Exhibitions
Balthus (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, till 29 August)
Potent pubescents
Giles Auty
It seems odd to me that I have not had an earlier chance to write about the impor- tant art of Balthus. Unfortunately the last retrospective of his work was in Paris in 1984 when I had barely started with this weekly. The artist was born in Paris 85 years ago with the exotic name of Balthazar Klossowski de Rola. Balthus's youth was spent between Paris, Geneva, Berne and Berlin and he is regarded almost as a native son in Switzerland where he also spent the years of the Second World War and has lived subsequently.
The artist, whose parents were artists themselves, grew up in a milieu of art and writing — Bonnard, Gide, Rilke — and formed a close friendship later with Gia- cometti. The present, excellently presented show, including more than 50 paintings and a considerable number of drawings and Illustrations, reflects great credit on the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, a par- ticularly agreeable city where I worked once as a travel guide.
While I have no objection whatsoever to renewing my acquaintance with a city traditionally liked by the English — or with the civilised restaurants of Ouchy — it seems high time that a proper exhibition of such an interesting figure as Balthus should take place in Britain. Balthus is a major figure-painter of unique vision but like two other 20th-century artists of rare importance — Stanley Spencer and Edward Hopper — was excluded from Herbert Read's A Concise History of Modern Paint- ing, a book which had great influence on art education in Britain, on the grounds that he was not a 'modern' artist at all. This is pernicious piffle but the regrettable legacy of Read's reasoning remains with us still and may help explain the neglect shown to the artist by British public gal- leries.
In his youth, Balthus took particular interest in and made copies from such mas- ters as Poussin, Masaccio, Uccello and Piero della Francesca. Indeed, the first named is the obvious influence behind one of several surprising and glorious land- scapes in the show, `Paysage de Cham- provent' 1941-45, but Balthus pays hommage to Cezanne also through landscape and to Matisse and Derain through his interiors and still-lifes. I thought I also detected hints of artists as disparate as Sickert and von Menzel whose works Balthus would have known well from visits to Britain and Germany. Eclecticism is no bad thing where such good masters are concerned but Balthus emerges eventually as a singular artistic voice which is impossible to mistake for any other. The painting for which I imagine Balthus would be known best to a British audience, if only through reproduction, is 'La Cham- bre' which is not included in the present show. That work depicts the figure of an adolescent girl draped over a couch in an attitude of apparent sexual abandon, exposed there by a female dwarf who is in the process of drawing a curtain. The sym- bolism in this and many other works by the artist seems more personal than universal and is charged with a potent eroticism. Unsurprisingly the cat, which claws as well as caresses, is often a player in the artist's hypnotic dramas.
Indeed, Balthus was still a child of 11 when he illustrated Mitsou, a sad little tale of a feline, prefaced and published by Rainer Maria Rilke. Already the lakes and mountains of Switzerland form the striking background to the tale which unfolds through 40 episodes. These and 'La Monta- gene' a 12-foot painting completed in 1937, formed widely contrasting high points in the artist's earlier career. The drawings were precocious, if less than masterly, and drawing as such remains an area of uneven accomplishment throughout the artist's career. But as 'La Montagne' reveals Balthus had confidence enough neverthe-
less to organise a huge outdoor subject of striking composition and originality with three major and three minor figures acting out a strange Balthusian drama. Shadow covers two of the foreground figures but the third, the artist's young wife of the time, emerges from the darkness and stretches herself, arms aloft, in a gesture more redolent of downy four-poster than Alpine upland.
Balthus's women and young girls seem always to be thinking private and intimate thoughts, at times rather obviously but at others much more mysteriously as in the wonderful 'Therese', 1938, where a seated adolescent reveals a face which is made part innocent and part knowing simply through the different expressions of the eyes. This is an important painting by any standard and, like 'La Montagne', belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Disgracefully, there are no major works by Balthus in British public collec- tions. What we are allowed to see, as I point out so often, is edited for us in Britain by our modernist masters in the museum service.
As well as superb landscapes and sym- bolic works, the show in Lausanne boasts a number of remarkable portraits; 'Joan Miro et sa fille Dolores', 1937-38, from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, emphasises again what we miss in Britain. `Portrait de la Famille Cassandre-Mouron', 1935, and 'Portrait de la Baronne Alain de Rothschild', 1958, are wonderfully idiosyn- cratic examples of the genre. The artist's present wife has just been the subject of an acclaimed exhibition at a commercial gallery in London. Would that this could be a prelude to a large-scale show of work there by her husband.
`Le Salon' 1941-43, by Balthus
Previous page
