Erich Klossowski, in his late years
It was said, though I do not know where the story originated (it may even be true), that he had been ordained a Catholic priest and had served in the Great War as a chaplain in the Austro-Hungarian army; when I asked him once about this period of his life he would say nothing and only gave me one of his studiedly enigmatic smiles. He had suffered a shrapnel wound—“in a skirmish in the Carpathians”—which had left him with an attractive Byronic limp. He was tall, straight-backed, with glossy blue-black hair, soft eyes, an engaging, if somewhat laboured, ironical smile. He could have been one of those Prussian princes out of the last century, all gold braid and duelling scars, so beloved of operetta composers. He claimed he had been captured in battle by the Russian army, and when the Revolution came had joined the Reds and fought in the civil war. All this gave him the faintly preposterous air of fortitude and self-importance of the Man Who Has Seen Action.
—JOHN BANVILLE, The Untouchable1
THE TIME WAS ENDING when artists or their subjects might calmly lean back and dream. Thérèse Dreaming would soon seem like a memory of easier times. Everything changed irrevocably with the onset of World War II.
Having installed Antoinette and Baladine at Derain’s, Balthus went off to fight for France. On September 2, 1939, he was mobilized. In a letter dated October 17, 1939, the woman who was then Pierre Matisse’s wife, Teeny (later Mrs. Marcel Duchamp), wrote Chick Austin, “Pierre writes Balthus is at the front. The whole situation is very frightening—no one here even guesses how ‘real’ war can become almost overnight.”
The war became real soon enough. But Balthus’s days as a soldier were few. The artist told me that he was “blown up on a mine in Savoie just at the beginning of the War” and was immediately demobilized for that reason. Balthus has mentioned the injury in several interviews as well. It is why, he explained one afternoon as we were slowly making our way down the corridor of Le Grand Chalet, he has had to walk with a stick ever since. This accident probably saved his life, he said philosophically, shrugging his shoulders as if this were yet another strange twist of fate. It was one of the many examples he gave me of circumstances beyond his control—and of his resignation to them.
John Russell, Jean Leymarie, and Sabine Rewald all handle the issue of Balthus and the war by reporting, in their published texts on the artist, that he was called to service when fighting broke out, and demobilized about three months later, in December 1939. They provide no additional details. However, in her doctoral thesis, Rewald goes further. Balthus’s wartime experience is yet another of his inventions, it seems. Whereas the artist has for years been telling people that he was hit by a mine which severely damaged one of his legs, Pierre Leyris, according to Rewald, told her that Balthus’s leg problems were the result of an operation he had had before the war—and which he later used as an excuse to prevent him from being remobilized.
James Lord, who knew lots of people Balthus knew during the war, and spent considerable time with the artist shortly thereafter, maintains that Balthus was stationed only on the inactive front, where there was no real fighting—and got through the war unscathed. On the concept that Balthus’s limp was the result of an injury incurred on the battlefield, Lord told me, “I never saw him limp,”2 even though Lord pointed out that, more recently, as an old man, Balthus has come to depend on a walking stick. Lord also said that, until I told him about it, he had never heard that Balthus had claimed a war injury. “All of that is completely untrue. He was never in any active service or any real danger.… Of course he wasn’t wounded; he didn’t do any fighting.”3 When I told Lord that Balthus had come to say he had caught shrapnel in various parts of his body, Lord responded, “I think that’s absolute pure bullshit. If that were the case, everyone in Paris would have known it. Alberto [Giacometti], Pierre [Klossowski], Dora [Maar]: all kinds of people would have known. We all saw one another at Marie-Laure’s. If Balthus had been badly wounded, he would have gotten a decoration.”4 But, like Pierre Leyris, Lord felt that the myth-making had to be treated with understanding: “He was a great maker-upper, and the more power to him.”5
James Thrall Soby also suggests that the land mine in Savoie was a fabrication. Soby, who knew Balthus fairly well and had many friends in common with him, treads lightly, as in his handling of the artist’s Byronic ancestry claims, but is careful to avoid inaccuracy. After referring to “the intestinal infection which has plagued him” ever since he developed it during his military service in Morocco, Soby writes, “In 1939 he was called up and sent to the front in World War II. His health broke quickly, he was demobilized and spent the remainder of the war with his wife and children in Switzerland.”6
A version of these same events that requires some reading between the lines is given by Jean Rodolphe von Salis. Von Salis first met Balthus in the 1920s, when he was writing his book on Rilke’s years in Switzerland. Von Salis had access to correct information about Balthus from Antoinette de Watteville’s brother, with whom he was friends in Bern, and over the years he periodically ran into Baladine, Pierre, and Balthus in Paris. Von Salis writes:
In May 1940, in the worst of the battle of France, when the German armored divisions were approaching Paris, I was astonished to see Balthus enter the Café de Flore limping and apparently suffering. He had been wounded, he said, on the Maginot Line, and the army had discharged him.7
Given that this account appeared in a sanctioned publication—the catalog for Balthus’s 1993 exhibition in Lausanne—it has an amazingly sardonic tone, not just for the use of the word pénétrer to depict Balthus’s manner of entering the Flore, but also for the suggestion that Balthus’s suffering and report of being wounded may not have been a hundred percent authentic.
A letter that Pierre Matisse wrote to Chick Austin in December 1939 clarifies this matter of Balthus’s fate as a soldier. Russell, Leymarie, and Rewald are accurate in saying that he was demobilized, even if, probably deliberately, they are vague about the reason. Leyris and Lord are also apparently correct that the leg injury about which Balthus spoke so resignedly to me was a ruse. Indeed, as Soby said, Balthus’s “health broke.” Matisse wrote Austin of the great misfortune of Balthus having been in the war from the very start, and then referred to him “picking up remains after the battles until it got the best of him. Now he is in Switzerland trying to recuperate after being temporarily discharged.”
In April 1997 I visited Pierre and Teeny Matisse’s daughter, Jacqueline Matisse Monnier, and asked her for her recollections of Balthus’s war experience or of her parents’ discussions about it. Jackie, who posed for Balthus as a teenager, has always very much liked the artist in spite of his having made her hold awkward poses for many hours, a discomfort she took in stride because “this is how life was”: children did what was expected of them. But when I told her that Balthus was now claiming war injuries, and that they were getting more severe by the interview, she raised her eyebrows with dismay. “He never talked about anything of the sort in conversations with my father or Giacometti,” she recalled. For of course they would have recognized the lie. “But he did often speak of his malaria, which is what we all thought his limp came from.”
It seems to me that Balthus’s “war injuries” may have been inspired in part by what actually happened to André Malraux, whom he met shortly after the war and greatly admired. In order to help some English parachutists escape a unit of Reich soldiers, Malraux ran across a field to divert attention from the fleeing Britons, getting shot in the thigh and incurring further injuries in the process—as a result of which he continued to suffer from leg wounds after the war. Consequently Malraux was awarded the British Distinguished Service Order by King George, given to him by Ambassador Alfred Duff Cooper at the British Embassy in Paris. Surely Balthus would have been pleased to have such accolades fall on him.
THE IDEA THAT THE EMOTIONAL agony of the battlefield, rather than any physical woes, is what prompted Balthus’s swift discharge suggests that the man who painted The Victim could not bear the sight of real victims in the flesh. I believe this to be so.
My sense is that Balthus is someone for whom violence is enchanting as the stuff of imagination, but intolerable in reality. He has, time and again, painted scenes of aggression; he has an appetite, like that of a child playing with guns, for extreme power. His look of sheer adulation when saying how much he admired Saddam Hussein “as a genius for his ability to hold up the world at gunpoint” was, I believe, not evil but merely perverse: a pleasure in being outrageous, an infatuation with the fantasy of tyranny. Balthus also described himself as “derangé” by the realities of the Persian Gulf War, which was then taking place in part thanks to the same Hussein. Balthus declared himself incapable of understanding why one paints in a world where such horrible things happen. Having witnessed two world wars, he said he was distraught at the thought of a third.
Balthus’s aggressiveness, even his lies, are in all likelihood a mask he has developed to cover up the extreme sensitivity and vulnerability to which Pierre Matisse referred in that letter. The same duality can be seen in Balthus’s paintings. On some level, he is impelled to mutilate his subject, to treat women like circus acts and put them on display, to show schoolboys as cruel and manipulative when they play their games, to shatter a glass and spear a piece of bread. On the other hand, he is the most sensitive of appreciators; the man who evokes the beauty of a landscape and flowers so palpably that it takes our breath away. Known for having delivered the cruelest snubs, he is also warm, gracious, and generous.
Both as a person and as a painter, Balthus savors and destroys, cherishes and diminishes. Those few lines of Pierre Matisse’s—revealing, as they do, the dichotomy between the artist’s response to real victims and his creation of painted ones, between his fragility and his boldness, between his vulnerability and the myths in which he has encased himself—help us to understand the pronounced duality that gives such tension to Balthus’s work.
That dreadful experience of seeing bodies on the battlefield chastened the artist profoundly. The struggle to grapple with violence—especially since he connected it inextricably with sex—and the essentially unresolved question of who he really was in the modern world have dominated Balthus’s life ever since those tumultuous events of 1939.
Indeed, one of Balthus’s recent accounts of his war experience, while probably a whopper, evokes the psychological impact of war on him with trenchant accuracy. In his November 1994 “elusive,” “never gives interviews” interview in Art & Antiques, he amplified the story of his war injury to a new degree. Now, according to his innocent interviewer, the artist had stepped on a mine near the Maginot Line and “caught shrapnel in his spine, right leg, and stomach.” Balthus touchingly explains: “ ‘I often dream of that experience … not seeing the others, completely alone, just hearing the sound of airplanes and having the feeling they want to hear you.’ ”8 It’s very moving, and perhaps I am a monster for believing Pierre Leyris and all the other available accounts of Balthus’s contemporaries in 1940, rather than this tale from the artist himself. But it sounds far more like an invention than the truth. The scene is not unlike the report of the solitary Balthus in the mountains after Rilke’s funeral. Like all of Balthus’s snippets of autobiography, it may distort the facts, but it is entirely accurate in depicting the artist’s thoughts and emotions, his fears as well as his hopes.
IN JUNE 1940, SOME SIX MONTHS following his demobilization, Balthus moved to Champrovent, in Savoie. Savoie at the end of 1939 and in 1940 was under Italian military administration, for which reason a number of Parisians—Gertrude Stein among them—were refugees in the area. Balthus and Pierre had previously visited Pierre and Betty Leyris at their large farmhouse there, and now he took a house nearby for himself and Antoinette.
Balthus quickly began to paint again. He did a pair of domestic interiors called The Living Room, for which the local farmer’s teenage daughters modeled. Both of these works show a girl reading in a pose like that of Thérèse in The Children, with a second girl, her skirt hiked well up her thigh, sprawling on the sofa. To escape the realities of the world around him, Balthus had quickly retreated to his favorite fantasies.
In late 1941 the Wehrmacht took over Savoie and Balthus and Antoinette fled to Switzerland. They stayed briefly in Bern, and in 1942 they went on to Fribourg, where they remained until September 1945. In 1942 Stanislas was born; in 1944 Thaddeus.
It was in this period after Balthus had actually left Savoie that he painted his marvelous Landscape at Champrovent—the painting that Guy Davenport interpreted as a direct counterpoint to the horrors of Treblinka.
MOST POLES, WHETHER JEWISH or not, were in exile from Paris during the war. Between February 1, 1933, and May 31, 1944, Erich Klossowski found refuge in Sanary, where he lived, along with his female companion Hilde Stieler, in the house of the Cavet family.
Erich Klossowski, in his late years
Balthus would never have given me information about the trauma of the war for his parents; nor would he approve of my revealing it. However, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, the renowned experts on Nazism in France, generously filled me in here—both with information on the effects of Balthus’s Jewish lineage and with material on Erich. They provided a reminiscence by Marcelle Cavet, the daughter of the people who ran the pension in which Erich Klossowski spent those eleven years, which reflects the reality of this time period in the life of Balthus’s family. Erich Klossowski
was a man of extraordinary culture, very subtle, very refined, and very pleasant. He was discreet, affable, calm, he came down the path very deliberately, returning in the same way, always at the same time. He was always dressed in black, with a silk foulard tie. He loved France passionately and was particularly devoted to Chateaubriand.…
Klossowski was very fond of this house which had, for him, the charm of the old Provençal farms with its terrace and its arbor. One of Hilde Stieler’s friends had complimented her on her choice of residence by saying: “You live in a fairy-tale house!” They did a lot of painting in those days.…
I can still see Monsieur Klossowski in the kitchen corner, listening to the news on the radio, his expression so attentive and anxious. After the defeat, in 1940, he virtually stopped painting. In the course of 1939 a Dutchman arrived in Sanary, Monsieur de Wilt, who became very close to the Klossowski couple and was able to help them a good deal. That really permitted them to survive.…
Toward the end of the war—it was after May 1944—they were billeted in a residence like the other Sanary émigrés (in the Haut-Var). This was a general measure. So they left the pension, but they returned to Sanary after the Liberation. They lived then in a little house in the Rue Barthélemy-Dedon. That was where Klossowski died, in 1952.9
In his cultivation and pace, the elder Klossowski was remarkably like Balthus in Rossinière. He countered the anguish of life by immersing himself in culture and maintaining his immense personal dignity.
