Balthus in his studio in Chassy, 1957, by Loomis Dean (photo credit 20.1)
SHORTLY AFTER HE MOVED to Chassy, Balthus began a series of paintings of three teenage sisters together. The girls were the daughters of the Paris art dealer Pierre Colle, a friend who had died in 1948. The artist started painting the Colle girls when he was visiting their mother in Biarritz in the summer of 1954. He worked and reworked the theme until 1957, and would again take it up in the early 1960s.
These riveting canvases, like the 1938 Thérèse Dreaming, show Balthus at his most eloquent and revealing. Looking at them, and talking with their subjects—now three dynamic and intelligent women—we get closer to, yet at the same time grow all the more confused by, the deliberate enigma of their maker.
I HAVE LONG HAD A PERSONAL connection with these paintings of sisters. In the summer of 1976, my future wife and I were in Geneva when we bought a pencil sketch for one of the mid-1950s Three Sisters. We were both strapped for money, and I still don’t know how we came up with the funds, but we were united in our passion for that drawing.
Part of what captivated us in this study of two of the girls was how it evokes, in a rough way, the posture of teenagers. The arrogant ease of the slightly older sister—leaning back on the sofa with one foot resting on the cushion—contrasts with the more childish curiosity of the younger one curled up on the floor. The girl on the floor gazes with fascination up her sibling’s dress and between her legs. The drawing, while complete and telling, is a feat of legerdemain. Balthus’s engagement is visible in every pencil stroke, yet his lines betray effortlessness.
Balthus in his studio in Chassy, 1957, by Loomis Dean (photo credit 20.1)
When I wrote Balthus in 1990 telling him I had been asked to write a book on him, I mentioned that we owned this sketch and that our own two young daughters had grown up in its presence. Indeed, the Study for “The Three Sisters” seemed an integral part of our lives. What I now realize is that this information that I was, however modestly, a collector in the right camp was probably a central factor in Balthus’s initially agreeing to meet me.
IN THE SPRING OF 1991, John Russell telephoned one morning to say that one of Balthus’s “Three Sisters” was in New York and would see me two days later. She was the eldest of the trio: Marie-Pierre Colle—an editor for House & Garden, living in Mexico City.
Marie-Pierre is the girl on the sofa in Balthus’s five paintings of the Three Sisters series, as well as in numerous sketches, ours among them. When we made our plan to meet at the Upper East Side apartment of the friend with whom she was staying, I told her about our drawing, which she asked me to bring along. The sight of the sketch opened the floodgates of reminiscence. Marie-Pierre was about eleven years old when she started posing at the Cour de Rohan; unlike her sisters, she not only sat for the group paintings but sometimes modeled alone. Balthus was “a friend of the family’s,” she told me. Ever since her own father’s death, the artist had become “like a father” to her and the others.
As she was recounting this to me forty years later, she was seated, as in her childhood portraits, on a sofa. I was on an elegant side chair at a right angle to it. We were completely alone in her friend’s vast apartment; the living room where we were talking resembled an elaborate Parisian salon.
Marie-Pierre was an arresting sight in a very tight and short miniskirt. She kept changing the position of her legs—sometimes tucked underneath her buttocks, sometimes crossed in front of her. She appeared to be trying to keep from revealing too much thigh, yet the effort was exposing a provocative amount of leg.
Balthus was “tender, gracious, loving,” she told me. He “felt responsible” for her. She went out of her way to make it clear that now he was very much misunderstood by the public at large. Neither she nor her sisters “felt any erotic connection with him; he was completely paternal, and in no way improper.”
As she was saying this, suddenly this attractive, youthful woman—impressively svelte and smooth-skinned at fifty—began, with her right hand, to massage her left breast: the one nearer to me. She was wearing a loose-fitting, silky blouse that was unbuttoned to mid-chest, and she had reached through the opening and under her bra. She looked unconscious of the act, as if she were in a trance.
Fascinated by the way she was rubbing herself, I tried nonetheless to give the impression that I did not notice. Our eyes hardly met. Once or twice in the course of our conversation, I said—defensively—that unfortunately I could not stay long. But I was not sure if this reaction to her seductiveness was necessary, since to this day I do not know if she was trying to lure me or if it was the memory of Balthus that was prompting her to fondle her own breast in front of me.
