Balthus. Maverick Among Moderns
The key to understanding the contemporary significance of Balthus’s work lies in its ambiguity. The French artist (1908, Paris – 2001, Rossinière), featured in a retrospective at Fondation Beyeler, Basel until January 1, 2019, stood outside of time, enclosed in an elite world, as suggested in his paintings’ indoor scenes. Refusing to align himself with any contemporary currents, Balthus paraded his grand obsessions on canvas across his lifetime, combining the virtuosity of the Old Masters with an eccentric, avant-garde attitude.
“BALTHUS,” FONDATION BEYELER, BASEL. THROUGH JANUARY 1, 2019.
I do not know why Balthus’s painting smells like the plague, the storm, the epidemics. (Antonin Artaud, Balthus, 1947)
The idea of having a feature in a contemporary magazine on Balthus (1908–2001), who has been dead for more than a decade, might seem inappropriate. However this anachronistic character was the essence of his world. From the outset, he didn’t align with contemporary currents. Any contemporary currents. During his long life, which spanned most of the 20th century, he witnessed many changes in the art world – without his own work echoing these turnarounds. Everything about his lifestyle tended to build an image of a conservative spirit: the fake aristocratic title, the château life (from the castle in the Morvan region to the Villa Medici in Rome to the 18th-century Swiss chalet, all places in which he lived), and his own statements about art. The fact that from 1961 to 1977 he held the very prestigious position of director of the French Academy in Rome only made matters worse. Especially when he spent those years restoring the Renaissance villa by stripping away later additions to attain an ideal, original past – even though his work went much beyond that, as when he had some old statues of the Niobids cast before rearranging them in the villa gardens, using the relics of ancient times to make what was, in the end, entirely his own work.
Something of the past
Several scholars, such as Jean Clair, have mentioned “the apparent un-topical character of this painting.” I must say that Balthus himself has led us in this direction with statements such as, “I believe I’m a profoundly medieval man.” And, “I am sending out an SOS to save painting because the love of painting is dead. I even believe that painting doesn’t exist anymore. I just can’t understand what painters today are doing. It’s called ‘contemporary art.’ … For me, it’s merely something executed without mastery. … The painter’s craft has disappeared.” And, “In some ways, my painting depicts a world that has disappeared.” In an interview with David Bowie, he told him, “I’ve never been interested in modern painting.” Which is ironic for a magazine called Modern Painters.
I have always found in his paintings an ambiguous mixture of the Old Masters’ virtuosity combined with a naive charm (this is possibly what attracted Wilhelm Uhde, the great champion of Le Douanier Rousseau, to Balthus’s work). Indeed, Balthus was self-taught, but he was not an outsider, since he grew up in the most sophisticated entourage. His father, Erich Klossowski, was a painter and art historian, his mother was close to Rainer Maria Rilke and the Parisian art scene, and his brother, Pierre Klossowski, was an artist and writer. Balthus’s fascination with the craft of art was probably due to both his lack of official academic training (well-trained artists are more inclined to unlearn) and the fact that he acquired most of his technique by copying the Old Masters at the Louvre. His fascination with the frescoes of Piero della Francesca and Masaccio, which he copied during his Italian trip of 1926, was certainly an important milestone in his apprenticeship. But his paintings would attain the chalky quality of the Italian masters only much later, in the 1950s and ’60s, with the use of casein tempera. The feeling of being in the presence of something old when facing his paintings is also due to the creative process: the slow layering of paint, which can take years to complete, gives his paintings an archeological patina. Casein tempera has a natural stiffness to it, particularly when compared to creamy oil paint, which would have been better suited to convey the sensuality of warm flesh.
