Girl with a Cat, 1937, oil on wood, 87.6 × 77.7 cm (photo credit 18.1)
“Milk is for the pussy, isn’t it?” said Simone. “Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?”
“I dare you,” I answered, almost breathless.
—GEORGES BATAILLE, Story of the Eye1
It is indeed a question as to what arouses us most in erotic works of art. For some it may be an excessive amount of pubic hair, for others the complete absence of hair.… Sometimes it is the expression on a woman’s face, the contortion of features expressing complete abandon.… Everyone has his Achilles’ heel, to twist a cliché. Certainly one of the most successful methods of animating the spectator is to give the impression that he is observing the performance through a keyhole.… The most important thing, it goes without saying, is that the artist be an artist. Just as a good pornographic novel depends on the writer’s ability to write, so it is with a painting or piece of sculpture. Even in “obscene” works of art we look for the touch of the master. The work of a hack leaves us cold or derisive.
—HENRY MILLER2
EXCEPT FOR THE OCCASIONAL portrait or character in a group scene, Balthus rarely included men or boys in his paintings. The males who strike us as most real—three-dimensional and alive in the way that the women are—are mostly self-portraits, or self-portraits at a remove. Hubert Blanchard in The Children is the rare exception.
In 1937 and 1938 Balthus went on to paint three major oils of Thérèse without him. Painting the young women alone, he focused utterly and achieved his most authentic voice.
The three paintings of Thérèse show Balthus at the apogee of his strength. For the rest of his life, he would return to images of daydreaming girls in domestic interiors, and to personality-filled cats, but rarely again would he summon his powers so effectively.
Balthus told me—as he has many other people—that he regards his large multifigure compositions as his most successful paintings. In these big and panoramic canvases of people whose lives overlap but don’t interlock, the artist has, he says, left his greatest mark. Even if Balthus attained his own objectives, I disagree that they are his finest work. It seems to me, rather, that his close-ups of adolescents are his ultimate accomplishment.
It is in his chamber music—of which the portraits of Thérèse are primary exemplars—that Balthus has made his most significant contribution to world art. These more concentrated paintings cohere better than the larger, more stilted pictures; the details ring truer. They are to his body of work what Echo et Narcisse was to Poussin’s.
The subjects of these less complex compositions are real people, not somnambulists. Visual and emotional truth is nearer, even if still in a mist. Balthus’s celebrations of females between the ages of twelve and twenty-two fulfill his goal of awakening. Both the viewer and the subjects come alive—to glorious if frightening possibilities.
BALTHUS HAS CREATED unique imagery in these intimate paintings of teenage girls. In his more schematic art, people look posed and anesthetized—as if someone had to dull or numb the excitement; this is not so for the close-ups. The gimmickry is less cumbersome than in works like The Street. There is—in the technique as well as in the characters invented—the superb linking of childhood with adulthood that marks Balthus at his best.
A supreme example of all the paintings of teenage girls is the 1938 Thérèse Dreaming (color plate 11). The canvas is as well painted, and in its subtle way as provocative, as anything Balthus has ever done. It belongs to the time period when he was unabashed about who and what he was—when he tried no guises and perpetrated no fluff. It arrests us because it is painted so richly and convincingly, because it betrays such unembarrassed convictions, and because the subject, whether it attracts us intensely or makes us extremely uncomfortable, is alive in all its complexity.
A SIGNATURE BALTHUS, exquisitely crafted, tasteful to a fault, Thérèse Dreaming presents the nubile schoolgirl exposing herself coyly but shame-lessly. Because of the girl’s age, her clothing, and her apparent indifference to the effect of her fierce sexuality, the image is more laden with libido than Titian’s Venuses, Goya’s Mayas, or Ingres’s bordello scenes. Thérèse emanates eroticism while looking blithely unaware of that fact.