Marie-Pierre continued with her memories. Balthus was always gentle and caring. When she was fourteen, he gave her phonograph records of the Brandenburg Concerti. She had never once found him angry or rude. The only time the artist had ever reprimanded her, he had done so with incredible gentleness. He had told her that when she changed position even slightly, it was a problem for him. She responded that she couldn’t see the difference in how she was seated from one moment to the next; in order to demonstrate the change, the artist had—“kindly”—shown her “a drawing to indicate otherwise.” Meanwhile, she continued to stroke her breast, although now her legs were in a fixed position crossed at the ankles.
Marie-Pierre recalled those times when she was aged eleven to thirteen and modeled for the artist alone, prior to the period of The Three Sisters. In that period of the early fifties, she would accompany Balthus to the Louvre with André Malraux, who had arranged those visits on days when the museum was closed to the general public. They would spend the entire morning in front of Poussins and a Courbet.
Then, in 1954, Balthus came to visit her family in Biarritz and began to paint the three Colle girls together. Hearing about this process, asking the occasional question, I simply took notes as if I were unaware of what was going on before my eyes.
Marie-Pierre said that her father was an art dealer and had introduced Balthus and Derain. The Colles owned The White Skirt. This provocative 1937 Balthus shows Antoinette, whom Balthus had married earlier that year, looking like a drugged lingerie model. The artist’s bride is clad in a translucent bra—through which her nipples show—and an old, full-length white tennis skirt that belonged to her mother. Balthus had told Pierre Colle’s widow that if he could have the painting back, he would paint her three daughters and give her their group portrait in exchange. And so Madame Colle asked the artist down to the country house that her parents, from a prominent Mexican family, had in Biarritz. The artist came with Léna Leclerq, with whom he was then living in Chassy.
The White Skirt, 1937, oil on canvas, 130 × 162 cm (photo credit 20.3)
“We didn’t pose for Balthus because he was the great painter of the century. We posed because he was a friend of the family.” The girls wanted to go to the beach, but instead had to sit still while the artist sketched. Marie-Pierre stressed to me that it was all in the context of “ordinary life.” To keep the children attentive, Balthus put a box of chocolates on the floor—in one painting he has transformed it into a basket of flowers—from which they could select a reward if they kept still.
A decade later, she became more of a professional model for the painter. In November 1963 Balthus invited Marie-Pierre Colle to come to the Villa Medici, where she posed again for him and stayed for five weeks. She recalls it as the time when Frédérique was “on her way out, Setsuko in—a turning point.” But in the studio it was business as usual. Every morning Marie-Pierre posed for hours, while Balthus sketched; he would work on the oil painting later, with no one there. During these sittings, the artist “never spoke.”
The memories brought on the smile people sometimes make when recalling past loves. Meanwhile, Balthus’s former model continued to fondle her own breast. And then this beautiful woman stood up and concluded our meeting by going into the bedroom, from which she emerged with a poem Balthus had written for her. As if transfixed—at that moment she looked like one of the women in Baladine’s images for Rilke’s Windows—she read, in a soft voice and measured cadence, the words penned on a small paper she held in her fingers. “Pour la fleur/d’entre les fleurs/l’adolescent Marie-Pierre, /son adorateur.” As she reflected back on herself as “the adolescent Marie-Pierre,” and the painter/friend-of-the-family as “her adorer,” her face lit up even further.
SYLVIA COLLE LORANT, the youngest of the three sisters, presented a very different situation than Marie-Pierre. I met her in Paris in November 1992. Her spacious Left Bank apartment offered much visual stimulus to our conversation with its splendid late Derains as well as a version of The Three Sisters Balthus painted in the mid-1960s when he revived the series at the Villa Medici.
Sylvia works in the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Pompidou and has, for a number of years, been writing a book on Balthus as a set and scenery designer. A scholarly, matter-of-fact art historian, she is exceptionally bright, crisp, and outgoing.
Indeed, Sylvia told me, Balthus had been a father figure to her and her sisters after their father—a wonderful, innovative art dealer—had died so tragically young. But the man who had had even a larger role in bringing them up was Christian Dior. Dior had been a friend of Pierre Colle’s, and Madame Colle had been in charge of Dior’s boutique. The girls’ dolls had clothing by the designer, and it was he who often supplied the boxes of candy that sat on the floor when Balthus painted them.