She was closed in dream, a princess in a tower, scarcely a flesh-and-blood woman at all. Did he then desire her not for herself but for all that was unawakened in her, all that had not yet come into being? His mother had read him that story: at the Prince’s kiss, Dornröschen opened her eyes. Then the fire leaped in the fireplace, the horses in the stables stirred, the pigeons on the roof took heads from under their wings. And a mournful desire moved in him, for the princess in her chamber, as he imagined her young body stirring, the ribs moving under the skin, the wrists turning, the eyes, dark with dream, slowly opening after their hundred years sleep.
—STEVEN MILLHAUSER, Martin Dressler10
IN SEPTEMBER 1945 BALTHUS and Antoinette and their young sons moved to the Villa Diodati near Geneva. Lord Byron had stayed in this house in 1816; Balthus’s year or so in the same auspicious setting must certainly have helped the development of his imaginary descendancy from the English Romantic poet.
André Maurois, whom Balthus knew, described the Villa Diodati in his 1930 biography of Byron. “It was an old house and well-placed, standing half-way up the slope of the hill, with grass and vineyards below, and it had a splendid view of the lake with its flowery shores, and across to Geneva and the Jura.”11 When Byron had lived there, Percy and Mary Shelley were in a peasant’s cottage just below.
At the Villa Diodati, Balthus completed his most significant painting of the epoch: Les Beaux Jours (color plate 2). This is the single Balthus painting of which I am leaving the name untranslated. The Golden Days—as it is known at the Hirshhorn Museum and in various English texts—imposes an inappropriate tint of nostalgia and distances it too much in the past; adolescence and its sexual intensity—the subject of this painting—are perpetual. Both Balthus and Setsuko voiced their skepticism to me about “Golden.” They made me feel as if I, as an American, were a party to the travesty—simply because I came from the heathen culture that devised it. “The Golden Days,” Setsuko would say, with a bemused expression on her face. She emphasized the “Golden” with the same hint of contempt she used for the name of the television show “Dallas,” which at that point was reaching the Swiss mountains. Balthus would assume a similarly ironic voice whenever he would say to me “The Golden Days, I think it is called now, Nicholas”—as if he had no more control over it than the painting that fell off the roof of his car.
Setsuko and I often talked about this particular painting. Its image was present in the detail of a superb tea cozy she had painted on silk and that adds its playful touch to the elegantly appointed service table in the dining room at Le Grand Chalet. This charming object, while managing to evoke a rather sinister painting, cleverly transforms its imagery and renders its tone lighthearted. In Setsuko’s version, the vain young woman has been transformed into a horse, and a humanoid cat reads up on art auctions. She told me she made it in part to compensate her husband for the absence of one of his favorite paintings. She and I were both of the opinion that Les Beaux Jours is one of Balthus’s masterpieces. And—by dint of my having come from that alien land on the other side of the Atlantic—I was in the rare position of knowing more about its ultimate fate than did its maker in his Alpine retreat.
Balthus in 1953 at a rehearsal of L’Ile des chèvres by Ugo Betti, for which he designed the sets (photo credit 19.2)
The painting’s situation at the Hirshhorn is, in fact, grotesque. Like the “murderous” lighting conditions at the Centre Pompidou—or the deadening glazing imposed by the Metropolitan on Nude in Front of a Mantel—the setting seems practically designed to obliterate the true quality of the art. No wonder that Balthus despairs at the “blindness” of current museum administrators. In the white, airport-style doughnut-shaped Hirshhorn Museum on the Washington Mall, Les Beaux Jours’ nearby companions for the past few years have been large canvases by Francis Bacon and Fernando Botero. Presumably this is because the three of them are figurative paintings of the same generation, but the alphabetical closeness of the painters’ names would be no less valid a reason. The viewer must screen out the work of the other two painters in order to let the Balthus have its effect, and their proximity makes the process difficult. Yet the tonality of Les Beaux Jours is so different from that of its neighbors that the effort pays off. Balthus’s painting is darker and more matte, the palette more somber. His sensibility is adventurous, playful, and understatedly haughty; their works look like outright screams. Balthus’s canvas appears as if it has been nurtured for centuries; Botero’s and Bacon’s, comparatively, seem to have just sprouted. Balthus’s art is subtly audacious; theirs, not the least bit subtly, goes for the quick shock.
With Les Beaux Jours, it is, indeed, the tone, and the success of the illusions, that strikes us first. The flames positively glow in the darkness of the fireplace, while staying precisely where they should be in the background. Balthus ranks with Velázquez in his Forge of Vulcan for his ability to paint the mysterious substance of fire. In Les Beaux Jours, the luminosity originates within the flames. Elsewhere on the canvas, light caresses materials or brings objects into sharp focus. The rich russets—and the green specific to tarnished brass—come and go in intensity, with shimmering whites adding the occasional accent mark. As in a theatrical production, the elaborate lighting system creates both singular moments and prolonged passages.
Balthus and Silvia Monfort, 1953 (photo credit 19.3)
On one level, you can see why Balthus shrugs his shoulders at the various analyses of the subject matter of the painting and disparages the thematic context. Clearly he went to as much trouble in articulating the white bowl at the left-hand border of the canvas, in delineating its graceful contour and in making its lustrous shadow, as he did in playing out the silent male-female dialogue—or, rather, the two monologues—that was his starting point. The light that pours in through the open, windblown curtains—Balthus’s usual source of awakenings—helps delineate the rim of that bowl, rendering it a thin and uneven gray, restrained and imprecise. We could study that bowl for hours to understand the craft of painting. The deep brown-black behind its right-hand lip accentuates its whiteness and provides a backdrop to the splash of sunlight on the table.
The more we look, the more that bowl becomes a female form, a uterine symbol of the type we know from Flemish paintings, its whiteness an analogue to female purity and virginity. These linkages may be entirely inadvertent on Balthus’s part—the result of his having imparted meanings over which he had no more control than the details of a dream—yet that bowl and the curves of the young woman and her chaise in Les Beaux Jours are as sensuous as in an Ingres. One can hardly blame the viewer who can’t get sex off his mind.
Were we to follow the artist’s guidelines, of course, Setsuko’s tea cozy would represent the level of interpretation at which we should stop. Yet Les Beaux Jours is, to most of us, everything Balthus says his work is not: intensely erotic, loaded with portent, full of symbolism. Yes, its initial power derives from its visual strengths—the workmanship is brilliant, the shadows palpable, the forms anchored and weighty, the surfaces and light intensely lush, the sequence of curves against the grid a feast. The artist’s disclaimers do not, however, cancel out the obvious meaning of some of the subject matter. I, among other people, am convinced that the blazing fire represents the supine young woman’s burning sexuality, and that the shirtless man stoking the fire—a Balthus-as-Heathcliff self-portrait—is vicariously performing, with those phallic logs, the act he would like to be performing in actuality. The woman has multiple readings. Looking in her mirror, she is as transfixed as Narcissus—which makes her a sort of female self-portrait of Balthus, to whom Rilke dedicated his poem “Narcissus.” She also looks—consider the way her right arm hangs—partly anesthetized or in a trance.
The swarthy, sexy Heathcliff type stoking the fire epitomizes maleness in counterpoint to the sheer womanliness of this modern goddess with her hiked-up skirt. His face is turned so we cannot see it, but his shirtless torso and active pose suggest great virility. A presumed self-portrait, Balthus makes himself look fit and competent.
He also looks hungry for what he cannot have. One imagines each of these personages in a private sexual universe: as aware of self as of the “other,” full of longing more than satisfaction.
BALTHUS HAS, WITH PAINSTAKING deliberation and care, created the massing of the woman’s hair, its bulk as well as the individual strands, and then let his brush pass over them with a certain abandon. And he has painted her large, flat, dramatic face—part in dark shadow, part in lustrous sunlight—to make it exquisitely beautiful. World War II was raging through Europe in its final days when Balthus began this painting. The artist, in the small neutral country that was like the eye of the storm—with Germany, France, and Italy all touching its borders—was, whether he was conscious of his agony or seemingly unaware of it, for whatever reasons of avoidance or escapism, immersing himself, as if nothing else in the world mattered, in porcelain bowls and beautiful hair. He celebrated life as it was being threatened all around him, and basked in a world that was going up in smoke. He coped with the vulnerability associated with his Jewishness by lying about it; perhaps the only way he could deal with the reality of war was to avoid it.
But this painting is a commentary on violence as well as an escape from it. Destruction and the will to overpower are very much at its essence. The flames, after all, are visible.
The woman’s right hand—a classic Balthus failure, it looks as much like the foot of a dead chicken, or a rubber puppet, as a human hand—hangs limp from her arm. It suggests that she is in a fugue state. She wraps the left one, however, around the mirror handle; she is competent and in control. Her head is inclined toward us; she knows her audience. Yet her eyes aim only for the mirror. The woman exists exclusively for herself. Aware yet unaware, playing to the crowd with single-minded vanity, she is the ultimate teenage girl—and very much like the man who painted her. The world may be on fire, but at least she has self-contemplation to fall back on, and the ability to withhold her charms.
This woman seems oblivious to the way one of her breasts is exposed and her thighs are visible almost to her crotch. Meanwhile, the row of tacks along the wainscoting, the clock and elegant container on the mantel, the gold mirror frame, all lend propriety to the setting. There is so much geometric order, and such a successful impression of reality, that the disorder (emotional and sexual) and the artifice (her waist is half the width of her head) affect us only gradually. Yet the painting abounds in psychological disruptions and tension. The fire tongs seem not merely powerful but almost like instruments of torture. The sphinx and fire irons imply secrets held within. The phallic logs thrust toward the warm hearth. The fire, meanwhile, can be seen to symbolize the war itself: a conflagration created by men.
A dozen years had passed since Balthus first began drawing himself as Heathcliff. But this is Heathcliff still: the working man in the presence of the lady, the outsider in the drawing room. An outcast, he has supernatural strength. His bare hand is in the coals. Stripped to the waist, he shows himself muscular, broad-backed, sexy. The deep red-brown of his back is almost the same color as the fire wall. He is taut and strong, with the hue and intensity of flames. Like the Heathcliff of the earlier drawings, he poses with his lean but solid buttocks aimed directly at us. Balthus has painted the skintight pants, and the rope holding them up, impeccably—with the same force and know-how of his subject stoking the fire.
IN 1946, WHILE HE WAS STILL living at the Villa Diodati, Balthus drew a portrait of Honoré de Balzac for the cover of a special edition of Les Marana: Vengeance d’artiste, published by Albert Skira. That spring Balthus collaborated with Skira and the French ambassador to Switzerland, Henri Hoppenot, in organizing an exhibition called “Ecole de Paris” at the Kunsthalle in Bern. He wrote to the conservator at the Kunsthalle that his goal was to show “the great precursors”—Cézanne, Seurat, Manet, Renoir, and van Gogh—an important group of recent pictures by Bonnard, Braque, Picasso, and Matisse, and “a few contemporary masters.” He included his own Beaux Jours. It was the first time a painting by Balthus was ever exhibited in a museum.12
The world has certainly come around since. A guard at the Hirshhorn told me that this is one of the most visited paintings at the museum. No wonder. In a society that savors Calvin Klein ads, Les Beaux Jours has some of the same appeal. Intensely male-female, its sexuality more salacious than satiated, it rivets us.
And reproductions do no justice to it. The angles of limbs make a march into the space. Abandon and wildness soar in this ordered world of firm horizontals and verticals. As with Balthus himself, we get a European feel for structure, a sense of history, a system. But what dominates is the unfathomable: raw, untempered, and beyond our grasp.
IN 1946 BALTHUS RETURNED to Paris with Antoinette and the boys. The unit of mother, father, and their two sons, however, lasted for even less time than in Balthus’s own childhood. It wasn’t a year before the young Swiss mother returned to her homeland with the children, aged three and five. Thus began the generally amicable separation that did not turn into an actual divorce until nearly twenty years later, to facilitate Balthus’s marriage to Setsuko.
Balthus used his studio on the Cour de Rohan, but for a while lived in the apartment of the Princess Caetani at 7, Rue de Cirque. His routine often consisted of an end-of-the-day drink at the Parisian café Les Deux Magots. A contemporaneous observer depicts him there in the Rilke mold: aristocratic, aloof, and independent.
He is a mild, thin, younger man, conventionally dressed in a slightly dusty, dark brown suit. He is very well-bred looking with a small, neatly cut head, a sharp-featured, incisively lined face. He sits there with feline detachment and sardonic ease, completely united to the Parisian scene around him, yet somehow apart from it.
His paintings are similarly distinct from current fads and schools.… The work of Balthus is eminently hard to pigeonhole.13
Ten years later, in another rare firsthand account of the artist, the journalist Georges Bernier, well versed in all the latest rages in painting, wrote similarly:
The first thing that struck me about Balthus when I met him was his elegance.… There is a certain element of dandyism inspired by Baudelaire, for whom he has a profound admiration. But there is no dandyism in the fact that for over thirty years he has worked in a style that is in direct opposition to contemporary trends; in this respect both his life and his work have an exemplary value.14
In that period following the war, the editor Judith Jones also spent some time at the Princess Caetani’s. She remembers Balthus as being so weakened by what she was told was a bout with the aftereffects of malaria that on some days he could not get up. “He seemed terribly alone; yellow, gaunt, and fragile.”15
When he was well, however, he came and went quietly. It was in one of these stronger moments that Jones witnessed what she called his “tender, good impulse.” Another resident of the house, Paul Chapin, was inclined to epileptic fits. One day he went down with a seizure; it was Balthus who cradled his head and calmly held his tongue.