Balthus poses the young adolescent with her legs spread wide and her skirt and petticoat thrust back. Her crotch, scantily clad in white underpants, faces us in full view. The lack of modesty or embarrassment is completely out of character for a young woman at this point in her maturation, when she has just begun to develop breasts. Her attitude suits either a mature seductress or a younger child who does not know any better. Or perhaps she is asleep and is not aware that we are seeing her in this indecent way. In any event, either out of his allegedly deliberate attempt to shock or, more likely, because of a desire to satisfy his own longings, the thirty-year-old artist has not just been risqué in having Thérèse display herself this way; he has been remarkably salacious. Thérèse’s sexuality may be dormant for her, but it is rampant for us.
In Thérèse Dreaming, the man who claims to revere the idea of privacy has invaded someone else’s. Balthus demands that we honor the walls and constructs of his life; but no aspect of Thérèse is off limits. We feel, with this painting, that we are being taken into the world of sights to which we are not meant to have access: that thin strip of material covering the genitals, the inside of the petticoat, a rather personal view of the girl’s armpits. The bulge of her inner thigh is ours to study. So are the shadows within her joints. We even have an inkling of the secret of her dream—that it must have to do with her burgeoning body and incipient womanliness.
Linda Fairstein’s take on Thérèse is that she is “unabashedly erotic. These little girls in seductive poses are titillating to anyone attracted to adolescents. Stimulation is invited.” What I wish Balthus would realize is that to acknowledge this truth is in no way to minimize the wonder of his artistry—or to denigrate his achievement.
That Balthus could, on every occasion when I ever saw him, be shocked and appalled that anyone might call his work erotic—and that his campaign against the notion of eroticism in his art has been the rallying cry of all his recent interviews—at times seem laughable, and at other moments odd and pathetic. It is as if, like his teenage subject, he has deliberately closed his eyes to what is obvious to everyone else.
IN Thérèse Dreaming, SUNLIGHT caresses this scarcely developed young woman’s naked legs. It shines off the back of her left thigh up to the point where it begins to bulge into her pale buttock, and illuminates the inside of her right thigh as high as her pubis. Her skin is alive. Thérèse’s soft young flesh—which we see in such amplitude—glows with more clarity and warmth than any other substance in the canvas.
The narrow folds of underwear, however, make the actual center of her sexuality less brazen than in The Guitar Lesson, Cathy Dressing, or Alice. In Girl with a Cat, his painting of a similarly positioned Thérèse done one year earlier, the slightly younger child—viewed from the same angle in almost the identical pose on the same chaise—has underpants so tight that the crack of her vagina reads as a dark crease. Now she is, technically, accorded a bit more modesty. Yet the imagery is “dirtier”—and more mischievous—than if Balthus had painted a straightforward nude. Had he taken the approach of a Matisse or an Ingres—overtly erotic, a mature man savoring a mature woman who looks entirely comfortable with the nakedness she celebrates—there would be nothing to talk about. Instead Balthus has us looking up a schoolgirl’s skirt—and makes the act feel clandestine and naughty.
The bareness of the child’s legs is accentuated by her shoes and socks. Balthus is up to his old tricks: the covering of one part of the body to call attention to the revealing of another. But in Thérèse Dreaming and Girl with a Cat, the shoes go further still in augmenting the eroticism: the left one points directly at her genitals. The firm and rigid shoe assumes a subtly phallic role as if it is about to penetrate the girl.
Balthus would probably declare this idea even more far-fetched than Guy Davenport’s observations in A Balthus Notebook that if the man in Les Beaux Jours were to turn around, he might look up the woman’s skirt. Balthus brought up Davenport’s assertion as an example of the ridiculous things people say about his work. How absurd, the artist laughed; “one does not see how the boy can turn around.”
In Thérèse Dreaming, Balthus spread his nubile subject’s legs in a way that threw them open for imaginary penetration and took it further with that perfectly angled foot. Balthus’s often repeated claim to me that he simply painted teenagers the way they sit in their usual poses is about as likely as Lord Byron being his grandfather. Dolores Miró and Jane Cooley confirmed that Balthus situated his models solely to suit his very precise goals—with scant concern for his subjects’ comfort or the issue of naturalness. Thérèse sits the way Balthus wants to see her.