The constant debate about the possible erotic nature of his work carries another issue, no less problematic: beauty. Discarding the possible sexual tension or intension of the work for the sake of pure beauty does not make these works more acceptable today, since beauty (or any other purely aesthetic goal) has become an illegitimate raison d’être. Eroticism, beauty (in its ideal form of young girls), and isolation seem to have become unsuitable. Balthus’s deliberate dissociation from the art scene – not from galleries and writers but from other artists, whether living and/or younger – might be perceived as a form of elitism incompatible with current democratic and egalitarian desires. In the increasingly narrative-oriented art world, Balthus chose to supply as few words as possible. In the handful of interviews he gave, he preferred to insist on the fact that he would not say anything – he would not justify. Which might have been acceptable, had only his paintings not defied our own ability to explain. They depict a literally (en)closed world since they represent interior scenes; even the landscapes appear more as views from a window than painted outdoors, enhancing the physical isolation of the artist from the rest of the world.
Old painters, great artists of today
“A New Spirit in Painting,” curated by Christos M. Joachimides, Norman Rosenthal and Nicholas Serota in 1981 at the Royal Academy in London initiated a series of exhibitions addressing the triumphant return of painting. The core of the exhibition, which displayed paintings made in the 1970s by thirty-eight artists of three different generations, was mostly composed of the generation of painters born in the 1930s–40s, such as Auerbach, Baselitz, Kirkeby, Penck, Lüpertz, Paladino, Chia and Polke, who would later be associated with the painting revival of the 1980s. Such artists as Calzolari, Merz and Kounellis, who were part of the arte povera movement in the late 1960s, best embodied the idea of a “return” to painting.
In their introduction to the catalog, the curators explained their choice to include six older painters (Bacon, Balthus, Guston, Hélion, De Kooning and Matta): “They have been regarded rather as outstanding survivals, with little to contribute to painting now. But we feel that these old painters are great artists of today, whose work has real affinities with the younger painters we have selected for this exhibition.” They continued, “The late manner of such artists as Balthus, Hélion and Guston assumed a significance only when a new sensibility, a new understanding for painting developed.” However, while Picasso’s early 1970s work presented in the show has the wild expressionist qualities and “freedom of expression” that echo the production of the newer generation, Balthus’s slow and traditional technique, resulting in a stucco-like surface, seems quite a mismatch. But Gerhard Richter’s series “Annunciation after Titian” (1973) and Cy Twombly’s paintings that directly refer to Greco-Roman antiquity share the same ambitions.
While launching a whole generation of more or less “new” artists, the exhibition clearly aligned with a more ambiguous position, lying between renewal and return. This debate at the core of the 1980s painting revival appears to pertain as much to reaction against the 1960s avant-garde – which became academic in the following decade – as to a certain resurfacing of traditional values. It is in this ambiguity that we might grasp the contemporaneity of Balthus’s work, which possibly appeared, among the new generation, as a reaction against the decaying epigones of conceptual art. “Since painting was, and in many circles still is, regarded [as] an absolute anachronism, the work that has been done by a number of major artists over the past two decades might best be understood as a partisan art, an underground battle against the official norm. When a ‘rebel’ like Balthus insists on his right to realize his grandiose obsessions on canvas and thereby to his own very private visions, he carries through something that has long being ignored in art – the right of the artist, and not only the artist, to define himself as an individual.” This perception of Balthus might come as a surprise when you think about his claim against the “personality” and “individuality” that, according to him, ruins contemporary art. He was much more in favor of anonymity deprived of expressiveness.
Solidity
When I recently visited the studio of Bob Wirtz, an artist described by Jed Lipinski as “quite possibly New York City’s only remaining outsider artist,” the last thing on my mind was Balthus. I had, of course, heard of Witz – through a group of New York artists – as some little secret known only to insiders and true art lovers. In the middle of Witz’s studio, I was astonished to see the biography of Balthus by Nicholas Fox Weber on his bookshelf. It was clearly not there to decorate but had been carefully read through by Witz, who had covered it with numerous notes, such as “independence and courage” or “The past. Newness and novelty.” When I asked him about the work of Balthus, he described it as “solid.” That is the kind of thing an artist would say about a peer.
Milton Gendel: “You don’t like to discuss your work.”
Balthus: “No. There is no point to it, unless with other artists. With my friend Giacometti I often have long talks about specific problems, but with those who don’t paint, what is there to say.”
Choghakate Kazarian is an art historian and curator based in New York City.