Balthus at this time went daily to the Café de Flore, a favorite Left Bank hangout for artists. Sporting his tweed jacket and Scotch plaid tie, sipping black coffee, he would generally sit by himself. But he soon took up again with old friends like Giacometti, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Marie-Laure de Noailles and came to know André Malraux and Albert Camus, while also occasionally spending time with Bataille, Lacan, Eluard, and Picasso. Claude Roy tried in this period to turn him again toward the Communist party but had no success.
Georges Bataille was also staying at the Princess Caetani’s in 1946. Balthus had first gotten to know Bataille in about 1937, when the writer and Pierre Klossowski had founded the Collège Sociologique in Paris—to pursue Nietzschean studies and the relation between eroticism and death. Now the thirty-eight-year-old Balthus became involved with Bataille’s sixteen-year-old daughter Laurence.
Laurence’s mother was the beautiful actress Sylvia Bataille—now married to Jacques Lacan—and her uncle was André Masson. The girl would maintain her position as Balthus’s main model and companion until Balthus moved from Paris in 1953. If his wife offered him access to the aristocracy, Laurence provided more colorful access—including that trip to Golfe-Juan which featured the evening with Picasso.
IN 1946 BALTHUS HAD HIS SECOND Paris exhibition. It was held at the Galerie Beaux-Arts—run by Henriette Gomès, who had formerly been a secretary at the Galerie Pierre. The show was deemed a failure, with two hundred visitors at the most and no reviews whatsoever. Balthus did a bit better, however, when Pierre Matisse, who had last given him an exhibition in 1939, showed his work again in 1949 in New York.
Balthus was just scraping by financially as a painter. His situation stabilized further in the early 1950s, when Henriette Gomès set up a syndicate to support him. Besides Gomès, its members included Claude Herseint, Pierre Matisse, Alix de Rothschild, Marie-Laure de Noailles, and Maurice Rheims. They covered Balthus’s essential expenses, in return for which he periodically paid them in artworks. Their organization guaranteed the artist’s meager financial survival for several more years in Paris and then when he moved to Chassy.
Balthus’s work in the late 1940s consisted substantially of nudes of Laurence Bataille. With her large, globular head and awkward, flattened, stick-figure body, the unnamed Laurence appears at an awkward, in-between moment of development. Balthus accentuated rather than minimized her boyishness. It is yet another highly personalized vision of femininity.
The naked Laurence generally appears as if she is a misty vision in a dream. The 1947–48 Room—at the Hirshhorn Museum—shows the dazed teenager in a state of deshabille similar to that of Balthus’s prewar nudes, with her feet and a single shoulder covered to accentuate the nudity of her breasts and genitals. But if her predecessors seemed like hussies, she has the look of a saint: otherworldly, more resurrected than earthbound.
The Room, 1947–48, oil on canvas, 190 × 160 cm (photo credit 19.4)
Oddly proportioned as Laurence appears—her breasts too high, her stocky torso rigid like a tree trunk—and bizarre as her moonlike face is, the painting as a whole still offers a haunting truthfulness. Up close, the flesh has the texture, the absorption of light, and the variables of real, living human skin. The curvature of the limbs is plausible. However, the nude woman’s admirer—the child who sits on the floor reading—belongs only to the realm of imagination. Her head is flattened and oblong; her face is contorted like a mask. Again we jump between the realms of truth and invention. The painting is a mix of the quotidian and the extraterrestrial.
Balthus has invested every detail of the setting with poetry, in the Rilkean mode. He seems to have scattered the elements of a Morandi around the composition. A cup and saucer, and two pitchers, exist in counterpoint as objects of heightened presence. The metal pitchers, noble in aspect, appear to move heavenward, purifying their setting. The open book is both a marvelous thing and a source of mental riches. Yet the babyish woman—exultantly anesthetized—and her demonic admirer are unfathomably creepy.
The Week of Four “Thursdays,” 1949, oil on canvas, 97.7 × 83.8 cm (photo credit 19.5)
It was a period in which Balthus was painting in a manner increasingly disjointed from reality. The 1949 Week of Four “Thursdays”—Thursday was a holiday in French schools—has an eerily artificial flatness. The wide-eyed cat has its upper lip stretched tight in the manner of a feline smile. The central figure is so papery that she looks as if she has been put through a duck press. Balthus has deformed her—and then knocked her out. The situation and its painting are a contrivance, but the materials are superb; Balthus has, as always, painted the hanging folds of fabric with utter conviction and skill. We are left both incredulous and believing.
LAURENCE WAVES CRAZILY from a small kayak in The Méditerranée’s Cat. Balthus painted this work as a signboard for the interior of a seafood restaurant on the Place de l’Odéon—not far from his studio on the Cour de Rohan—that he frequented with Eluard, Camus, and Malraux. Françoise Gilot traces the imagery to the evening with Picasso at Golfe-Juan two years earlier. Gilot has written that Balthus was seated at the table at the Restaurant Marcel with her, Picasso, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Lacan, Sylvia Bataille, Laurence, and other friends. “Balthus kept observing Laurence and obviously found her quite to his liking. Soon she got bored with sitting there or of being so carefully observed and left the dinner to go rowing in the harbor in a turquoise blue canoe moored at the front of an open-air terrace. The sight of this charming girl affirming her independence by veering away from the adults on her small skiff charmed him so that it became the theme of The Méditerranée’s Cat.”16 The ocean-fresh fish, on the other hand, have lost their independence. But as these creatures leap from sea to plate, one is convinced of the quality of the food at the Méditerranée.
The Méditerranée’s Cat, 1949, oil on canvas, 127 × 185 cm (photo credit 19.6)
The mad, hedonistic, human cat belongs to a tradition that goes back to ancient Egypt. The details, however, are pure Balthus. With his carving knife and long-tined fork, this imperious cat-man owns the world. His legs splayed, he sits like a swarthy gangster; clearly he is the kingpin. A giant, nicely cooked lobster awaits him; so does a bottle of young white wine catching the sunlight. His napkin is tucked in place; he is ready, with unequivocal delight, to take the world as his oyster.
The perfectly crafted, simple awning post that divides the picture in half confirms the truth of the scene and brings us right up to it. The cat’s authority is thus assured.
THE BOY IN THE 1948–50 Card Game has a head that is large even by Balthus standards. This flattened globe, seemingly neckless, bears little relationship to the rest of him. His body is further disjointed—almost mermaidlike in its division. From the knees up, the boy is strong and muscular, with broad shoulders and an impressively tapered back—just like that of the shirtless hunk, the self-portrait-as-Heathcliff, in Les Beaux Jours. But his lower legs could belong to an aristocratic lady, ending as they do in delicate ankles and tiny feet clad in something like ballet slippers. He twists his bifurcated figure in a manner that might, realistically, be possible, but that would induce excruciating pain. The boy seems all the more awkward, and violent, because of the way he holds his playing cards uncomfortably at the small of his back—as if they are a secret weapon he is about to deploy.
This fellow is practically the mirror image of Hubert Blanchard in The Children, or, even more precisely, of Heathcliff in the 1933 drawing on which that 1937 oil was based. If you consider The Card Game next to that drawing which preceded it by fifteen years, the two characters look as if they are meant to be on a stage facing one another, their positions choreographed for their symmetry. They flaunt their muscular yet trim buttocks in pants so formfitting that the curves and crack are precisely legible.
Self-portrait, 1943, crayon, 40 × 40 cm (photo credit 19.7)
The Card Game, 1948–50, oil on canvas, 140 × 194 cm (photo credit 19.8)
These young men assume their poses with narcissistic zeal. The expressions on their faces make them secretive and unreadable: plotters who conceal their schemes. But they gladly let us know that they relish their sexy, adolescent bodies. Variations of Balthus himself, they are intensely attractive, yet armored and slightly malevolent.
When I went to see The Card Game at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, however, I had a great surprise. The girl, too, is a version of Balthus. She has the identical face, and the same whisper of a smile, as his 1943 self-portrait drawing. Exquisitely posed and feline, she is, except for the hair, the artist’s perfect double.
So Balthus has given his face to one of these two card players, his chosen body image to the other. The artist has both penetrated his characters—putting himself into them and creating them out of his own flesh and blood—and transformed the “outsiders” into extensions of himself.
AT THE THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA, The Card Game hangs on a salmon-colored wall—the matte hue of a postmodern hotel lobby—at the end of a vast and grandiose gallery. A relatively large Balthus canvas—55 by 76⅜ inches—it shares the space with an Edward Hopper of almost equal size, as if they were companion paintings. The Balthus-Hopper comparison is one that a number of people have made over the years. Balthus told me he had never heard of Hopper, which may or may not be the case. In any event, the equation of the two artists is highly superficial. They painted different worlds in dissimilar styles. By comparison, Hopper is straightforwardness itself, a paean to American directness, while Balthus, visually and psychologically, offers a sea of complexity.
Yet in spite of all the weirdness, The Card Game is rare among Balthus’s work in the success with which the artist has painted a male. Strange as the lad’s body is, its surfaces pulsate and the frame and musculature look authentic. His legs capture the light splendidly. Even his more visible hand is painted convincingly—a rarity in Balthus’s art. The thumb structure, however, is truly a disaster. The area beneath the thumb bulges out of all proportion, and there is inadequate differentiation between this puffy mass and the actual thumb, which is too short and flat. Yet the card it holds is one of Balthus’s masterpieces of verisimilitude. And the boy’s strange hydrocephalic head is rendered superbly.
There are patches of genius throughout The Card Game. The blue Empire chair that is like a throne for the girl is a fascinating passage of painting, a juxtaposition of hard wood and soft fabric. The strong green of the tabletop—which diminishes in reproduction—soars back in space, glowing vibrantly for a fine touch center stage. The candle stand is excellent. The overall composition—an elaborate series of movements and responses, all carefully orchestrated within a balanced, geometric plan—is subtly stunning in its muted palate and velvety, layered texture.
The psychological life of the painting parrots the visual: intricately layered, alternately clear and hazy. After my own time with the painting, on returning to it with my daughter Charlotte, by now eleven years old, I had occasion to see it through the eyes of a near-contemporary of the subjects of the painting. Here was a viewer herself in the throes of Balthus’s golden age, that period of complexity between childhood and adulthood. First she remarked that the boy is naked. He is not, of course, but the sight of his buttocks is so startling, the seat of his power so palpable, that he might as well be. Then she pointed out what the painting is really about. “He looks as if he’s about to make a pass at her. Who cares about the cards?” Charlotte added that the boy is a cad; the girl, on the other hand, “is pretending to be stupid and ignorant.”
The observations seemed especially valid because they came from a child who loved to play actual cards and did so all the time. She read the painting as being like the scene now revised in The Street: the demonic, aggressive boy making moves on the girl in never-never land, the brigand and the anesthetized angel. By instinct, my daughter, almost the same age as these two characters, saw this painting as a scene of attempted sexual conquest.
As far as the card game goes, the conclusion is not quite clear. The girl smugly fancies herself to have played the winning card, but the boy may trump her yet with what he is holding folded behind his back. Victory is dicey, but determination is rampant. That phallic candle at the center of the composition, its light taper thrusting into the darkness (forgive me, Balthus; laugh and deny as you will; but I’m not the one who devised this scene that so patently depicts the drive “to dip your wick”), symbolizes the goal.
It is, of course, what Balthus’s art virtually always evokes: the powerful male and the crafty but captive female—in a rarified, enchanted world of deceptive equipoise and visual lushness fraught with ambient tension. Often the dominating man assumes the form of the invisible artist; on rarer occasions like this one, he actually faces us—even if he deliberately avoids meeting our eye. Regardless, Balthus himself is both the love object and the successful master.
BALTHUS IN PARIS in the late forties and early fifties was making quite an impression. Robert Craft describes an evening with Igor Stravinsky—they were also friends of the Caetanis—and the artist in 1952:
May 10. After a dinner in a bistro near the Invalides, we go with Balthus to the Deux Magots. Slim, pale, handsome, bittersweet, dandyish, he is femininely conscious of his clothes, which are evidently meant to identify him as a Hebridean laird, or, at any rate, to conceal that his work could have anything to do with paint. He will say nothing about art, except to vent scorn on “the latest daubs of Chagall,” but to steer him away from music, Schubert’s above all, is difficult.…
What about Balthus’s portrait of Eros? Do his open-legged, mirror-fixated, pubescent girls represent joyful innocence, as Camus and Artaud have claimed? Or do they, as I think, project a lesbian fantasy, for it seems to me that the girl in The Guitar Lesson openly dreams of being fingered by an older woman. And all of Balthus’s girls are either flushed with desire or pale with satisfaction (or is it the other way around?). They are definitely not little girls to gratify boys of any age, but then, those barely budding bosoms and itchily self-conscious pudenda, girl-bodies with acromegalic boy’s heads, stubby legs, edematous calves, puppy-fat ankles, teeny feet are a long way from my vision of volupté.