The girl lifts her arms with her elbows out and her fingers crossed at the top of her head. Pressing her hands into her cranium, she seems to contain her thoughts—and pull herself together, figuratively and metaphorically. Her arms bring all the lines of energy full circle and home again; she is reaching within—rather than toward anyone or anything. Stretched backward in this manner, her arms also render her defenseless and leave her body available, with her developing breasts free and clear. The motion of the twelve-year-old’s limbs thus has all the power Antonin Artaud wished for.
Balthus often used arms this expressively. In The Mountain, the central female figure raises her arms and interlocks her fingers as if in a fantastic stretch or ritual dance. We know it means something, but we do not know exactly what. The limp arms of the unconscious figure in the foreground, like those of The Victim, imply a state somewhere between sleep and death. Other Balthus women painted through the years extend their arms in front of them almost as if they are swimming—indeed, they look as if they are underwater—or drop them in abandonment, or bend them as if they are possessed by demons. The gestures are generally extreme, the arms often disproportionately long. The meaning is ambiguous, but the effect is substantial.
LIKE THE MAN WHO PAINTED HER, Thérèse appears to reveal a great deal and to open herself to us, but remains remote. We will not get past the barriers. Her mouth is clamped shut, her eyes closed. She will not speak; we have no idea what she sees.
But we do know that her left nostril—her face is in profile, so it is the only one we see—is dilated as if she is having a rich experience, even if its precise nature is kept from us. That evocative swelling of her nose is more apparent in the actual canvas. I visited Thérèse Dreaming when it was in the collection of Natasha Gelman. The painting was then hanging in Mrs. Gelman’s elegant, old Fifth Avenue apartment in the company of Matisses and Mirós and Cézannes—except on those periodic occasions when it was on view across the street on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Mrs. Gelman has since died, and Thérèse has gone permanently to the Met.) The unsalable artistic escapade of the 1930s had been elevated to the blue-chip artwork of the nineties; Thérèse, like the man who painted her, had been transplanted from plain and rugged digs to surroundings of splendor. But whatever space she, and he, may now occupy—however much their audience has grown, and however much Thérèse and her creator now bask in glory—they still keep their fantasies and pleasures secret. The sensory thrill suggested by that swollen nostril, exposed though it is to any onlooker, has a source that is Thérèse’s—and, perhaps, Balthus’s—alone to know.
In Girl with a Cat, a cat stares out at us from the foreground. Scowling and protective, he looks like Thérèse’s bodyguard. The spectacular feline holds the world at bay. In Thérèse Dreaming, a very different sort of cat—in the same position in the painting—laps a bowl of milk. The earlier cat sits there imperious, while this one stands, its tail stretched behind it, semirigid, in a position of action. This second cat smiles. Cartoonlike in execution—with a goony, merry facial expression unlike one ever worn by a real cat—it is a far less realistic image than the brown tabby in Girl with a Cat. It is, rather, testimony to Balthus’s whim.
Girl with a Cat, 1937, oil on wood, 87.6 × 77.7 cm (photo credit 18.1)
The devilish animal, its smile pure mischief, appears overcome with pleasure. It squints its eyes as if it is intoxicated. With its bright red tongue, it devours the contents of its bowl—milk or cream, we assume—gleefully. At the very least, the image suggests the thrill in taking sensuous pleasure. More specifically, in Thérèse Dreaming the cat—always a stand-in for the artist himself, the self-declared “H.M. the King of Cats”—is Balthus salivating. Not just salivating but partaking. He is lapping up the young girl whose legs are spread and crotch presented.
THE REJOINDER I HEARD Balthus utter as much as any other was, “Everyone is excited because you can see the little girls’ underpants.”