In Biarritz, she recalled, Balthus would sketch the girls for an hour or so every morning, from ten to eleven or eleven-thirty. He made a lot of drawings of them, but painted the actual oils back in Chassy. He captured the family scenario as it really was: with Marie-Pierre like a queen on a throne, Béatrice always playing, and Sylvia herself totally lost in a book—generally Dostoyevsky, but sometimes Dumas or Hugo.
At that time in their lives, they reacted to the finished paintings just the way one would expect of girls their age. When Baladine Klossowski asked Sylvia what she thought of the version of The Three Sisters then owned by Henriette Gomès, Sylvia’s main response was that she hated having such big legs.
Yet even if she did not like her oddly proportioned limbs, Sylvia found nothing strange about the whole experience of posing for Balthus. “As a person, he was tender, present. He amused himself with us; he joked a lot. The paintings were enigmatic, but he was not. There was never any danger: the sexuality was in his head. His cerebral world was different from the world out there in the painting. He had the audacity to express his ideas in his art.”
The Colle girls knew him well enough to speak with authority. Once Balthus was living in Chassy, he regularly stayed in their apartment on the Rue de Varenne when he visited Paris. Sylvia, even as a child, perceived his layers. She distinguished his behavior as a man from the revelations of his art. She and her family took their old friend’s use of a title in stride: “He always knew how to comport himself like a count, and he was always just that.” They had perspective on his eroticism. “Lui, he exaggerates the theme of provocativeness. And he shows things. But he’s no dangerous child molester.” In his art, “Balthus deliberately disorients us. He’s provocative in presenting a situation which is the projection of the viewer.”
The wide-eyed Sylvia—in middle age bearing an uncanny resemblance to her adolescent self in Balthus’s paintings—amplified her points as she looked up at the painting she owns. She noted “the ambiguity that is always there”—and the hints of eroticism that show up in details like Balthus’s placement of white gloves on a little girl. Sylvia explained that this particular Three Sisters was based on a combination of models. Balthus had in mind the Colle girls as they had been almost ten years earlier; he had also depended on his other, younger models in Rome, and had now set the scene at the Villa Medici. Sylvia observed, with a deep laugh, that the girth of the legs which so bothered her as a child gave the work expression. And she concurred that in this otherwise marvelous composition, the hands fall apart completely.
The Three Sisters, 1966, oil on canvas, 130.5 × 175 cm (photo credit 20.4)
And then Sylvia Lorant, perhaps as much as anyone I have ever spoken to except for Pierre Leyris, seemed to capture the true nature of Balthus. “He’s never in one situation or another. But always at an intersection of ambiguity—the passage between one time period and another—there at the beginning of adulthood.” She suggested that Balthus and his subjects were the same. With all their undercurrents of feelings, the latent yet soaring emotions, they combined dissemblance and candor in equal mixture.
IF SYLVIA COLLE LORANT EVOKED the ambiguity of adolescence, Béatrice Colle Saalburg, the middle of the three sisters, represented another side of Balthus’s teenage girls: the seer, the observer who could peel away the layers and recognize the core. When I saw her in Paris a couple of days after I spoke with Sylvia—a year after my encounter with Marie-Pierre—she spoke with an impeccable grasp of our elusive subject.
Béatrice and I met one morning at my hotel in the sixth arrondissement—a short walk from Balthus’s old neighborhood. Like her sisters, she was quite extraordinary-looking—half Spanish-Mexican, half French—and intensely animated. More than any of his other former models, she was in real life truly a girl from a Balthus painting. Now a grown woman, Béatrice had not lost an iota of her teenage vitality. With her well-defined features and noticeably strong hands, she radiated aliveness and energy.
Possessed of a grace and generosity similar to Sylvia’s, Béatrice—who studied with Cassandre and teaches graphic art—provided an account of Balthus that, while human and personal, was as measured and proportionate as a layout sheet. First she meticulously provided historical data—in greater detail than her sisters had. Balthus had been one of the most important artists in her father’s gallery in the 1940s and had remained a close friend of Madame Colle’s after Pierre died young. He stayed with the widow and three daughters periodically in Paris after his move to Chassy in 1953.
Béatrice’s account of the arrangement between Balthus and Madame Colle concerning The White Skirt matched Marie-Pierre’s, but then she went further.