I also fail to glean any insight from the man concerning the other oddities of his artistic eidos. Why, master of technique that he is, does he seem at times hardly to know how to draw? And why, apart from juvenile would-be-delinquents, is his work in no way concerned with the contemporary? A list of influences would read like a catalog of loans from the Louvre: Piero; Carpaccio; Velázquez (the dwarfs, duennas, cats, mirrors, goldfish bowls); the French seventeenth century; Corot; Courbet; Ingres; Seurat; Cézanne. Whatever the answers, Balthus is peerless among living portraitists…[and] stands no less alone in another dimension, the representation of Evil. I am thinking of La Chambre, in which, surely, the sexually ambivalent Satanic dwarf cannot be ignored, the picture meaning far more than, as I.S. would have it, spatial architecture and chiaroscuro.17
This was characteristic of Balthus’s relationship to the world around him. At the de Noailles’, at the Catalan—a popular artists’ bistro near Picasso’s studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins—and at cafés like the Dôme and the Deux Magots, Balthus met many of the most interesting avant-garde composers, writers, painters, and patrons of the time. Yet the lean, somber artist—contemporary accounts feature the adjective “dandyish” more than any other—was also removed from that milieu and often harshly judged by it. His acquaintances recognized his skill and intelligence, but many of them regarded him as slightly suspect.
Balthus soon opted for a lifestyle that further announced his separateness. In 1953 the artist followed Rilke’s example in seeking a rural retreat that would enable him both to work in isolation and to fulfill his fantasies of life as an old-fashioned aristocrat.
He had recently been given to remarking to his close friend Alberto Giacometti that “he needed a château more than a workman needed a loaf of bread.”18 Balthus’s listeners mocked his upper-class pretensions, but he scarcely cared. If the notion of living decorously like a feudal lord was offensive to some people when spareness and bohemianism were the order of the day, so much the better. A rural castle was a tool for work as much as a ploy for grandeur; it was also another means of echoing the life of his companion and hero Rainer Maria Rilke.
HAVING DECIDED TO LEAVE PARIS, Balthus scoured the countryside in search of his own equivalent of Muzot. But the reality was that he had relatively less money to spend even than the pittance Rilke had. Dora Maar—Picasso’s mistress of the 1930s, and now one of Balthus’s closest friends—helped him in his search. She suggested a small château not far from where she lived in the lovely Luberon village of Ménerbes. But even though the price tag was next to nothing, it was beyond Balthus’s reach (the château sold shortly thereafter to the painter Nicolas de Staël). Like Rilke, Balthus could only afford to rent, not buy, but unlike Rilke, he had no angel in the background—beyond the members of the syndicate who were acquiring his art.
When he was with Georges and Diane Bataille near Vézelay, Balthus at last found a suitable place. The dilapidated structure he settled on as his first château, near a tiny town called Blismes in the Nièvre region of the Morvan, in Burgundy, was called Chassy. When he took up residence there in 1953, it had neither electricity nor running water—which had also been the case initially with Muzot. But the rent of approximately $200 a year was hard to beat. And Balthus could indulge in the perquisites of rural life; he told me he had thirty cats there (ten fewer than his hero Delacroix), as well as one dog—a Bouvier des Flandres.
An austere structural block, Chassy was distinguished mainly by four huge round towers at the corners. There was no central heating for the large rooms inside; the roof leaked; and there were gaps in the woodwork and plaster. Once it was electrified, the fittings consisted of bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. And at first there was no telephone.
In Chassy, Balthus was initially as much like Heathcliff the humble field laborer as the ruler of the fief. One winter night in Rossinière, he launched into a reminiscence. Virgilio had just stoked the fire in the library. As the butler refilled his demitasse, Balthus—with the slightly lecturing quality that affluent parents have when wanting to remind their children that they were not always rich—proudly told his wife that at Chassy he often chopped firewood on cold winter days when this was the sole heating fuel. Part of the appeal may have been that in his childhood he probably heard Rilke describe the period in 1897 when the poet had regularly chopped wood in the Berlin suburb of Wilmersdorf while adopting the deliberately earthy lifestyle of his mistress Lou Andreas-Salomé and her husband, Friedrich Andreas. Balthus, too, lent romance to his tasks; explaining to me that it had been his job to patch the roof and bring in electricity, he beamed in fond recall.
Whatever the struggles, the move facilitated a great period for Balthus’s work. Chassy offered a view of a farmyard and of fields sloping into a valley, which—for the eight years Balthus lived there—would provide the subject matter for many of the finest paintings he ever did. His achievement at Chassy reflected a tranquillity and equanimity that had nothing to do with the rugged living conditions reported by visitors.
In moving to his château, Balthus had opted not just for links to a noble past and for impressive architecture, but also for a degree of daily hardship as the price to pay for the ability to paint those rural reaches with all the privacy and concentration possible. The goal was to have time to look out the window at the countryside, to notice all the stages in which flowers bloom, and to cultivate one’s art at a remove from the modern world: just as, in his youth, he had known Rilke to do.
IN THE 1950S, when Balthus was in his château, Life magazine and other publications ran articles that portrayed him as the epitome of landed gentry. While most well-known artists of that epoch could be seen at the Cedar Tavern or in rugged garrets, Balthus was more the precursor of the artists of the eighties whose homes resemble the villas of nobility and movie stars. Looking at those photos of Balthus standing like a confident country gentleman in front of the turrets of his castle, the public had no sense that the few dishes inside were chipped and that a single bare bulb illuminated the dining room. The handsome, impeccably groomed artist posing defiantly before his splendid abode gives no doubt that he was to the manor born.
Indeed, after several years of struggle at Chassy, Balthus began to sell more work at higher prices. He gained the wherewithal to improve his lot in life. The artist soon began to develop a new, upper-class existence that was like a preamble to the grandeur that would follow in Rome at the Villa Medici. For the first time since his early childhood, he had servants. And it was in this rural corner of the Morvan that the locals began to call him by the title that became so inordinately significant to him and to the world’s perception of the previously disenfranchised youth.
EVER SINCE SHORTLY AFTER the end of World War II, the story that Balthus has been more eager than any other to get people to swallow concerns his use of the title “the Count de Rola.” In my time with him, Balthus was busier denying his Jewishness than defending his nobility—but this was only because he treated his title as if it were a fact rather than an issue he would deign to argue.
In his construction of his chosen image, Balthus has achieved his goal with resounding success. Perpetuating his aristocratic fantasy, the once impoverished grandson of a cantor from Pinsk has scored a victory.
From the time he shed “Baltusz” in adolescence, the artist has always been “Balthus” to his close friends and in his professional life. However, for official and business purposes, until the late 1940s, he was Balthazar Klossowski—the name on his birth certificate. “Balthazar Klossowski” also often appeared in parentheses following his nom d’artiste in museum catalogs and on painting identification labels. Then, at about the time of his fortieth birthday, he began to be Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola. It is the name he has insisted on—in private as well as in public—ever since.
Balthus’s title of “Count,” however, has no historical basis. The Klossowskis were minor nobility and were one of the seventy-three Polish families that bear the Rola coat of arms, but they never held a title. “Rola” was a heraldic appellation that any number of families might use, but it conferred no right to be a “count.”
Polish nobility emerged in the fourteenth century, at about the time that the native kings of Poland died out and were first replaced by foreigners, with the French Louis of Anjou being crowned in Cracow in 1370. The highest-ranking nobles were the members of the king’s council, which evolved into the upper house of parliament; there was also a huge, unwieldy landed class that was a lesser rank of nobility called the szlachta, and this was the group to which Balthus’s paternal ancestors belonged. The szlachta included members of the king’s army, who received land as payment for their services, and its members were equal before the law and enjoyed more freedom than other citizens did. However, at no point was the szlachta entitled to use titles. There was no peerage, and Polish law did not recognize the use of “prince” or “count” or “baron” for anyone in this group.
By the eighteenth century there were about 725,000 members of the szlachta in this country of just under ten million people. They were scattered over the 282,000 square miles of the vast kingdom. Laws kept changing as to who was noble. At one point, servants of magnates and Jewish converts became noble en masse. But then, in 1775, there were new regulations requiring that possession of land be a condition of nobility, and it is possible that at that point Balthus’s ancestors were declassified; since there was no Klossow, there is no indication that the Klossowskis had the requisite land. Sources that list over 1,000 noble families of Poland do not list the Klossowskis at all.
There was no precedent for Balthus’s title in his family. Not surprisingly, neither Balthus’s father nor his older brother was ever anything but Erich or Pierre Klossowski. Although my attempt to meet Pierre through an intermediary failed—as I expected it would because of his well-known reluctance to discuss his brother—I have been told by mutual acquaintances of his and Balthus’s that he considers the title of “Count” to be nonsense, not only factually unjustifiable but also embarrassingly pretentious.
Yet how natural it is that the once homeless Balthus would want a title that conferred not just social position but also land. By becoming “the Count de Rola,” he compensated with a vengeance for previous hardships.
Rilke had similar pretensions. The poet had encouraged a belief that he descended from an ancient, aristocratic family from Corinthia. Claiming to be the scion of that distinguished line, the poet designed a coat of arms to be engraved on his tombstone. While the right of his family to use it was questionable at best, and he was often taken to task for his insistence on it and on his aristocratic origins, none of this seemed to trouble Rilke—in spite of all of his legitimate claims to fame. It was not enough that he was infinitely more accomplished than his friends of higher lineage; he wanted their pedigree, too.
It makes perfect sense for Balthus to have borrowed his self-definition from the mentor whose values he had imbibed. Moreover, Rilke and Balthus had similarly unusual, multinational backgrounds. Rilke grew up as a German in Prague with a French-speaking mother; Balthus was raised in Paris and Germany by parents who spoke the languages of both places. Rilke was born in Bohemia, held an Austrian passport, considered Russia to be his emotional home and Paris his intellectual one, had lived in Italy, and ultimately found sanctuary in Switzerland. Balthus, a French citizen at birth, is from a Polish family, found Japan in many ways to be his spiritual home, Italy his source of inspiration, and Switzerland his refuge.
These men also had in common that much of their character was sculpted by their mothers:
It is true that Rilke’s sense of form (which extended even to the externals of his bearing and attire) and his tendency to project an aloof, aristocratic image may have been handed down to him by his mother, along with a passing interest in spiritualism and a strong need for social acceptance.… Even the suppressed but powerful erotic element in his nature may be traceable to her.19
We know the extent to which Balthus’s nature similarly derived from his close companionship with Baladine. And then there was the issue of physical resemblance. Rilke had a noticeably enormous mouth from his mother; Balthus the nose from his. As if to compensate for their distant fathers, each trumped up claims of his paternal lineage.
The Count de Rola had followed Rilke’s example, as well as the poet’s mandate for him, by choosing the realm of invention over the oppressiveness of facts.
INITIALLY BALTHUS had to disregard people’s reactions to his use of the title. Or at least he chose not to be bothered by how appalled they were.
To those who were listening … the utterance sounded strident beyond belief, and they happened to include Derain, Giacometti, Picasso, Artaud, Albert Camus, the Viscount and Viscountess de Noailles, Princess Caetani, et al. Some laughed, some sneered, some smiled indulgently, and everyone took it for granted that the artist had no legitimate claim whatsoever to a title.20
Derain, a close friend, was supposedly so disgusted by Balthus’s snobbery that he wanted to sever all connections with him, until he was persuaded to relent.
Ned Rorem was particularly disparaging about the artist’s title and its trappings. Rorem used to encounter Balthus in the de Noailles’s blue marble dining room, where the painter and Dora Maar were lunch guests as often as twice a week, or at dinners at the Catalan hosted by the vicomtesse.
Balthus, single-named like Colette or Fernandel, was a count because he said he was. Born in Poland, romantic to the teeth, emaciatedly attractive, a self-pitying scold, and far more widely versed—including in music—than most painters who never read and so hang out in cafés all winter when night falls early (especially in northerly Paris) and it’s too dark to paint, Balthus had a little-boy whine that counterbalanced his pedophilic paintings and an opportunistic way of denigrating Marie-Laure that got results (what’s money for if not to nourish genius, etcetera). He longed to legitimize his bogus nobility by buying a castle. This he did, with a ramshackle fifty-room ruin.…21
Balthus succeeded. In the area of France near the château as in Rossinière, the villagers all refer to him as “le comte.” When he was director of the Villa Medici in Rome and he and Setsuko issued invitations from “Le Comte et La Comtesse Klossowski de Rola,” no one quibbled. Starting in the 1960s, major magazines and newspapers in France began to follow suit. In Réalités, Paris Match, Le Figaro, and Le Monde, the artist has been called—with no one openly questioning it, even in a country that has a detailed understanding of such matters—“Le Comte Balthazar Klossowski de Rola,” usually with his title in bold type right at the top of any article about him.