To this he would nod his pale, marvelous head in tired agreement, inhale deeply from yet another long white Dunhill, and acknowledge, “Well, one does see them.” And then he would utter the same refrain: “The problem is the viewer’s longings and interests, not mine.” With a voice betraying just a hint of mockery and condescension, a look of puzzlement on his face—and the suggestion that he is the victim of forces that have nothing to do with him—he would complain again that his paintings “are awakening strange obsessions.” I heard this day after day, as if the refined old man simply could not fathom the perversion that seems to be running rampant in the world.
As a boy Balthus must have been perpetually aware of the blatant sexual charge between Baladine and Rilke. Invited into their passionate universe, he was also made to keep his distance from it, neither to respond nor to appear to notice. Now he could be the one to display his longings and demand that others act as if nothing was there.
But a crotch is a crotch. And Thérèse fascinates and terrifies—as her creator perfectly well knows.
Is it too much to say that the crack within the human body—the biological crevice with its pleasures mysterious yet infinite—was akin to the “Crac” about which Rilke had written the young Balthus: analogous, according to Rilke’s “Mr. Blackwood,” to the nonexistent moment between midnight of February 28 and the start of March 1 in non–leap years? Three-quarters of the time, the anniversary of Balthus’s birthday occurred but did not occur, and as such was his alone, the domain that only he could enter. “What is private must remain so,” Balthus wrote to John Russell in the statement that became his credo. Furtive, personal territory—known but unknowable—was the best of all.
THE SEXUALITY OF Thérèse Dreaming—her fantasies of genital pleasure; our fantasies of her imaginary, perhaps masturbatory, sequence of stimuli—gives the work much of its strength and beauty. Balthus would change his style—and dissemble in myriad ways as both a man and a painter—for over half a century to come, but where his heart and ultimate talent were and would always be is clear in this painting. Balthus truly loved young girls (the jump-ropers on the Piazza Santa Croce, Laurence, Setsuko, and others). He also tortured them (Dolores Miró, Elsa Henriquez) with a cruelty edging on sadism. In either case, the obsession is indisputable.
Balthus’s repeated disclaimers about the significance of this subject matter do him the great disservice of adding to, rather than dispelling, the idea that he is a painter of “dirty” pictures. By protesting what is obvious, he denigrates it. His only real perversion is in depriving himself of the acknowledgment of the excitement of neurotic thought that is so central to his being and his work. For the abandon and lack of self-consciousness of Balthus’s art at its best testify to aliveness and offer the thrill of feeling. If, on close viewing, the eroticism begets more eroticism—and so the chair legs become phallic, the cat’s bowl vaginal, the vases uterine, the clothing fetishistic—then this sensuous deluge should be celebrated, not disparaged. In the pervading intelligence of his art, Balthus elevates these soaring libidinal feelings from the sphere of the merely animal to the unique arena of human sexuality.
Looking at almost all of Balthus’s art from the 1930s, we believe that every decision about clothing, gestures, and postures has to do with our sexual selves, our sense of who we are in our own eyes and whom we might attract, of what we want or else wish to avoid.
Balthus may have told me dozens of times that all comparisons to Nabokov are entirely off base, yet like the worldly and erudite author of Lolita, he, too, has had the bravery and magnificent effrontery to acknowledge that grown men can be sexually attracted to young girls, and to make great art of that taboo. In a disarmingly tasteful style of painting, he has tackled without equivocation an apparently tasteless subject. Like Nabokov, he has brought intense culture and intelligence to the revelation of raw emotion.
The price has been high. I have had people tell me that Balthus was arrested because of his activities with young girls. The word that gets thrown around in random conversation is “pedophile.” Indeed, he has had a series of relationships with teenage women, married someone thirty-four years his junior, and painted young girls. But we live in a world where middle-aged women sport baby-doll dresses and twelve-year-olds wear miniskirts. Junior high school girls try for the effects of fully sexualized women; women in menopause present themselves as little girls. Balthus has simply gone further than most in revealing all of this—and committed what for some is the transgression of treating his fantasy as reality.