It was easy to see why Balthus wanted The White Skirt. For one thing, like a hunting trophy, it shows the prey vanquished. The aristocrat—wearing that white flannel tennis skirt which to the young painter must have symbolized her easy way of life—is exhausted on her throne. Through some form of power, sexual or otherwise, her portraitist has reduced her to semiconsciousness. It was also probably a painting Balthus now wanted out of circulation because it revealed his wife in her tight bra in a manner that—while allegedly a concession to her modesty, since she had insisted on the undergarment in preference to total nudity—allows her nipples to show and seems to cheapen her and hold her captive. Or he may have negotiated to get the painting back because he knew he could now get a better price for it.
Meanwhile, to Madame Colle’s consternation, once the widow gave The White Skirt to its maker, the painting promised by Balthus never arrived. The artist had made any number of sketches of the Colle girls, who had posed as instructed, but neither his three young models nor their mother knew if he had used them for the oil that was to be his half of the exchange. After ten years—by which time Balthus had evolved from the impoverished painter at Chassy to the esteemed director of the Villa Medici—Madame Colle was truly annoyed. “Where’s the picture?” she demanded.
Madame Colle had come to realize that Balthus had, indeed, completed canvases of her daughters. She had seen one dated 1954, another 1956, and there were several substantial oil paintings that showed just one or two of the girls. But rather than going to Madame Colle as promised, these canvases had all been sent to dealers, or to members of the syndicate, to help the artist pay off his debts.
Now, however, Balthus had begun his second Three Sisters series—albeit in his new Villa Medici style. Marie-Pierre was the only Colle daughter still modeling for the artist, but the others were clearly there in memory, in partnership with the new actual models for these later works. This second group of Three Sisters canvases, in pastel tones that reflected Balthus’s work on the frescoes at the villa, were—the observation is Béatrice’s, but reflects her mother’s response as well—“colder, and more aesthetic.” But at least Balthus finally sent one.
Madame Colle, however, did not like it. Eventually she selected another painting from the series: the version I saw over Sylvia Lorant’s sofa. But even then, it was a far cry from one of the original 1950s Three Sisters for which her daughters had actually posed, and which she had been promised.
What happened to Carmen Colle called to mind other stories I have heard about Balthus. It made me wonder if Balthus was actually rooked by Pierre Loeb and Cyril Connolly—or if, for all his tales of woe and wrongdoing done to him, the trickster was Balthus himself.
“He’s very weak,” Béatrice told me. “He has these two sides. He’s someone who escapes, and avoids things. When he sees a problem, he runs around it. He doesn’t face the situation.
“He has always lied.” This was said with understanding, even fondness: the same voice that Pierre Leyris used when he characterized Balthus as having a “mimetic personality.” It was as if this were all beyond Balthus’s control, part and parcel of what made him both wonderful and emotionally inaccessible. “He knows how to avoid obstacles. To protect his independence. He has a sense of mystery.”
BÉATRICE CONTINUED WITH her general reminiscences. From the start, Balthus “made a strong impression; he was the man in the house.” She and her sisters “felt fear and admiration.” Everything about him, and every experience, was a bit extraordinary. Like Marie-Pierre, Béatrice remembered the visits to an empty Louvre, not open to the general public: at nine in the morning, when they would concentrate only on Delacroix. In every encounter, the lean, sallow artist was “someone one could not forget—fascinating, a bit animal. He looked at everything, always with a little smile.”
And he put a unique twist on every observation and act. “He dominated the situation”—which, in Béatrice’s free association forty years later, came easily both because Balthus was “very beautiful” and because he was possessed of “a mélange of profound intelligence.” Nothing was by accident in Balthus’s behavior. “He was very conscious of this slightly ambiguous side; he always turned reality.” He saw the world with a certain “derision.” And both his art and his everyday existence were, as much as anything, “like a dream.”
PART OF WHAT I LIKED about the clear-headed and good-natured Béatrice Saalburg was that she reported all of this without animus. What James Lord so vehemently deplored, and Jean Leymarie so sheepishly adheres to, she simply accepted as an integral part of someone she both admired for his talent and enjoyed as a person.