Even someone as sharp as John Russell unequivocally referred to Balthus as “the Count of Rola” when he wrote a piece for Art in America at the time of the exhibition of Balthus’s work he organized at the Tate. Subsequently Russell has come to belittle Balthus’s use of a title—talking with me, he treated it as an utter joke—but once upon a time he bowed completely to the notion. The American popular press has also perpetuated the claim. Life—once the most widely read magazine in the world—declared Balthus in his château to be the Count of Rola. When Balthus had his major exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1977, two of the most savvy and influential art journalists in America presented the painter to the American public unequivocally as “the Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola”—the only variable from French accounts being that now he was Balthasar rather than Balthazar. Mark Stevens, in Newsweek, not only used the title in association with Balthus’s Louis XIII château in Chassy but likened the artist to “an émigré from the ancien régime.”22 Robert Hughes, in Time, introduced the artist as “Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, a French aristocrat of Polish extraction better known by the name of Balthus.”23
I am no innocent in this matter of reiterating unsubstantiated information. In my book Patron Saints, which was published in 1992 and where I discussed Balthus’s early patronage by James Thrall Soby, I, too, perpetuated the idea that the artist was “Balthazar Klossowski de Rola,” and—even though I had the sense not to use “Count”—referred to him as “a privileged European nobleman.” But by the time I wrote an article about Balthus for the New York Times in 1993, I knew better. My editor instructed me to add the information that Balthus’s real name was the Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola—it said so in the computer—but when I argued the point, she accepted the evidence that Balthus was not really the Count de Rola. However, this did not prevent the Sunday New York Times Magazine, less than a year later, from identifying the artist, in bold type, as “The Recluse Balthazar Klossowski, Count de Rola.”
Naturally, no one has been more diligent in pushing Balthus’s noble lineage and its significance than Jean Leymarie. It’s surprising that Leymarie—an art historian of remarkable scholarship, intellect, and breadth—would permit himself to be so trapped by this nonsense. But he is in there all the way, chronically overstating the case far more than Balthus or Setsuko would ever deign to do. So in the catalog for the 1992 Balthus exhibition at the Musée Gustave Courbet in Ornans, Leymarie—in a text set in the sort of bold italic type generally used only for listings of elaborate concoctions on fancy French restaurant menus—begins with the claim:
Balthus, unlike Courbet, was born in Paris, his family distinguished and cosmopolitan, but his whole Polish ancestry is linked to the land, and the etymology of his double patronymic, Klossowski de Rola, evokes the soil and a sheaf of wheat.24
Why Balthus has perpetrated this scheme is questionable. It is a matter of hot debate among a handful of people who know the artist well. But in any event, the weapon detonated entirely according to his design. When, in 1993, Balthus’s illustrations for Wuthering Heights finally appeared—sixty years after he had made them—in a limited edition of that novel, the Rola coat of arms appeared as a watermark in the text. As in Brontë’s novel, the wanderer had triumphed.
IN OUR CONVERSATIONS, I had a chance to observe, firsthand, the count’s highly effective technique for convincing others of the validity of his bogus appellation. His ploy is to act as if he would not even dream of stooping to justify his noble rank: it is simply a fact of which he tries to appear so certain—and, perhaps, feels so certain—that he does not give a hint of acknowledging that it might be questionable. Talking with me, Balthus simply laughed at the way James Lord tried to rob him of his right to the title in the New Criterion article. He treated Lord’s antics as being so childish that all he could do was curl up his face and grin at the ridiculousness.
Listening to Balthus speak about his various detractors with his air of bemusement and superiority, watching his head turn in instinctive response when his servants address him as “Count,” seeing him open the letters addressed to “Le Comte et La Comtesse Balthazar Klossowski de Rola,” I realized that by this point in his life he had probably come to believe his own myth entirely. Pierre Leyris agreed with me; having seen Balthus in virtually all of his incarnations, this sage observer imagined that in all likelihood Balthus no longer had any idea that he was lying.
I discovered that another family member who has clung to the idea of the family’s title—and seems genuinely convinced of it—is Balthus’s son Stanislas. Stash happily elucidated “the facts” to me when I was in Rossinière. He explained that the name of “de Rola” goes back to the tenth century and figures in Polish folklore as the equivalent of Merlin—someone with magical powers, who understood the language of the birds. His grandfather did not use “de Rola” and the title that went with it only because he felt you should not do so if you were not rich. (How someone who owned a Delacroix and other art masterpieces was not rich is a question I didn’t bother to ask.) And the reason the title was not recorded on Balthus’s birth certificate is that there was an administrative mistake in Paris. Art historians and journalists may be too dumb to recognize the point, but there is no question in Stanislas’s mind as to his father’s right to use “Count.” And he admires Balthus’s use of it as a kind of defiance, a flying in the face of the ordinary way of doing things.
The tale about the reason for the absence of the alleged title on Balthus’s birth certificate is consistent with an account Balthus gave the musician David Bowie in a long interview in 1994 (“rarely interviewed and enigmatic … the last Legendary Painter”) that reads like a transcribed tape recording. The early part of the story—which explains the variations of Balthus’s first name—may have some small kernel of truth to it, but the second part, though it corresponds completely to what Stash told me, seems less likely. My sense is that this was Stash’s fabrication, and that Balthus liked it so much that he tried it on for size. It is yet another one of Balthus’s bittersweet tales in which he is the victim of some wrongdoing.
I was born on the 29th and my parents forgot to inscribe me to the état civil [registry office], so I was born with a fee of 200 French francs gold and since then I have never been in order. I was born in Paris and they had no name—they expected a girl and they had no names for a boy and so when friends came and they asked what is the child called: “Oh we call it baby.” But at the état civil, what is he called. “État civil, my god, we forgot to register him.” Next day they ran to the état civil and my father happened to be like many Poles—he was born in Germany because from Poland there were Poles everywhere in Austria, Germany and in Russia. And my father happened to be born in Germany which has now become Poland again. And, so he was ashamed and he said, well, there’s a boy and we want to call him Balthus. Baltusz in Polish. And the man said: “Mais, ça n’existe pas.” “Alors quoi?” “Appellez-le Balthazar,” and nobody calls me Balthazar for all my life.… And it was very funny because my father was so embarrassed and ashamed that he didn’t even say that he was a Count.”25
Stanislas has occasionally gone so far as to elevate himself to “prince.” One old friend of Balthus’s, roaring with laughter, described an evening when he and Giacometti were together and read “that Stasha was a Prince of Marengo.” The friend and Giacometti were both fairly drunk when Giacometti telephoned Balthus, who was in Rome at the time. Giacometti chided his old companion from their days in the Paris cafés, “I hear that your son is a Prince of Marrons Glacés”—at which point Balthus, furious, simply hung up the phone. His rage was not at his son’s pretense, only at the mockery of it.
Another friend of Balthus’s told me of an intimate dinner at which the artist seriously enumerated the noble origins of everyone present. “Setsuko is a Japanese princess,” Balthus allowed. “I am a count. And you,” he said, pointing to another guest, “are from a very old family of Ravenna. And you”—now Balthus pointed to Pierre Matisse—“are the son of a famous painter.” It went on for about five minutes. Setsuko was the only listener who looked remotely respectful; the others at the table masked their smirks, but nothing could deter the proud speaker.
Balthus has become so mistrusted that his usage of “de Rola”—legitimate even if Pierre and Erich never bothered with it—gets treated as suspect. I have had people insist to me that Balthus picked “de Rola” up from a character in the writings of Alfred de Musset. John Russell maintained to me that Antoinette—who was, after all, a true aristocrat—had told people that the artist came up with “Rola” from Rolle, the Swiss city she lives in.
Whether or not he gleans the mockery of much of his audience, Le Comte Balthazar Klossowski de Rola persists. As in his art, he requires fantasy in order to survive.
I BELIEVE THAT THE REASON Balthus invented, and has so voraciously embraced, his title, is that, like his refutation of Judaism, it makes him feel less vulnerable in a world where he has been buffeted about. Like the portrayals of humankind in his paintings, he suffers from a profound level of fear and sadness which has made him develop a mask. The upper-class cover-up that he finds so intoxicating is a protective encasement around his own fragility.
To be Jewish meant one was at high risk of death. Most Polish Jews ended up in the crematoria at Auschwitz. For someone so sensitive that the disappearance of a pet cat obsessed him as an adolescent, the possibility of the total annihilation of a civilization must have been intolerable. During the Second World War, he escaped to a mountainside in Switzerland and immersed himself in painting utterly pastoral landscapes; his response to tragedy was not to face it squarely but to turn from it. Following the war—knowing that his own mother might have been one of those people in a cattle car bound for a concentration camp, and certainly remembering that he had once been dirt-poor—he became non-Jewish, rich, and, finally, titled. His own self was too terrifying.
In his art, too, Balthus’s real persona has ultimately proved too discomfiting. No wonder he was willing to paint out the assault in The Street, and has prohibited The Guitar Lesson from ever again being seen.
When he was fourteen, Balthus’s own mother was so puzzled by him that she lamented that she had no idea who the real boy was. “Qui est Balthus?” she asked, half in despair, half in amusement. When Balthus was eighty-seven, I happened to be present when his twenty-one-year-old daughter said, with a bright smile, to David Bowie—whose interview had recently appeared—that she would like really to understand Balthus. A grinning Bowie, opening his arms with both palms forward in a gesture of questioning, asked, “Who does?” Balthus’s primary task—in the substance of his art and his person—has always been to keep the questions unanswerable.
BALTHUS HAS CONVINCED the world that there are no apprehensible facts. Then, contradictorily, he has disseminated considerable information of his own choosing. His machinations have guaranteed excitement and confusion. Even his own family has encountered too much obfuscation and received too many mixed signals to sort him out. The puzzle, however, is not really so hard to unravel.
Having disobeyed Balthus’s instructions that he remain “an artist of whom nothing is known” so that the art can stand on its own, I have found that my knowledge of the man—his compulsive mythologizing as well as his erudition, his chicanery alongside his personal magnetism—has led me to an understanding of his work. Conversely, the paintings themselves—gorgeous, narcissistic, seductive; paeans to visual beauty and to the escape route of fantasy—have brought me nearer to the real person than living at his side ever permitted.
Balthus is the same as a painter and as a person: a brilliant connoisseur of impeccable taste, a deceiver bent on covering up the truth. Just as, in his art, he has invariably, and with exquisite judgment, mimicked his well-chosen mentors, blending Piero and Hogarth and Courbet and Seurat, in his life he has modeled himself on a series of heroes—fictional and real, ranging from poetic wild men to dandified aristocrats. For his persona his choices have been dicier than for his work, but in neither case has his own substantial genius ever been enough for him. He has always had to worship, and be, someone else. Having always craved, and stimulated, excitement, it is as if he has himself become so excited and tantalized by his experience that he has had to resort to role playing to anesthetize himself.
Not since Mitsou has Balthus allowed himself to relax and remain his own true self. His consummate understanding of painted and natural beauty has not sufficed. The excessive lengths to which he has gone to compensate for some sense of shortcoming complicates his work and gives it its perpetual air of tension.
In his finest works—The Children, Thérèse Dreaming, Bouquet of Roses, Montecalvello—he has achieved a sublime level of painting. Even at his weakest, he has always displayed immense skill: the most contrived of his canvases manage to be charged up and lively at least in part, with some wonderful passages if only in the drapery folds. But the work suffers for its lack of personal release. It always has an overstudied aspect. One longs for the oneness between the painter and his art we get with Giotto, Renoir, Giacometti. Unlike them, Balthus—in his paintings as in his life—is creating a stage play.
AS PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI WROTE of the Marquis de Sade, the pivotal experiences for this creator occur not in life itself but in the artworks. Balthus may have lived, to some extent, according to his desires, but it is thanks to his art, like his title, that he has been able to enjoy his ultimate fantasy in its purest form. His paintings, like his life, are an imaginary universe: his dreams of choice. Thus comes the sense of distance we experience when we look at the work: these are constructions, always at a remove, lacking in spontaneity or unity.
The photographer and writer Brassaï observed of Picasso and Paul Eluard, “To the most realist of painters and the most visual of poets—neither of whom can imagine life without love—art is the act of living and seeing and not of imagining and dreaming.”26 So Picasso, like Cézanne, did his utmost to seize, whole, the reality before his eyes. Balthus, on the contrary, perpetually engaged in the process of re-creating.
That said, whatever his personal foibles, Balthus merits the often made claim that he is, at the end of the twentieth century, the single greatest living artist. When, standing in front of various works by the old masters, we ask ourselves if anyone in our time understands the mystery of painting as they did—and even approaches their technical brilliance and their ability to transmit the miracles of human existence, visual and physical, aesthetic and sensuous—we quickly conclude that it is he more than anyone else.
An extreme cat-like softness; it was the voice of the unseen observer, of the eternally silent superior servant.
—IRIS MURDOCH,27 The Italian Girl
MARIE-LAURE AND CHARLES DE NOAILLES were also among the most indulgent of Balthus’s friends when he assumed his new persona after World War II. If the former clone of Antonin Artaud was now a highborn nobleman, so be it. Bernard Minoret told me about a lunch in the house on the Place des Etats-Unis in the late 1950s when most of the de Noailles’s dozen or so guests were all making fun of Balthus for having become Le Comte de Rola. Charles de Noailles would have none of their mockery. “Ça ne fait rien,” he told his guests. “Ça lui fait tant plaisir.”28 A member of the “noblesse du court” could afford to let Balthus have his fun; Balthus was a fine painter and had earned the privilege.
