Balthus: Cats and Girls

by Sabine Rewald

An insightful new look at Balthus’s ongoing fascination with cats and girls, including his controversial paintings of young adolescents

Balthus’s lifelong curiosity with the ambiguities and dark side of childhood resulted in his best-known and most iconic works. In these pictures, Balthus (1908-2001) mingles intuition into his young sitters’ psyches with overt erotic desire and forbidding austerity, making them among the most powerful depictions of childhood and adolescence ever committed to canvas. Often included in these scenes are enigmatic cats, possible stand-ins for the artist himself.
Cats and Girls is the first book devoted to this subject, focusing on the early decades of the artist’s career from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Drawing on extensive knowledge of the artist’s life and work, as well as on interviews with Balthus and the models themselves, Sabine Rewald explores the origins and permutations of Balthus’s obsessions with adolescents and felines. She addresses the crucial influence of such key figures as poet Rainer Maria Rilke, his mother’s lover, who acted as Balthus’s surrogate father, but also includes the previously unknown voices of the girl their recollections and comments provide a unique perspective on some of the best known and most controversial paintings of the 20th century.



Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(09/24/13–01/12/14)

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History

176 pages, Hardcover

First published October 14, 2013

Reviews

[Tamara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really love Balthus, his style and use of colour is something I admire a lot about him. Although his subjects are a bit controversial I continue to appreciate his works, even more so after learning about his life. Just to clarify, this is barely a book, its more images with tiny descriptions.

[Tadzio Koelb · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review of the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of Balthus paintings – “Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations” – for which this is the catalogue – is forthcoming in the Times Literary Supplement.

Curator Sabine Rewald’s central assertion is that the artist was not the source of the eroticism in the paintings on display, but in fact only acted as a sort of messenger, bringing model and viewer together in a way that exploits a mutual misunderstanding. To me this is at best a sly misrepresentation, and I write:

One way this is implied in the catalogue is by a conflation of girls and their representations through such linguistic tricks as “Thérèse had numerous successors, but they lack her distinct features and the psychological depth of Balthus’s portrayals of her”. Posture and expression are assumed to originate with the model (“Thérèse Blanchard never smiles”; “She remains always herself”), the painter quietly left out of the equation, or compared to “a photographer who captures his sitter repeatedly from similar … angles.”

I argue that Balthus was deeply theatrical (he designed stage sets), and that his work is the result of very obviously calculated choices:

The poses are clearly forced: indeed, it is the mystery of the reader’s unnatural position (and the way it jars with the relative naturalism of the painting) that make “The Salon I” (1941–1943) and “The Salon II” (1942) so arresting. The removal of a cat (present in the preparatory sketch) from beneath a stroking hand in “Golden Days” (1944–46) creates something awkward and enigmatic: a straightforward interaction becomes an intangible – and ostensibly intrinsic – yearning. The effect is so strong, one starts to imagine cats missing everywhere.

The catalogue quotes – with disapproval – the critic who wrote that “Balthus would be very little without his sexual perversion”, but it is hard at the end of this show to find the statement incorrect. Instead I disagree with both the critic and the curator, who seem unquestioningly to assume that sexual perversion is not a fit subject for art, when Balthus so clearly demonstrates why they are wrong.

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this case, you really can judge a book by its cover.

[carelessdestiny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This painter's life story reads like a nineteenth century decadent French novel, but what is even more fascinating is his superlative skill with pictorial composition and other painterly techniques that he used to create these really unique pictures.