Although “it got stronger with Setsuko,” in this period in the 1950s when the Colle girls were seeing Balthus regularly, “the Comte de Rola came progressively.” It was just another way in which the artist transformed the world around him and initiated his own metamorphosis. Reality was rough enough to require some softening. The artist was “very poor at Chassy”—so much so that he “had to go to friends’ houses to get enough to eat.” There were “not enough potatoes.”
Balthus’s companion in this rugged existence was, of course, Léna Leclerq. Béatrice recalled Leclerq as seeming to have evolved out of Parisian café life—as if she simply emerged from nowhere one day at the Deux Magots or the Flore—before she was introduced to Balthus by Giacometti. When Balthus went to Biarritz in July 1954 to begin to fulfill his half of the deal with Madame Colle, he stepped off the train with the young poet and introduced her to the Colle girls with the line, “Voilà ma gouvernante.” At about the age of twelve, Béatrice was immediately struck both by how pale Léna was and by her wrists with the slits that had still not healed from her recent suicide attempt.
Léna was—in the French sense of the word—“formidable.” She had “yellow eyes” and was shaped “like a Giacometti sculpture … very thin, and with a big bust and big calves.” Béatrice recalled her as “straightforward”—and as intense as her lover, although their passions lay in very different directions. The daughter of Communists, the poet “remained an anarchist”—which was notable in part because “Balthus had no political conscience at all.” After her affair with Balthus, she ended up in a tiny apartment where she hid arms for Algerians.
The teenage Colle girls had all been shaken when Léna tried to kill herself in response to the ascendancy of Frédérique. Even if for Balthus, Léna was nothing but “a little adventure,” for Léna, the artist was “her whole life.” Indeed, eventually she did succeed in committing suicide.
But in a way this was not surprising. Balthus’s effect on women was, by Béatrice’s account, extraordinary. “He took them up completely. He was beautiful, young, and irresistible. Laurence, too, was very much in love with him. And other women were overwhelmed. They were at the mercy of Balthus. They posed, and became totally fascinated with him; while he made them part of his life.
“He looked at them like a sibyl. He was like a cat. Once he chose his prey, no one could resist him. It was this that was fascinating: when he desired something, he got it.”
To the three young Colle girls, however, he was simply part of life. Dancers and artists came and went in their house; they were used to the extraordinary. What they wanted to do that summer was go to the beach. “Balthus was there each morning with a box of chocolates”—but they wished only to play. Yet they did what they were supposed to, and sat while their parents’ friend sketched and made watercolors because, as was the case for Dolores Miró, you did not challenge the rules—especially when the taskmaster was Balthus.
BÉATRICE SAALBURG REVIEWED the stages of Balthus’s existence as if they were a sequence of atmospheres and attractions that had no reality beyond the artist’s vision and desires. To look out the windows at Chassy is to see the vistas as he painted them; Béatrice remarked that Balthus so completely evoked the atmosphere of that house that she could not figure out whether the pictures gave their atmosphere to the building, or the building to the pictures. The main difference, she told me, between Chassy and the art showing it is the overwhelming cat smell of the actual place.
Frédérique—who still lives in this château that she and Balthus inhabited together—was obviously well suited to the rural existence in that corner of the Morvan, but less able to fit into the next phase of her lover’s life, in Rome. “She likes horses, animals, country.” I pictured the way she looked at age seventeen on the sofa in The Dream, and in Young Girl in White Dress, and two years later in Girl at a Window. “With her hair to her shoulders, she is now like a woman who prolonged her girlhood. She would have liked to marry Balthus and have children. She was very jealous when he left.”
But what suited one stage of Balthus’s evolution was inadequate for the next. At the Villa Medici, Balthus would need a woman lofty enough for his new post. “He opened the door for Setsuko. She’s very fine. Very intelligent. Perfect for that life”—both in Rome and in Rossinière ever since. I thought of Setsuko on the phone organizing a visit with Mrs. Goulandris in Gstaad, of Setsuko planning dinner with the servants, of Setsuko’s tremendous alertness and intelligence and chic, and recognized how right Béatrice was.
“Balthus went from a precarious country situation to civilized life. Frédérique was a bit adolescent, wild, marginal.… She isn’t entirely reasonable—she is still très sauvage.” Thus Balthus had to abandon her.