Creators were Marie-Laure’s gods, and she considered it her role to serve them. After a brief affair with Edward James, the great British patron of ballet, she had become involved, at age thirty, with the musician Igor Markevitch, ten years her junior, for whom she bought Alfa Romeos. She might not have provided for Balthus as lavishly as for her lovers, but she would always relish her role as Balthus’s model. According to Bernard Minoret, in her later years—almost until the time of her death in 1970—the vicomtesse delighted in telling people, “I was Balthus’s Lolita.”
In 1958 Balthus painted a portrait of another doyenne of Parisian society, the Baroness Alain de Rothschild. As opposed to the painting he had made of Marie-Laure twenty-two years earlier, this large canvas looks almost as if it had been done by one of the Deauville or Palm Beach portraitists who advertise in glossy magazines. The setting is true “Style Rothschild”; the baroness, in a plush robe and fine jewelry, her hair looking as if it were just coifed by Alexandre, relaxes in a large armchair surrounded by the accoutrements of her luxurious life. There is a classical bust on the mantel; she is flanked by a golden urn with a black cupid on it, elaborate candelabra, and glistening objets d’art. In 1936 Balthus had been the circus trainer with a whip who summoned nobility to his garret; now he willingly immersed himself in every nuance of the titled world.
The Baron and Baroness de Rothschild gave a large cocktail party late one afternoon in their enormous house on the Avenue de Martigny to unveil the portrait. (This imposing residence is now used by the French government to house prominent world leaders visiting Paris.) Balthus, typically, was not there. But lots of chic Paris was, and they were clucking—even if the elegant canvas looked more like a lightly painted society portrait commissioned by a wealthy husband than a full-fledged effort by the artist of The Children and Thérèse Dreaming.
Portrait of the Baroness Alain de Rothschild, 1958, oil on canvas, 190 × 152 cm (photo credit 19.9)
Charles de Bestégui—who in 1951 had hosted, in his Venetian palace full of Tiepolo frescoes, a beaux-arts ball that many considered the greatest social event in Europe since the war—could be heard voicing his admiration for the regal portrait. At over six by five feet it was Balthus’s largest portrait ever, and to most of the guests it was a status symbol with great cachet.
Marie-Laure de Noailles was not to be outshone by the haut monde, however. She showed up for the occasion in the same simple black suit she had worn when Balthus painted her. And while others leaned into the Rothschilds’ velvet and brocade-covered armchairs, Marie-Laure insisted that she could only sit on a simple, cane-seated wooden side chair—precisely like the one on which Balthus had shown her. She asked the servants for one, and it was brought in from the kitchen.
In stark and telling contrast to her graceful hostess, the Vicomtesse de Noailles perched on that plain side chair in the middle of the gathering and, in her austere clothing, assumed the same uneasy pose and taciturn expression as in 1936. Having been painted by the real Balthus, she would not succumb to this frivolity. She remained one of Balthus’s most loyal supporters, but always on her own terms.
FROM THE TIME OF HIS RETURN to Paris in late 1946 until his move to the Morvan in 1953, and then on his periodic returns to the capital for the rest of the decade, the artist often had lunch or dinner in the great dining room of the house on the Place des Etats-Unis or would go with Marie-Laure to the Catalan, where their regular dinner companions included Ned Rorem, James Lord, and Bernard Minoret.
In a diary entry Rorem wrote in the fall of 1951, he describes a viewing of The Room at an early stage. The account provides a rare glimpse of Balthus’s working method as well as a highly personal take on the work:
Today lunch with Balthus at the Catalan and afterwards a visit to his very messy studio (it resembles what must have been the interior of the Collier brothers’ home) in the adorable Cour de Rohan just off the rue Jardinier. Balthus is working on a most frightening oil. The canvas is enormous, four yards wide, and high as the ceiling. On this are nothing but two curious girls: one, a naked dead doll in false light stretched on a couch awaiting love; the other, a vital little idiot sister in a green sweater opening the curtain and exposing her rival to the real light of the sun. There is also a vase and cat. All this in colors hitherto uninvented.… I had to shiver! Poor great Balthus: so Jewish and sorry for himself; so rich, so poor.29
WHEN I MET WITH ROREM in his Upper West Side apartment in the spring of 1995, he described Balthus’s everyday behavior in the early fifties. A picture emerged of how the lean and melancholy artist, solitary yet sociable, struck the people with whom he came in regular contact. Rorem spoke with annoyance of Balthus’s insistence on speaking English during their initial meeting at Marie-Laure’s. John Richardson and several other English people and Americans told me the same thing; it bothered all of them to be at a dinner table where everyone else was speaking French—in which they were also proficient—and to be made to speak English against their will. They and the other guests found Balthus’s use of the language forced and phony, but he continued nonetheless. Adding to the discomfort, according to Rorem, Marie-Laure would then try to join the conversation in the language in which it was taking place, and Balthus would tell her how lamentable her English was. And while Balthus’s command of English was commendable, it clearly was not his mother tongue.
Ned Rorem in 1951, photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson (photo credit 19.10)
In spite of that, Rorem found Balthus polite and attentive. Balthus listened patiently to Rorem’s unaccompanied choral pieces. “I remember that he was in no way condescending to me,” the composer reminisced.
Yet everything Balthus said seemed to have a subtext. Balthus remarked of these new songs, whose creator was eager for a response, “They remind me of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Rorem “thought that Balthus was name-dropping that he knew Hawthorne as no one else in France did. And I was fascinated that he thought I was New Englandish when I thought I was heart-on-my-sleeve and erotic.”30 Rorem then quipped, “He acted Jewish to me because he wanted to get his way.”
Rorem and Marie-Laure de Noailles often discussed Balthus. The composer confirmed Bernard Minoret’s report that the viscountess was quite kind on the subject of Balthus’s ascendancy to the ranks of the nobility when other people were derisive. “Marie-Laure did not talk about his title; she would have thought that was condescending. Of course, she was not impressed by lineage but by talent. Balthus was impressed by lineage as well as talent.”
On the other hand, even if Marie-Laure would not stoop to mocking Balthus’s social pretensions, Rorem told me she loved to gossip about his “thing for little girls.” She also said, of her own sexual relationship with the painter, “Nous avons fait l’amour à papa.” Rorem explained, “That meant heavy necking. They might have kissed under a piano—for one second or twenty minutes. He wouldn’t discuss it, but she was a real gossip.”
While Balthus never talked openly about his own sexual experiences, he sometimes enjoyed taking a teasing, hypothetical tack with the openly homosexual Rorem. The composer recalled, “Balthus once said to me, ‘I’m not queer at all, but if I were I would like to be encoulé by Jean-Louis Barrault.’ And I thought to myself, why? They look exactly alike: thin and mannered—although Balthus is not quite as theatrical, and a little more melancholy. Look at Barrault in Les Enfants du paradis. They’re both gaunt, and effete.” It’s as if Balthus’s fantasy was to be buggered by Balthus.
ON ONE OCCASION WHEN the Viscountess de Noailles and Ned Rorem and Balthus were all at the Catalan restaurant, Balthus made some pencil drawings on the paper tablecloth. One is a woman’s head in a simulated oval frame. Almost comic-book-like, it mocks a traditional eighteenth-century portrait of an aristocrat, complete with her proper curls and elaborate necklace; we picture the deep colors of history even though it is only in pencil. The other is of a man with three faces. His round head, sitting atop a sort of globe, has a left profile, a right profile, and a third set of features we see head-on. Each face is a variation of the others. The man looks important and imperious—as well as, quite literally, multifaceted.
After making the drawing, Balthus turned to Marie-Laure and Ned Rorem and remarked, “Ceux-ci sont mes ancêtres.” Marie-Laure carefully cut them out with a scissors and gave them to Rorem with instructions that he should take good care of them.
When I visited the composer, I was intrigued by the small sketches—which I subsequently purchased from him. How perfect that Balthus would make one of his ancestors look like a fictionalized Scottish grandmother—while the other, with his three faces on the same head, might as well be a Romanov, a Poniatowski, and a Radziwill all wrapped into one.
A HANDSOME AND DASHING Danish college student named Claus von Bülow was also part of Marie-Laure de Noailles’s circle.
Balthus mentioned von Bülow to me one afternoon in Rossinière. They had had lunch together with Lucien Freud about a year earlier in London—during Balthus’s trip there for the opening of Setsuko’s exhibition. “Poor Claus,” Balthus said with utmost sympathy, “I don’t think he could possibly have murdered his wife; I can’t imagine that he murdered anyone at all.” He delivered the pronouncement with an incredulous grin, injecting cheer into the word “murdered” the way Boris Karloff might have.
Like Ian Fleming, Claus von Bülow was another of Balthus’s “amusing” friends with an apparent penchant for S&M. Ned Rorem told me about an occasion in 1952 when von Bülow proudly invited the young composer to see his whip room.31 Rorem reported with sparkling eyes that it was full of “jewel-encrusted, gold-handled” bull- and horsewhips and cat-o’-nine-tails.
You might well ask my reason for repeating Rorem’s tales about the world’s most renowned and colorful murder suspect in a book on Balthus. It is because there is a certain alliance of taste. Starting with The Guitar Lesson, Balthus had evinced his own interest in sadism in elegant quarters. The well-dressed dominator who showed himself as the whip-bearing “H.M. the King of Cats” also indulged, in his art, in the related fantasy of desanguinated, nearly comatose women.
This sort of thing was the ordinary parlance of the de Noailles set. At Marie-Laure’s, houseguests might merrily pore over the original manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom knowing that its author was their hostess’s illustrious ancestor. What was a game and what was reality—or to what extent imagination and everyday conduct converged—I cannot judge. Humor and the thrill of being outrageous may have counted more than any deeper instinct.
Another reason Claus von Bülow’s whip collection is of concern is that von Bülow’s own proclivities may have colored his views on his old friend from Paris.
VON BÜLOW HAD BEEN EXTREMELY accommodating when I phoned him to set up a date to discuss Balthus. He received me on the appointed April afternoon in 1995 in the overstuffed, elegant living room of his house on a large square in the Chelsea section of London. We sat surrounded by nineteenth-century paintings, family antiques, and beautiful photographs of his wife, Sunny, in the early and seemingly happier years of their marriage, and of their ravishing daughter Cosima.
My host looked completely different than in the days of his trial. Very svelte in the era when the world was trying to figure out if he had set out to give his wife a fatal injection, he had gained a lot of weight since that time. Impeccably dapper whenever the television or newspaper cameras were on him, he now exposed a roll of bare stomach between the bottom of his small and tight bright red polo shirt and the top of his unbelted corduroys. He was growing a beard, which was coming in white and was still at the seedy stage.
The other noticeable change since the time of his trial over a decade earlier was that now von Bülow seemed relaxed and content. His animated demeanor and ebullient conversation were a far cry from the persona he evinced during his ordeal at the Rhode Island courthouse. When he periodically referred back to this period of “shall we say, my troubles,” he furrowed his brow, but otherwise he seemed to be completely ensconced in the good life. Based on the phone calls I heard him receive concerning luncheon parties and travel plans, and his references to current girlfriends and dates to attend the opera, he was, indeed, suffering from no lack of amusement.
Perhaps because he had himself been the object of so much gossip and conjecture, the cheerful and perpetually entertaining Claus von Bülow was careful to avoid drawing any spurious conclusions about Balthus—toward whom he felt a mix of compassion and rapport. Even more than Balthus, von Bülow has suffered from the experience of other people projecting their own conclusions and fantasies about his character. The opprobrium extends beyond the obvious arena; some of his fellow members at his London club consider his use of “von” as bogus as Balthus’s title. Yet while I would have expected von Bülow, based on his common ground with Balthus, to voice wholehearted support of the count’s masquerade, the contrary was true. His similarities to the artist seemed to heighten his alertness to the reality behind Balthus’s shams and complexities.
Von Bülow gave new perspective to the worldly—and world-weary—side of the friend he had known for over forty years. He also had a clear grip on the artist’s approach to women—both personally and in the paintings. More often than I could possibly have anticipated, the erudite and sharp-focused Claus von Bülow proved to be among the most astute and original firsthand observers of Balthus I have encountered.
WHEN VON BÜLOW INITIALLY entered the circle of Marie-Laure de Noailles, he was not yet the cosmopolite he would become. As if describing a country yokel, he laughingly recalled himself as “a nineteen-year-old Scandinavian in my wooden shoes.”32 In Paris for an interval between his undergraduate studies at Cambridge and his preparation for the bar, the charming young Dane had found his way to the opulent house on the Place des Etats-Unis—where he was very much to Marie-Laure’s liking. “She took me under her umbrella, but not into her bed—for which I’m grateful.” Von Bülow said that the vicomtesse invariably tried to seduce any new and eligible acquaintance within the first weeks of their meeting. If that did not work out, however, she gave the man a chance to prove himself in other ways.
