, high-spirited child as stocky and depressed, and to immobilize and dull a normally bright-eyed man. In effect, he subjugated them. At the same time, by gratuitously rendering the unfeline Miró as catlike, Balthus was giving the older painter the image he generally reserved for himself.
Again Balthus had to transform his subject in order to possess it. Having literally exhausted Miró father and daughter in the sessions at the Cour de Rohan, Balthus has shown them exhausted; he has also made them restrained and uncomfortable. While hinting at Miró’s actual pleasantness and gentleness, Balthus also made the Spaniard much that he was not: more tired than his daughter knew him to be, stiff and tense when in life he was lively and animated. Miró’s suit, which in truth fit perfectly well, becomes too small and taut; it pulls at the waist. Dolores’s beloved dress here seems to bind her. To present the facts was not what interested Balthus. He would rather blend reality with fiction to suit the dictates of his personal taste.
Balthus may have cherished Miró’s support, but—perhaps because he could not bear to feel beholden—he chose, at least unconsciously, to overpower both the artist and his child. The subject was not Joan Miró and his daughter Dolores as they were but, rather, as Balthus would have them. So Miró emerges as a painter not unlike himself: holding firm—across her breast, no less—to a squirming young girl who has been nailed in place.
WHEN I ASKED BALTHUS whether he and Miró had kept in touch after the 1930s, he told me a story that was anything but what I wanted to hear. It’s a familiar sort of frustration: you are counting on an old person to dispense a nugget, and you get, instead, a worthless bauble. Worse, the old person treats the bauble as a gem. Balthus retold the story with equal gusto on a number of occasions when Miró’s name came up.
One evening in the 1960s, Balthus went to have dinner with his two sons in Paris. They were meeting at a Chinese restaurant near the Rue de Rivoli. He arrived ahead of Stanislas and Thadée and saw that Miró and Pilar were dining there. Balthus was chatting with them when a waiter came and said, “Elles vous attendent dans le bar.”
Balthus told me that when he walked into the bar, he thought he saw, in his words, “two American lesbians” standing there. A moment later, he realized they were his sons, both of whom were sporting long hair at the time.
The anecdote had no bearing, of course, on Miró. But something about this incident filled Balthus with sophomoric pleasure. His sons’ mistaken sexual identities, and his repeated reference to this incident when Miró’s name was in the air, have little to do with the Spaniard, but to Balthus the misapprehension had irresistible charm.