THIS MATTER OF THE SUBLIMATION of the “très sauvage” prompted Béatrice and me to discuss The Guitar Lesson and Balthus’s repeated assertion that he wished he had never painted it. Balthus’s former model had pointed out during our conversation that in all of his other paintings the artist had held himself back as the spectator. “He is always gazing as an outsider—looking at the world like a cat. At the same time, he is spectator and actor. It’s the moment between the scene—le spectacle—and the action—this little period—that he comes to paint.” In paintings like The Three Sisters, the views out the window at Chassy, and the earlier canvases of Thérèse, it is as if Balthus is the one looking out the curtain—“always a little bit secret,” Béatrice commented. We feel Balthus’s presence both as the participant and the observer, but aren’t exactly clear about who is who and what is where. There is a tremendous self-consciousness—as if the subjects are observing him observing them—but a lot is furtive, and we know that the world of secrets is what matters. To reveal all would be to lose one’s identity: as a liar, an inventor, one’s own creator. This is true of Balthus’s teenage girls, and of Balthus himself.
Balthus in Chassy, 1957 (photo credit 20.5)
Béatrice continued. “In his other paintings, he stopped. The Guitar Lesson, however, is the real one. The painting troubles him now because it’s too honest.” Its subject, of course, is conquest, power, blatant seduction. It does not waffle about the wish to be man and woman at the same time, victor and victim. It reveals the subsuming role of sensuous pleasure—of striped wallpaper and silky upholsteries, of the world of form, as well as of genital sex. For while savoring the texture of satin, it focuses unambivalently on erotic desire, the allure of flesh so strong that everything else in the world ceases to matter.
This time Balthus laid his cards on the table—rather than hiding them with a twisted wrist behind his back. As his former teenage model understood all too well, ultimately he preferred haze.
I SAW THE GREATEST OF ALL the variations of The Three Sisters—the one that Sylvia Lorant had seen at Henriette Gomès’s—in the sprawling West Hollywood house of Mr. and Mrs. Emilio Azcárraga (color plate 12). The mansion is a vast open-plan building composed of arcades and glass walls and terraces in which inside and outside merge. This Spanish colonial palace with state-of-the-art media equipment is set on a well-tended private park in the middle of a densely packed residential section overlooking Los Angeles.
Like Niarchos’s apartment, this enclave belonging to the greatest television magnate in Mexico seemed like a secret lair. Now the work of a struggling artist of the 1950s who could scarcely afford the bare bulbs that were his sole source of lighting was in the inner sanctum of wealth.
Emilio Azcárraga, who died in April 1997, was yet another of the Balthus collectors who seem the stuff of the fiction Balthus read as a youth and dreamed of making his reality. Azcárraga “usually travel[ed] with an entourage befitting the most powerful media mogul in Mexico. With his baronial bearing and distinctive appearance—a stripe of white hair bisect[ed] his jet-black mane—Mr. Azcárraga live[d] up to his nickname, ‘El Tigre.’ ”1 Thus it was in “the Tiger’s” den that The Three Sisters and two other masterpieces by the King of Cats had come to rest.
El Tigre wielded power in a way that must have drawn him instinctively to Balthus’s work. An obituary of the “Billionaire Who Ruled Mexican Broadcasting” reports:
His decision making style was as autocratic as it was bold. Televisa employees tell of the tall wooden chairs he kept for visitors to the offices he maintained in Mexico City.… The chair was so high that the adults who sat in it could not touch the ground with their feet and so seemed childlike. Whenever he wanted to reprimand or belittle someone who worked for him, he was said to have offered a seat in the notorious chair.2
Balthus’s portrait subjects would have been right at home.
EVEN THOUGH I HAD MET Sylvia, Béatrice, and Marie-Pierre by the time my wife and I saw the Azcárragas’ Three Sisters, this painting struck me not so much as a group portrait of these specific girls as an emblem of a particular time in life. It reveals generic types of female adolescents and their connection to one another. Marie-Pierre, on the sofa, is the haughty one, the seductress, infinitely self-assured; Sylvia, on the left, is the girl who deals with life by losing herself in the world of books; Béatrice, on the floor, is the squirmy child. Those distinct personalities emerge from one of Balthus’s most well-conceived canvases.