Since he felt Marie-Laure resembled “Louis XIV in drag” and did not relish the thought of being his hostess’s lover, von Bülow was fortunate in having the spark and wit to stay on in a chaste role. Today he credits the Vicomtesse de Noailles with having helped him develop a trait of great significance for his subsequent way of life: “If I have any discipline in dinner table conversation, it is her to whom I am grateful.” The Dane was by instinct witty and erudite to a fault; with Marie-Laure’s fine-tuning, he fit in well with his hostess’s social scene and cast of characters—among whom Balthus was one of the key players.
What drew Balthus to Claus von Bülow was the background of the tall young man from Cambridge. “My mother was the mistress of Prince Raimond von Thurn und Taxis, whose family owned Duino,” von Bülow explained to me on that spring afternoon. Raimond was the grandson of Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, one of Rilke’s closest companions and most ardent supporters; Duino was the setting for Rilke’s best-known elegies. When von Bülow first mentioned this connection to Balthus at the de Noailles’s dinner table, “Balthus was clapping his little hands. He had this nostalgia for la vieille Europe.” So declaimed the renowned bon vivant with an amused chuckle.
Claus von Bülow spoke to me about Balthus’s portrait of Marie-Laure, and I told him the story of the vicomtesse insisting on the simple kitchen stool at the Rothschilds’. He had, he said, the “perfect pendant” to that incident. It concerned the time he took Sunny—“my new American bride”—to the house on the Place des Etats-Unis for the first time. “You could see Marie-Laure eyeing her little Balenciaga suit. And then Marie-Laure said to Sunny, ‘Of course, I couldn’t afford anything like that.’ And you could see Sunny looking all around her—at that fantastic house—and wondering. Then Marie-Laure said, ‘What I mean is, you’re very beautiful. So you can afford to wear clothing like that. But I’m very homely. So I can only wear these plain clothes. That way, people just look at me and think that the reason I don’t look better is because I dress so poorly.’ ”
It was the sort of brilliance the young Scandinavian esteemed in the doyenne of this illustrious household. He equally admired her coterie of artists. The leader of the vicomtesse’s impressive constellation of creative geniuses was Picasso. On one occasion, in response to von Bülow’s mention of his upcoming legal studies, Picasso did a drawing of a bewigged barrister on von Bülow’s “tummy.” The law student saw a motive behind the act beyond pure entertainment: Picasso knew that the man bearing this drawing would cease bathing for quite some time in order to preserve the art—“thus making me a nuisance to my hostess,” the Dane remarked.
Balthus—who was almost a generation older than von Bülow and was also “in the top half dozen” of Marie-Laure’s circle—offered a far more refined form of companionship. At the de Noailles’s own table, or at meals the group would take at La Méditerranée, what was most striking in von Bülow’s “privileged exposure to Balthus” was Balthus’s emphasis on aristocracy and European traditions. The artist was often in the company of Madame Villabova—of the same name as one of the ladies-in-waiting to the last czarina. “With her, the conversation was a little bit old Europe—a lot of inside-track name-dropping. Balthus would sound nostalgic: ‘We are now all déposé.’ ”
You should have heard the glee and condescension with which von Bülow thus quoted Balthus. “The Romanovs were no longer at home; nor were the Klossowskis,” he added with a mocking sneer.
VON BÜLOW SEES BALTHUS as having always been very much an observer of the “haut monde.” Similarly, the artist struck him more as a perpetual voyeur of women than as an active lover.
He amplified. In recent years, a mutual acquaintance of both of theirs has been a prince from “one of the tremendously grand Black Roman families: you have the whole of the papacy” with a family castle near Montecalvello. The prince has both “won a poetry prize and made a profession of sexual intercourse. He is, reputedly, exceptionally well endowed, and is a great lover of beautiful women who tend to be a great deal younger than him.” For Balthus, in von Bülow’s eyes, part of the appeal of the friendship with this high-living man with his impressive title is “a certain voyeurism—of both the prestigious family and the sexual prowess.” Von Bülow feels that this is very much Balthus’s approach: to look at life from a distance and take pleasure in seeing more than in doing.
That space between himself and things, and the concomitant degree of control, seemed to be present even when Balthus drove a car. Von Bülow described the artist as driving “like an Italian bus driver, well back from the wheel, arms straight out in front.” We talked about the similar critical distance in his work—about why so much of Balthus’s art, for all the eroticism (of which von Bülow considered Balthus’s denial laughable), is nonseductive. Velázquez or Matisse presents women to be made love to; Balthus puts them there more to be observed.
Von Bülow remarked that with Picasso’s females, you feel that the artist has had sex with them. The entire experience is present. With Balthus’s, however, the activity is almost all mental. Von Bülow linked Balthus’s attitude to women with his relationship to the social scene. “Balthus may be a voyeur sexually; so he is a voyeur of Gstaad. He could have been mundane in his life; he chose not to be, but he is in his gossip.” With those in the upper echelon of society—the world known all too well to Claus von Bülow—as with the staff at the Villa Medici and the townspeople in Rossinière, Balthus knew every name and had a handle on all the personalities; von Bülow saw this degree of engagement as more of a diversion for Balthus than a sign of any more profound connection. “If you are patently a great artist, you’ve got to let your hair down from time to time. Gossip, where there’s nothing else, is appalling. But in perspective it makes you human.”
What von Bülow unearthed for me was Balthus’s simultaneous immersion in and distance from everything. His portrait of his longtime acquaintance depicted a narcissist and a chronic observer—brilliant and creative, but personally removed. Others of Balthus’s friends had suggested the same: the artist as a fantasist, more masturbatory than sexual, more narcissistic than amorous. It is his actual detachment from others that helps facilitate the fierce internal engagement.
BECAUSE OF CLAUS VON BÜLOW’S own history and reputation, I asked him what he thought Balthus had done to the subjects of those paintings who seem most clearly comatose or victimized. With this in mind, I showed him reproductions of The Guitar Lesson, The Window, The Room, and The Victim.
In all four of these pivotal paintings, von Bülow saw the subservience and apparent helplessness of most of these females as an extension of their usual role in the sexual act. “The fact that the man physically takes the woman: when you go to the next step, she’s the victim. Sadomasochism is the natural taken one step further.”
Then, looking at the 1936 Victim, he unequivocally declared that the woman had been raped—rather than murdered. Studying this ashen white nude with the dagger at her side, he added, “Victim? I think that’s perfectly all right by me. One finds women who are inviting, who have very strong personalities, but in bed want the roles reversed.”
I made no comment. Given who the speaker was, I listened to it all with rapt attention, while furiously writing down every word. Von Bülow told me that, in light of some of his experiences with the press, he generally insists that interviewers tape-record him and provide him with copies of the tapes. He said, to my surprise, that it suited him to have me transcribing his comments instead. I could not, with my pen, keep up with every utterance—the countless references to history, or to someone’s genealogy, the deep admiring remarks about historian Simon Schama—but I missed little concerning his theories on Balthus’s treatment of women. I also managed to transcribe all of his utterances pointing to Balthus’s subjects as renditions of the artist himself.
“Is he doing anything to women that he isn’t doing to himself? There’s a melancholia.” To von Bülow, the grimness and intensity of Balthus’s teenage girls gave them a strong resemblance to their creator. He saw Balthus as the quintessential, brooding, tragic Pole, and the adolescent girls as having been made very much in the artist’s own image.
“At the crisis moment in my life, I was criticized for not showing emotion. Well, you can’t help your physiognomy. I look like a stand-in for Curt Jurgens as a U-boat captain. Balthus looks like Chopin. And his girls are calculated images of his own profile. Happiness is very distracting.”
Claus von Bülow saw the persona of Balthus’s girls to be that of their maker, and the world of his paintings—like that of his life—to be his chosen Eden. “Every one of his pictures, though representational in style, is fantasy. You have to honor your fantasy.” In a noticeably slow cadence, von Bülow precisely enunciated the nature of Balthus’s realm of desire: “The absence of pubic hair and the visibility of the labia major: why shouldn’t he live, himself, in fantasy?”
NOT ONLY DID CYRIL CONNOLLY let Balthus have Byron as an ancestor, but he invested Balthus with some of the artist’s chosen ancestor’s most endearing personality traits. In an essay for a 1952 Balthus exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in London, the English novelist wrote, “We see that the exterior of the gentle dandy and witty cosmopolitan conceals a strong will and deeply original mind.” Connolly was a sage Balthus observer. He understood the interplay of the contrasting sides of the artist’s character. “As a personality Balthus is one of the most delightful companions in Paris and one of the most sought after, his iconoclastic sallies are both provoked and relished and it is perhaps to be regretted that he never takes his charm and irony with him into the studio.… It is clear … that he may incorporate … all those lighter qualities which have endeared him to his friends into his fastidious, virile, and somber imagination.”33 It was a prescient view of the man who had painted Alice and The Victim—but who would soon enough be making society portraits like the one of the Baroness de Rothschild.
On the other hand, in his diaries Connolly declared Balthus “depressing” and “melancholy.” And his and Balthus’s friendship ultimately went the way of most of the artist’s relationships. In 1948 Connolly had acquired Balthus’s The Cherry Tree. Lord Derwent—a friend of the writer’s—had offered to take over payments if Connolly could not make them, but then Peter Derwent died before the painting had been paid for in full. According to a letter Balthus wrote James Thrall Soby, Connolly carefully began to avoid running into the artist. Balthus meanwhile observed his former friend managing somehow to live well on no income. Then Connolly sold The Cherry Tree.
Balthus sarcastically quipped to Soby how “wonderful” it was when Connolly, after selling the painting, offered Balthus half the amount. Here it is not clear whether he meant half the amount for which he had sold the work or half of what he still owed, but in either case Balthus felt that the “crook” deserved “not a cent” for himself.
They made a settlement—about which Balthus gave Soby the most cynical explanation. The artist felt that by agreeing to Connolly’s terms he had succumbed to reprehensible values that were perfectly suited to the current world. It is yet another story of a wound inflicted on Balthus where the details will always remain elusive and subject to more than one explanation.
For it seems that none of Balthus’s close relationships with writers or other artists endured. With the friend whom Balthus saw more than any other in these postwar years—Giacometti—there was, similarly, a schism at the end.
BUT WHEN THE SCULPTOR LIVED in the Elyssia quarter and Balthus was on the Cour de Rohan, the two got together nearly every day. Life revolved around cafés, and they most often met at the Deux Magots—even more than at lunch parties at Derain’s or the de Noailles’s. Balthus told me that, except for an interlude during wartime, he and Giacometti saw each other in this way until he left for Chassy in 1953—although even after that point Giacometti continued to visit him at the château in the Morvan.
In a relationship that James Thrall Soby calls “one of the strangest friendships in the world of modern art,” Balthus and Giacometti were soul mates and complete opposites.34 Soby, who knew both of them fairly well, writes about the numerous, deep bonds between the two men, but also describes “how they jabbered like magpies, fought, embraced, quarreled again and always ended in some curious affinity of spirit.”
Whenever Balthus talked to me about Giacometti, he lowered his eyelids as if he were talking about a holy person. There was no one else whose name came up in our conversations who garnered quite the same respect, or seemed possessed by the same purity.
Balthus’s voice took on that quasi-religious timbre on the afternoon he led me to a fine Giacometti bronze in one of the lesser-used sitting rooms at Le Grand Chalet. He reported proudly that Alberto had told him he was the first person who ever liked it, and so the sculptor had given it to him. Looking on the brink of tears, Balthus implied that there was the most perfect sympathy between them.
Balthus told me that when, in the late 1950s, Giacometti saw his large Passage du Commerce Saint-André, the sculptor said “he thought it had the same subject as The Palace at 4 a.m.—people crossing an outside room.” Balthus then stressed that he did not see the link—because his goal was not to express loneliness. “I never want to express anything at all,” he announced definitively. Yet the comparison of Balthus’s Passage to Giacometti’s earlier Palace makes sense. And although Balthus now repudiated the notion, he had brought it up with considerable pride.
Balthus and Giacometti, after all, were certainly unified in their determination to portray human isolation—even if the Balthus I knew disavowed that intention. Aspects of the Surreal agenda linked them even if they disparaged the movement itself. Antonin Artaud had been profoundly affected by Giacometti’s Surreal work; The Cage of 1930 was said to have anticipated the Theater of Cruelty. Giacometti’s emphasis on alienation and emotional distance—on the voids as well as the presences—was central to Balthus as well, and would continue to dominate Balthus’s art, whatever his disclaimers.
Yet for all their rapport, Balthus and Giacometti favored entirely different ways of life. Giacometti was known to say, “I want to live in such a way that if I became destitute tomorrow it would change nothing for me.”35 It was a far cry from Balthus’s “I have a greater need for a château than a workman has for a loaf of bread.”36 By James Lord’s account—and Lord did spend a considerable amount of time with Giacometti and Balthus together—
Balthus…[was] the artist to whom Alberto was most bound in friendship and in a mutual commitment to aesthetic purposes opposed to contemporary taste. Yet the two were very different as artists and very, very different as men.… Alberto desired to live and work in circumstances of austere simplicity, whereas Balthus yearned for pomp.… Alberto wanted to be left alone to pursue his work as best he could, convinced in advance that his best would probably turn out to be evidence of failure. Balthus desired not only the homage due to a successful artist but also the deference due to an accredited aristocrat.