[Ostap Bender · Rating 4 out of 5]

Balthus is an artist who is bound to disturb you. His lifelong preoccupation with painting prepubescent girls nude or in highly suggestive poses may actually anger you, especially if you think beyond the paintings and into their creation. His painting ‘The Guitar Lesson’ from 1934 shocks us with such overt sadism. Again and again he shows us girls with their legs spread, in outright provocation (as in ‘The Golden Days’ (1944-45), or ‘Therese Dreaming’ (1938)), or in what are ostensibly more innocent works (as in ‘The Children’ (1937), or ‘The Game of Patience’ (1943)). His models were mostly neighbor girls over the decades - Therese Blanchard, Georgette, Jeannette Aldry, Marie-Pierre Colle, and Frederique Tison among others - and one wonders what their parents were thinking. The expression of Frederique Tison in ‘Girl in White’ (1955) shows us a very sad painting if you ask me, as the 17-year-old girl (who had posed for him since the age of 9) seems resigned to the gaze of the 47-year-old painter.

Great art pushes boundaries, is provocative, and causes introspection. Balthus clearly does all that, and with skill as a painter. Is he to be praised as a great artist, or condemned as one encouraging pedophilia, if not (possibly) practicing it? Is there a message or statement he’s making in these images? In ‘The Street’ (1933), with the original version having the man’s hand between the girl’s legs (he altered it at the owner’s request 20 years later), is his point that while this violence is happening to a girl, the rest of the world is disinterested, their heads turned and going about their business? In ‘Girl With a Cat’ (1937), are Therese’s eyes telling us that if we’re thinking dirty thoughts while gazing upon her with our adult eyes, we’re the ones who are perverts? Or are those thoughts a reflection of the discomfort we feel as adults when girls occasionally reveal themselves, innocently, or later, when they inevitably do begin to blossom, but are still children?

The book itself, published after a 1984 exhibition in Paris and New York and written by Sabine Rewald, an expert in Balthus’s work, is well formatted, has a great introduction, 51 full page color reproductions, and 151 black and white illustrations. It provides insightful commentary, and does a great job showing earlier artwork that inspired specific pieces by Balzac, as well as his own sketches and studies. It was interesting to find that Rainer Maria Rilke had been his mother’s lover, and encouraged his art at an early age. In reviewing and rating the book, how much should this weigh in, versus some of the content?

Balthus’s position that the paintings were not meant to be erotic is laughable. Some apologists point out that at the start of his career, the French age of consent was 13 – does this excuse him somewhat, or does it illustrate how hopelessly wrong he was, that this material does not stand the test of time, especially as we’re more sensitized to the violence against women and girls in society?

Answers to these questions are hard to come by. At first I thought that Rewald didn’t go far enough to explain Balthus’s rationale, or to provide a judgment of him one way or another. However, I came to realize that that in itself was the right answer – for art is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s up to the viewer, or reader, to judge. And as an aside, Rewald continued to write about Balthus after 1984, and this excellent article from 1998 expands on her themes, as well as provides additional examples of the treatment of puberty in art (from Rops, Schiele, Munch, Dix, Kirchner, and others).
www.metmuseum.org/pubs/journals/1/pdf...

As for the art itself, my favorites in this collection:
Andre Derain (1936)
Therese (1938) … a more subtle version
The Cherry Tree (1940)
The Game of Patience (1943)
Nude with Cat (1949)
The Room (1952-54) … wow, on the scorn and judgment in the look on the little girl!
The Dream I (1955)
The Turkish Room (1963) … he would marry the model, Setsuko, despite a 35 year age gap
Katia Reading (1968-76)

It’s not for everyone, and it’s art that you may be seriously conflicted by, but if Balthus is an artist you’re interested in trying to fathom, this would be a good book to start with.

[Leonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't read all the text in this collection of art work by Balthus. I looked at the images, which was my purpose in checking the book out of the library. The paintings were interesting and, like most art, but especially painted portraits, raises questions about the artist and the models, their relationships, the atmosphere of the setting, the personalities of the characters, and the goal of the artist. The images were not particularly dark, but I did not find them infused with joy either. They seem to be moody and pensive. Of course if I had read all the text I may have reasons for why the images are like that!

[Benjy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does what it says on the tin. Balthus hitting the high notes on his favored subjects, cats and girls. The cats mitigate the paedo revery just enough to make this book something you can leave out in view of others. Cats: what can't they do? (Other than display prolonged affection, of course.)