The Three Sisters is among Balthus’s masterpieces—completed at a moment in his life when the artist was everything he could be, true to his passions personal and painterly. Subtle yet authoritative, and unique in its delicacy—the picture is neither too weird nor too mannered—it encapsulates a realm of human existence into which few observers have so daringly or skillfully ventured.
The figures—which exist in a Pieresque hierarchy, with Marie-Pierre the Queen of Sheba—function as a frieze. When we examine the canvas closely, we marvel at the way the artist has brought it all off. The girls’ faces, much as they seem to belong to living beings, are deliberately blurred: concealing and distanced. Marie-Pierre’s right leg, which is like the linchpin of the composition—practically dead center, a bold vertical beat in the horizontal flow—makes us feel that Balthus is asking us just how much he can get away with, it is so disproportionately massive. It should turn the lithe girl in her orangy-red dress into some sort of monster—yet somehow it does not.
The figures, posed and studied, are frozen in time, suggesting a religious permanence. Similarly, each still life—the basket of apples, the bouquet of flowers, even the solitary apple Béatrice is eating—is an event. A sense of age and experience emanates from the amazing textures of The Three Sisters. The flesh, different from all the other substances, is a network of little lines, like a porcelain glaze that has developed craquelure. The dominant dark greens and browns look carefully plotted and worked and reworked, bespeaking a centuries-old tradition of art. These earthly colors seem based in the fundaments of existence, with their deep, quiet tones offsetting the ceaseless rhythm.
On top of this tonality that makes us feel that the artist took years to achieve it and apply the paint, Marie-Pierre’s flower, her red shoes, the sole of Béatrice’s yellow slippers, and other small details provide bright accents, fresh and young. This color scheme suggests the perpetual newness and spark of youth against the layers of civilization: the ability of children—even in the most antique-laden and cultured settings, redolent of history and rules—to offer sharpness, freshness, and energy.
Meanwhile, Balthus has worked his way around the scene brilliantly. He has painted the folds and cascades of Marie-Pierre’s dress in the manner that Morandi paints a seashell: it exists. The cushion shapes on the sofa back echo the three heads and provide a powerful setting. The little orange geranium Marie-Pierre holds has been painted with the delicacy of a Fabergé egg.
At a distance, this is real space. The figures occupy it with a Giacometti-like reality. The wood frame truly supports the upholstery of the armchair, and Sylvia really sits there. Yet there is, of course, something anatomically wrong with Béatrice. Where her buttocks should be divided beneath her yellow garment, the flesh reads as a single continuous mass. Whereas we feel that in many ways Balthus has re-created everyday life in the canvas, here we are left questioning.
This artistic puzzlement has that same dichotomy as the bright paint within the subdued whole, or the bold children in an urbane setting. It is, simultaneously, inordinately sophisticated and childlike—perhaps faux näive. The Three Sisters is not so much the real world as Balthus’s version of the real world. Therefore its personages must be contorted, their heads too big (and hence babylike), and their hands disastrous (he has practically painted them out). The art that emerges is serene but tense, totally languid yet charged up. Energy, myth, imagination, and restlessness all prevail. Puzzles and frippery—and a high-degree of game-playing—are there like a kid’s prank in this extraordinary semblance of earthy reality.
ELEVEN- AND TWELVE-YEAR-OLD girls sit in unusual positions. Or, at least, seven- and eight-year-olds do. What Balthus did in repeated paintings—his variations of The Three Sisters and of The Living Room—was to show girls who look to be young teenagers but sprawl in a way more characteristic of slightly younger children, who really do not care or notice if the rest of the world can see their underwear.
The artist would, of course, attach no significance to his having given the attributes of seven-year-olds to adolescents. He would say that he was simply showing children.
But when we consider the actual art as evidence—more than the gospel preached by Balthus himself or by his spokesman Jean Leymarie or the prodigal son Stanislas now making good—it appears that even in work as subdued and tasteful as The Three Sisters, Balthus was still making powerful young women his prey. He was no longer depicting them as rapees or murdered corpses as in The Victim, or as the girls under direct genital attack in The Street and The Guitar Lesson, but he still had his girls where he wanted them: displaying their sexuality, both offering it and denying it.
As such, the three sisters are like Balthus himself—presenting an irresistible form of beauty and then keeping their secrets and denying access. On one level, they show all. On another, like cats who purr on your chest when it suits them and then flee and elude your grasp, they steadfastly maintain their distance.
