Warm and tender obsessions
Andrew Wordsworth on the themes that characterise Monet's and Balthus's work
I n the summer of 1903 Monet closed the
door of his studio on the outside world and began the long series of paintings of w-aterlilies that would absorb almost all his energies until his death 23 years later. Apart from a two-month trip to Venice in 1908 he would never again paint away from home, nor work on a subject outside his own garden. This change in attitude was significant. As an exhibition now on in Treviso (half an hour from Venice) reminds us, Monet's reputation as an open-air painter had been based on the ease with which he could evoke the light and atmosphere of a wide variety of landscapes. The 90 paintings on display in Treviso present locations worthy of expensive Hollywood movies: the mountains of Norway, London, Brittany, Paris, the Me d'Azur. In one room the Houses of Parliament stand next to the Doge's Palace in Venice, while opposite them a view of a Dutch windmill and field of tulips is hung next to a study of a Norwegian village.
Working like this, Monet always ran the risk of producing images that were pretty but superficial. The 1890s saw him moving away from a descriptive mode by elaborating variations on specific subjects, such as a haystack, or Rouen Cathedral, or a line of poplars. The experimentation, however, remained at an essentially technical level — one effect, set against another, morning light analysed in relation to the soft glow of dusk. With the series of waterlilies the involvement was much more complex. At the same time as he evolved subtle and unpredictable colour harmonies, Monet used the reflections from the water to create spatial depth without perspective, thereby radically rethinking the principles of landscape composition. And he nurtured the metaphors implicit in his subject until the garlanded surface of the pond, fragile, weightless and luminous, appeared like an image of the human soul laid bare.
The picture-postcard images of Monet's earlier work — the churches and railway stations, the mothers with parasols and rosy-checked children — sank to the bottom of his Giverny pond, drowned by calligraphic arabesques of colour that boldly asserted the intrinsic and inimitable qualities of painting as painting. And the surface of the pond, with its shifting depths and reflections, was in a sense transposed directly onto the surface of the canvas, so that the object represented became one with the act of painting. Gradually but inevitably the terms by which all 19th-century painting had been judged were called into question and then transcended.
The implications of Monet's later work were far-reaching: the New York Abstract Expressionists of the 1 950s, for instance, claimed him as a major precursor, and praised the way in which he had liberated colour and form from a descriptive context. Indeed, the consensus among the avantgarde about the limits of 19th-century aesthetics was such that any painter who relied on narrative or descriptive devices in his work was liable to be branded as reactionary or old-fashioned, and ostracised.
This was more or less what happened to the French painter Balthus, who is now the subject of a major retrospective in Venice. The fact that such a large exhibition (more than 200 paintings and drawings) should be held is not just a tribute to the talent of the painter — it also suggests that the criteria on which modern art was for so long based are finally being called into question. The wheel comes full circle as a thoroughbred figurative painter, whose compositions relied on scrupulous drawing, numerous studies and countless references to the great masters of the past, is now proposed as an important protagonist in 20th-century art.
Balthus found it impossible to imagine that art had a future if it severed the umbilical cord that bound it to the past. His favourite model was Piero della Francesca, but his instinct was to turn to the French school for help and inspiration. During his long career he leaned on and learned from most of the masters of French classical painting, from Poussin through to Bonnard. The result, inevitably, was a hybrid art of very mixed quality: indeed, with his eclectic tastes and aristocratic detachment, Balthus could easily have been no more than an accomplished mannerist painter, a learned and somewhat remote eccentric totally out of touch with his time. What makes his contribution to 20th-century art significant, though, was the honesty and intensity with which he tried to give form to his personal and private experiences, and in particular to his highly ambivalent attitude towards young girls.
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For more than 60 years Balthus devoted a large part of his time to drawing and painting pre-pubescent and adolescent girls, who were either fully clothed, half-dressed or naked. The fact that he seems never to have used a model over the age of 21 makes the point very clear: unlike, say, Picasso or Modigliani, Balthus was not a painter of women. He painted girls, and girls only.
Given the public outcry against paedophilia at the present time, one could reasonably expect the curators of this exhibition to offer some sort of comment or reflection about this crucial aspect of Balthus's art. Curiously, though, the 500page catalogue glosses over the possible implications of the painter's lifelong preoccupation with what Nabokov would later call `nymphettes', treating the nudes in just the same way as the landscapes that he painted. It is as if the act of painting implied a subtle alchemy of the emotions, transforming thoughts and images which might be considered indecent in other forms (photography or video, for example) into valid and valuable works of art.
Certainly the paintings of these girls are as carefully composed and controlled as the rest of Balthus's output; yet the drawings done from life have a warmth and tenderness that is unusual in his work. Typically they show a girl between sleep and waking, either drowsily passive or stretching herself as she wakes up. By focusing on this movement from one state of being to another, Balthus offers some exquisite metaphors for adolescence, both in terms of the passage from childhood towards adulthood, and, more precisely, in the awakening of sexuality. As the pencil caresses the forms and lines of the girl with the lightest of touches, as if afraid of violating the intimacy that is exposed, we feel that it is the artist's own sexuality that is awakened, in response to the model's beauty.
When is a theme not a theme? When it is an obsession. Balthus's endless brooding over young girls has a clearly obsessive quality, in a way that Monet's single-minded exploration of the theme of waterlilies does not. Of course, Monet's subject-matter is by definition innocent, but it is not just that: his canvases breathe an exhilarating sense of freedom. while Balthus's paintings arc cramped and disturbing. Monet releases a potential of infinite variations from a single subject, while Balthus fixes and concentrates attention with unremitting ferocity.
Balthus is the first well-known painter whose ceuvre can reasonably be defined in terms of a single obsession. Born in 1908, he grew up in a time when Freud's writings were all the rage, and his work can be seen as a classic example of the influence of Freudian thought on modern art. Balthus's obsession could be considered an essential ingredient in an artist's vision (for example, it is a keyword in the vocabulary of Francis Bacon). In the end it is Balthus's skilful reading of his unconscious which —despite his rather pedantic style and academic way of thinking — makes his contribution to 20th-century art valuable, and justifies the elaborate and expensive tribute offered to him in Venice.
Monet is at Treviso, Casa dei Carraresi, until 10 February 2002; Balthus is at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, until 6 January: 2002.
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