…
BALTHUS’S TEENAGE GIRLS represent, I believe, both the object of the artist’s love and his narcissism. Those unyielding, secretive girls—lost in their own reverie—resemble Balthus himself. Like him, they are alluring and unavailable. On one level his women are himself in female form. The adolescence with which Balthus has always been most obsessed with is his own.
These girls are also, in part, an evocation of the mother with whom he identified: the love-struck young woman whom he wanted as his own. And having probably been tortured in ways by his mother’s affair with Rilke, he now inflicted reciprocal pain on her stand-ins. The teenage girls of Balthus’s paintings are Baladine overwhelmed by Rilke, Baladine punished by her son, as well as Balthus as a teenager overwhelmed.
Of course, they are also, quite simply, teenage girls. The species in general has rarely had a greater admirer. Based on the look I saw on Balthus’s face when he met my own young teenage daughters—I will get to this—attractive young women are his intoxicant. That said, at least in old age, he was the most harmless Humbert Humbert imaginable; he knew how to behave.
BALTHUS, OF COURSE, is quite right that the craft of painting is pivotal. His brother’s renditions of eroticized women—weakly drawn, overtly sexual without any of the same art—are a mockery by comparison. Thérèse Dreaming grips us so, and has its ravishing impact, because of its power of representation, the triumph of its colors, and the pulsing movement that is as alive and charged as its subject’s nubile body.
In this canvas as in his life in his marvelous chalet, Balthus as set designer and couturier has displayed unerring, impeccable taste. The wallpaper behind Thérèse has, with its lustrous colors, the resonance of a deep yet quiet voice. This is virtually the same paper as in The Guitar Lesson, although Balthus painted them in different studios. Its design is probably a product of the artist’s imagination, more than a reproduction of an actual object. It reveals the inanimate ability to invest inanimate objects with maximum impact. That know-how is equally apparent in the still life on the wooden table with its Morandi-like reserve, clarity, and magisterial articulation.
Balthus makes all the elements plausible and rich. In what will consistently be one of the strong points of his work, he has painted the draped white material in Thérèse so that every fold reads easily and rhythmically. The position of the table in the space of the room is distinct. The angle of each chair is as exact as Dolores Miró’s feet were when the poor child had to buttress her toes against nails. The way the light falls is masterful: providing a soft tone to the background, intensifying shadows, highlighting Thérèse’s flesh.
The 1938 canvas contains most everything Balthus is best at: a cat, country furniture catching the light, folded material, women’s knees, a pillow, naked flesh. And it further validates Picasso’s statement that Balthus was the master of interiors. How authentically the shadows of the furniture fall on the floor. We believe that what we see truly exists. The chaise legs, like Thérèse’s shoes, seem as real as the details of a Jan van Eyck. And beyond the agglomeration of details, Balthus composes the painting as a totality. He gets the surfaces right, and establishes an embroidered hem as fact, but he also understands objects in space in a more profound and generalized sense, making them, in a large and noble way, forms and light and shadow.
At the same time, Thérèse Dreaming avoids Balthus’s problem areas. The artist has navigated his way around the troublesome issue of the hands by interlocking them. And there is no thought of including a boy or man, except by implication. The painting does have, however, the usual element of Balthus’s bizarreness of scale. Although it is not particularly noticeable at first, the girl has a disproportionately large head. This is yet another successful contrivance: like the chair caning, it works without our necessarily being aware of it. Rather than having us think that we are looking at something that does not scan when we see this oversized head, Balthus convinces us that we are in the powerful presence of a real personage. Supremely conscious of effect in his art as in his life, the artist formulated the proportion for its impact. Thérèse’s vast face and skull have the effect of absorbing us in her thoughtfulness. Quite literally, her mind looms large before our eyes.
THE SOLID, STATUESQUE STILL LIFE on the table—the immobile vase, flacon, and canister, with their shapes rigid, the hardness of their metal and glass palpable—exists in counterpoint to Thérèse’s large and wide cheeks. The order and separateness of the neatly placed objects on the tabletop are like a foil to this alive, complicated creature.