[Giacometti] disapproved of Balthus as a person but enjoyed his company. He did not admire his work but was sincere in his esteem for the artistic resolve which engendered it. This esteem was well deserved.… High standards of integrity prevailed for both.37
THE YOUNG AMERICAN PAINTER Leland Bell—for whom Derain, Balthus, Léger, Giacometti, and Jean Hélion were all mentors verging on gods—periodically discussed Balthus with Giacometti in Paris in the late 1940s and 1950s. In conversations we had in the mid-1980s at his house in New York, Bell provided a firsthand account of Giacometti’s views on Balthus’s work. Bell and Giacometti both revered Balthus’s artistic talent and were frequently annoyed when talk about this artist they so ardently admired would turn to prurient snickering about “Balthus and his little girls.” Yet they also agreed with one another that Balthus’s denial of the sexuality of his art was nonsense. They considered it as ridiculous as, and not dissimilar to, his obsessive class consciousness.
Giacometti was entirely matter-of-fact on this issue. He remarked to Bell that the erotic element “was always there in Balthus, as if Balthus simply could not help but include it.” It was undeniable; it was seminal to the work. Giacometti admired Balthus above all for “his use of space, the marvelous totality of his pictures, his freedom from gimmicks”—precisely the qualities for which Balthus would want to have been esteemed by the man he told me was “the last great living artist.” But “Balthus a sa mauvaise audience, et c’est sa faute,” Giacometti remarked to Bell.
On one occasion when Bell and Giacometti were discussing Balthus in the mid-1950s, Bell complained to the Swiss about the Museum of Modern Art’s decision to hang Balthus’s work alongside Pavel Tchelitchew’s and Peter Blume’s. Together they lamented this pairing of work by “a real painter” with “these decadent minor realists.” But whereas Bell expected Giacometti to discuss Balthus only in purely artistic terms, Giacometti, sounding more like most other people than Bell anticipated, was preoccupied with Balthus’s pervasive eroticism and his social shenanigans.
The Window, Cour de Rohan, 1950–51, oil on canvas, 150 × 82 cm (photo credit 19.12)
Bell began to tell me about a painting he had seen in Balthus’s studio which showed both the studio interior with its still life and the view out the window into the courtyard. “He made big changes, and the paint would run. He was always trying to get the big planes to relate, and he maintained the articulation,” the younger artist observed. These were the elements that excited Bell—and still thrilled him as he resurrected the studio visit over thirty years earlier. But to Leland Bell’s surprise, what Giacometti emphasized about the canvas was its sexuality. The Swiss said that the buildings across the way reminded him of a woman—as if the dark window openings were female orifices—and that the still life within also had aspects of genitalia. “Even a piece of fruit by Balthus had something erotic about it,” Giacometti told Bell. The surprise is that the observation came from someone Balthus would now have us believe was his complete soul mate.
Giacometti also made a point of telling Bell about a recent trip he and Pierre Matisse had made to see Balthus in the Morvan. They had gotten lost near Chassy in their chauffeured car, and asked a peasant where the château of Balthus was. “Balthus, qui ça?” replied the peasant. Pierre Matisse explained, only to hear, “Oh, Le Comte de Rola!” The artist’s old friends could hardly believe their ears.
On the other hand, Leland Bell saw Balthus’s assumption of this rather silly social position as a partial consequence of the artist’s more justified sense of his own status in the intellectual hierarchy. Visiting Balthus in Paris in 1953, Bell encountered Cyril Connolly’s friend Peter Derwent in the studio at the Cour de Rohan. Bell began to argue with Derwent about Arp and Mondrian, neither of whose work the wealthy English collector particularly cared for. Balthus took this completely coolly and was silent until Derwent left, at which point he turned to Bell and said, “My dear, you’re absolutely right, but you must never bother to argue about art with a layman.”
BALTHUS AND GIACOMETTI AGREED about many issues of painting, but differed significantly on the matter of human relationships. When Balthus first moved to Chassy, Giacometti arranged for a friend of his, a woman in her mid-twenties named Léna Leclerq, to be the artist’s housekeeper. Balthus had little money—his work was not yet selling well, and he lived solely off his regular stipend from the consortium—but even though he didn’t have a franc to spare, he needed someone to help with cooking and with cleaning the decrepit château. A country girl whom Giacometti had met in a café, Leclerq was a poet, and Giacometti had the idea that by taking the post she would be able to write while Balthus painted.
Laurence Bataille had remained in Paris, and Antoinette and the boys were in Switzerland. Balthus was on his own. The idea of companionship as well as service suited him perfectly.
Once they were alone in the Morvan, Leclerq—like many women—succumbed to her employer’s charms. And for a while she thought she had the lean and intense painter to herself. It was not an easy relationship, however. A fairly dour and defeated person to begin with—as Balthus emphasized in his paintings of her—she suffered from his mockery. When the sardonic Balthus once asked her who in history “she might have liked to be” and she replied Trotsky, he quipped, “You might have chosen Lenin. He, at least, succeeded.”38
Leclerq’s greater agony, however, began when Balthus’s fifteen-year-old “niece”—in fact his stepniece, the daughter from a previous marriage of Pierre Klossowski’s wife—moved into Chassy. Leclerq attempted suicide. Giacometti and his wife, Annette, who rushed to the scene, were distraught. Balthus, apparently, was not.
Giacometti was put off by his friend’s indifference. And their relationship suffered further when Balthus’s fortunes changed following the 1956 Museum of Modern Art show. Now a uniformed butler appeared on the scene at Chassy to greet the count’s visitors. By the time the Count Klossowski de Rola moved to Rome to assume his position at the Villa Medici in 1961, the rapport of the old days at the Deux Magots was gone.
It seems that Giacometti even lost his feeling for most of Balthus’s work. David Sylvester reports a discussion with the Swiss in the following way: “Once in the 1960s I asked him what he thought of the work of Balthus, an old friend to whom he remained devoted; he answered discreetly, saying he liked some of the drawings.”39 Only a loyal politeness remained from the vibrant camaraderie and sense of a mutual battle Giacometti had felt when he and Balthus had championed Derain in the 1930s.
SINCE ALBERTO GIACOMETTI’S death in 1966, Balthus, however, has resurrected their friendship—and erased the distance and froideur that marked their relationship in the last decade or so of his former companion’s life. This is not unlike the way he managed, when I was present, to depict a nonexistent closeness to his mother in this same period of the fifties and sixties when his social ascendancy had such primary importance that he severed many of his earlier, expendable connections.
That skillful restitution of what was not really there emerges in the longest text Balthus has ever published: a three-paragraph essay about “Alberto” which he wrote in Rome in 1975 for a catalog of a show of Giacometti drawings held at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. The writing style is terse, but the sentiments about Giacometti are eloquent and deeply felt. Given Balthus’s usual disinclination to extend himself—he rarely writes letters or makes phone calls: the world must come to him—it was a major act to have committed his words to type in this way. The effect was to establish a sense of his inseparable closeness to “Alberto.”
In that brief essay, Balthus dwells on Giacometti’s death nearly ten years earlier. He treats it as the basis of a rather peculiar, highly personal event. Balthus describes going to a foundry and seeing a Giacometti bust, of which the owner wanted to change the bronze patina. Balthus considers this explanation of why it was there to be bizarre and specious. But regardless of the validity of the reason given for the presence of the sculpted head, he became absorbed in contemplating it. He describes Giacometti’s bust very dramatically: as meteoric, charred, fashioned by fire in a breakneck—vertiginous—fall through an infinite void. Balthus writes that he watched the piece avidly devour the space around it.
Léna with Her Arms Crossed, 1954, oil on canvas, 101 × 65 cm (photo credit 19.13)
Balthus then claims that, in viewing the sculpture, he came to anticipate Giacometti’s death. After the trip to the foundry, he felt a heavy sadness for twenty-four hours. It was an invasive, alarming worry. He went home in a dream.
Shortly after this experience, he heard that Giacometti had, in fact, died. It is on this note that he concludes the essay—before announcing, warmly, that he wrote these lines for Alberto’s brother Diego.
It is a totally narcissistic essay—like the sort of eulogy in which the speaker recalls the deceased only in relationship to himself and his own experience. As in his portraiture, Balthus reveals more about himself and his own vision than about his subject. And he depicts himself as being like the characters in his own large figure compositions: overcome by their personal dramas, full of premonitions, in a sort of fugue state. The effect is dramatic, but Giacometti is lost.
IN CONVERSATION WITH ME, Balthus frequently reiterated that, beyond being “the last great living painter,” Giacometti was admirable for having written and published as much as he did. Balthus himself felt that he lacked this ability. He also commended Giacometti’s perspective on the world: “Alberto was like two persons. One person who was himself, another who was amused by himself.” When Balthus said this, I wrote it down verbatim and accepted it at face value, but in retrospect I wonder if it was not Balthus rather than Giacometti about whom he was talking.
The large photo of Giacometti I had observed in Balthus’s studio seemed to keep the Swiss near. Giacometti, after all, was the sole person with whom Balthus used to be able to talk, day in and day out, about the craft of painting. They had similar artistic aims, and shared a sense of the futility and mystery of the battle. Each felt estranged from art historians, critics, and others who observed rather than made art themselves. Balthus told me—naturally with no hint whatsoever of the rift in Giacometti’s last decade—that he had never found “the equal of Alberto.” He might still discuss art with former students from the Villa Medici—most especially with the painter François Rouen, who periodically visits from Paris—and with Setsuko, but it was not the same.
For whatever strength there is in Setsuko’s rather tepid art rests on the apparent ease behind its creation. What Balthus and Giacometti had most in common at the height of their closeness was that certain things did not come naturally or easily. For both of them art was—at least back then—a ceaseless, ongoing struggle in which satisfaction was impossible.
IN 1991 BALTHUS GRANTED Le Figaro an interview on the subject of Giacometti. Balthus declared, “I was very fond of Alberto, for he was one of the most interesting and exciting men you could ever meet.”40 Recalling Giacometti’s break from the Surrealists and elaborating on the subsequent priorities of his art, Balthus was completely adulatory.
For the Figaro reader, Balthus described the routine of his visits to Alberto’s studio:
Very often he continued working during my visits. He would show me a sculpture and shifted from the most absolute pessimism to the most absolute enthusiasm. He was an anxious man, an artist who perpetually doubted what he was doing. He was never satisfied with what he produced. He would talk all the while he was drawing, painting, or sculpting. I never heard him say that he thought any of his sculptures were completed. He had a need for an inner truth which he never managed to fulfill.
This sounded remarkably like Balthus’s account to me of his own dissatisfaction in taking years to finish single paintings, changing them perpetually, never feeling done.
There is one good moment in painting, Balthus announced—with an expression, however, that was anything but satisfied. That is when you think it is finished. But the sensation quickly evaporates.
For with painting you could go on forever: “As you don’t know how to paint; no one really knows how to paint.” At times one of his own pictures might momentarily seem nice to him; on other occasions he doesn’t know what more he can do; and then there are the moments when he simply stops out of fatigue. But no matter what, the process of painting seems endless, its goals unachievable, its process as futile as for his beloved Alberto. Like the precious cat that fled from Balthus when he was eleven, art is exquisite, compelling—and beyond human grasp.
FRÉDÉRIQUE TISON, BORN IN 1938, was the daughter of Denise, the widower whom Pierre Klossowski married in 1947. Her father, who was in the Resistance, had been killed by the Germans; her mother had been deported during the war. When she was about ten, she began to pose for Balthus.
Balthus probably first met Frédérique in Champrovent, where Pierre Klossowski and Denise had begun to go in 1945. Jean Leyris, Betty and Pierre’s son, used to play with the girl and her brother Jean Charles at that time. Leyris told me Frédérique was “a wild kid, up to mischief, a naughty child in the nicest way.” She did things like “taking plugs out of water barrels and stealing.” Her “uncle” Balthus soon came to find her irresistible. “When she was fourteen, he used to show up at her lycée with boxes of chocolate to court her.”
It was not long before Balthus achieved his objective. In 1954 the sixteen-year-old Frédérique arrived in Chassy. For a while Balthus lived with her as well as Léna Leclerq—just as, eight years later, he would live with both Frédérique and Setsuko in Rome. By 1956 Leclerq was long gone, however, and Balthus took his new young mistress along to Rolle for Christmas with Antoinette and the children. He molded his life according to his whims.
Looking at Balthus’s work of the period, one can hardly tell which of his female companions Balthus was painting. Both Léna and Frédérique served as his model, but the work was neither personal nor biographical. It was the opposite from Picasso, whose every new relationship brought a different manner of painting and characterization of women in general. Individuals might come and go in his life, but whether his subject was Léna, Frédérique, or another of his models, they all became “Balthus girls.”
From the time he returned to Paris after the war, Balthus had been painting the naked female figure as if she were the essence of renewal and salvation. Reality might periodically intrude on his life, but in his art he was free to feast upon females at the stage when he seemed to love them best. Adolescent and blossoming, they appear lost in reverie, enjoying endless time as if life was one extended summer afternoon.
These nudes of the late 1950s are variations of creatures we have long known. Their breasts are developed but they have no pubic hair. They present themselves unabashedly for the taking, yet conceal their mental worlds. Their legs gargantuan, their hands malformed, their skin soft and luminous, they descend not so much from the individuals who posed for them as from the mind and experience of their conqueror.