Yet Balthus has evoked the child’s features with extraordinary economy. Thérèse’s closed eyes and eyebrow are painted with utter simplicity. The pursed lips and rounded nostril are achieved with a minimum of brush. A simple interplay of thin, opaque tans and rouges establishes the luminous flesh. Their maker knows the devices to create precisely the living presence he wanted.
Thérèse’s body, meanwhile, is a mixture of repose and action. With her solid, powerful upper body—a Balthus trademark—she leans back, her weight centered on her buttocks. Yet her back is poised; she does not allow herself to sink into the pillow. She is resting yet perched: comfortable but at the start of something. Similarly, with her legs relaxed yet braced, her arms comfortable but active, she combines being asleep with being alert.
These confluences create tremendous rhythm and visual motion. The composition moves in and out with a pulsing energy. The left leg, starting at the foot, shoots up to the knee, then drops down slowly as it widens to the thigh and crotch. The elbows jut. As with Giacometti’s figurines, Thérèse’s sturdy, powerful limbs endow her with vitality and potency. The total effect is the perfect physical representation of the mixed state of being that is adolescence. Balthus says today that each of his paintings is “a prayer”; it is, by most standards, an offbeat form of religion, but this art is indeed a celebration, an homage to human capability and complexity.
This self-taught artist could outpaint almost anyone of the day. At age thirty, he evinces the extraordinary skill that, while not consistently at the same level, would distinguish him for years to come. He folds a towel on the table with the expertise of Velázquez. He makes a country chair and table exist as vividly as the brothers Le Nain did. He captures the way the unfinished dark wood of a country table absorbs light. He brings off the caning of the chaise—not by any tedious verisimilitude but by inventing just the right sawtooth effect for the wrapped stretcher at the end. Up close, the caning of both the chair and the side chair are really very simply painted: in a creamy beige true to straw, accented by aptly colored shadows. At a distance, the rendition works so well that we know the precise extent of the indentation and sagging. Psychologically ambiguous, Balthus was visually utterly exact.
The majesty of forms and light and shadow is, indeed, a mainstay of all his art. He evokes physical truth. We know what his chairs are covered with; we feel them as solid surfaces, strong enough to sit on. His furniture has adequate strength and weight and substance. Balthus, like all the great painters, attends to the rudiments of life. People live and breathe, stretch their bodies, occupy space. They have weight. They dream. Chairs and beds support our bodies; tables elevate the accessories to our existence.
And art heightens sensation. In Thérèse Dreaming, the color relationships have been as carefully constructed as the composition. Few painters of our century have taken such pains with the formulation, such care with every sequence. Having kept the color range minimal—with that self-imposed discipline Balthus told me he enjoys—he has worked it to full effect. The warm orangy red of the wallpaper stripes is picked up by Thérèse’s skirt and shoes, and by the cylindrical container on the table. The only other colors are browns, whites, the tones of flesh and straw, and a range of greens. It is all rich and subdued at the same time, simply balanced.
In making these aesthetic choices Balthus was taking a solitary stance. Even with the similarities to Derain and Giacometti, he made himself as different from everyone around him in the 1930s as he has since the Second World War by choosing to be an old-world aristocrat. The Surrealists were painting bright. His beloved Bonnard was all pastel. Picasso’s dominant hue was a Mediterranean blue; Matisse’s canvases shone with the sunshine of Nice. Balthus’s palette is deeper, more resonant—deliberately layered with weighted colors.
The green he has chosen for the pillow is evidence both of Balthus’s perfect sense of visual pitch and of his exquisite tastefulness. It is the same sense of style that prevails in his house in Switzerland: in the handsome country antiques, the aged vases full of local meadow flowers, the impeccable porcelain accoutrements in the bathrooms, the fine old prints in the guest rooms, the baronial iron lamps that Balthus had had made in Italy. Balthus has a judgment and a sense of history in a way that, even in our international world, seem quintessentially European. That green cosseting Thérèse’s back is darker than sea foam, but similar; it is velvet, but it seems indigenous to nature. This is a rich, masterful color: a color that conjures age, that belongs to a society where we sit on materials that have preceded us by centuries—and presumably will outlive us by as much. Balthus knew the effect of things: of color as of limb position. In The Bernese Hat, the yellow of the hat gives the painting a note of light Mozartian esprit; this green has the depth and resonance of Beethoven’s Appassionata.
SINCE LITTLE INFURIATES Balthus more than the “idiotic” comparisons between his work and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, it is odd that the second portrait of Thérèse—the 1938 Girl with a Cat—appears on the cover of the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic edition of Lolita, a much circulated paperback. When I was with Balthus, I saw him turn down a request for one of his paintings to appear on the cover of a book by Josephine Humphries; he did not know Humphries’s work, but explained to me that he disapproved of having his art on a piece of fiction. Yet Penguin got the permission of DACS, the organization that controls Balthus’s reproduction rights, to have the alluring Thérèse symbolize precisely what the artist says she does not.
This particular Balthus is a full crotch view. It presents a sinister, uncomfortable-looking child. In fact, she is all wrong for Lolita, but not necessarily for the reasons Balthus would claim. For one thing, the old-master colors of the painting, the daybed, and her clothing make her too purely old-fashioned European. She is from the wrong culture; Nabokov’s book is rooted in America in the 1950s, and Lolita is too much part of that world for the Balthus to work. More importantly, Lolita is a book emphatically about self-knowledge, about unabashed delight in one’s own obsessions, about the celebration of neurosis. Balthus, on the contrary, may hint at private feelings, but then he denies them and makes a halfhearted attempt to cloak them. He does not know how he feels about his feelings, or at least he does not let you know; he plays games with you. He is no more up front about what is really going on emotionally than he is about the facts of his background, whereas Nabokov’s writing extolls impassioned delight with tumultuous honesty and frankly depicts an obsession with obsession.
It is for this reason that, even if Balthus has repeatedly insisted on denying any link in sensibility with Nabokov, the novelist practically flaunted their similarities. Once, when a group of people were visiting the filmmaker Billy Wilder, whose art collection included major paintings by many of the best-known twentieth-century masters (Picasso, Matisse, etc.), the guests were all musing about which picture they would take as their own if they could choose just one. Nabokov had no doubt as to what his selection would be, and was proud of it. He pointed to the Balthus frontal nude of a teenage girl and said with unabashed delight that he would pick that one.
In Lolita, rather than lay the groundwork for speculation, Nabokov tells all:
As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine,” etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.3
Humbert deliberately affronts us. He assumes guilt, and from time to time addresses an imaginary jury. Unafraid to be funny, he leaves few questions begging: “She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham, with a pattern of little red apples, and her arms and legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies, and the ribbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down at the remembered level, and because of her childish gait, or because I had memorized her as always wearing heelless shoes, her saddle oxfords looked somehow too large and too high-heeled for her.”4 Nabokov’s book is a shameless partaking of delights: a deliberately all-or-nothing engagement. Humbert refers to himself as “a maniac with pederosis.”5 He sets forth his ardor unequivocally: “Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.”6
Humbert, who in fact has murdered someone, knows the connection between who he really is and how he behaves, and is capable of being witty and worldly and ironic about it. Balthus, on the other hand, perpetually equivocates. In his paintings of young girls, he presents them as sexual presences but then has them deny their sexuality; the girl being groped in The Street looks as if nothing is happening, as if she is some otherworldly religious figure heading off into a spiritual world. No one engages one hundred percent in what he or she is doing. The artist invites emotions only to take them away. With Matisse and Picasso, however different their voices, we know where they stand—be it lusty and appreciative, or angry and deprecating—while with Balthus we are in tenuous territory. Studied and contrived, the paintings, like their teenage subjects, need to give mixed signals in order to keep their secrets and hence their power.