I last celebrated Balthus’s birthday in the early days of Artblog.net, on a Leap Day twenty years ago, by quoting him:
Rilke maintained that I must accept this magic a priori, this entry into the marvelous world of painting, in profound areas where light is found. I was born on February 29, so my birthday can only be celebrated every four years. I'm pleased by this calendar oddity, created by the movement of the stars. I've always noted it with a grain of irony, like a mark of strangeness. Rilke wrote to me when I was fifteen years old: “This discreet birthday that most often dwells in a form of the beyond, certainly gives you rights over many unknown things here below. My dear B., I wish that you may be able to introduce some people on our earth to growing, despite the difficulties of our unsure seasons.”
I've always tried to follow his request, and be faithful to his wishes. My painting has merely to “introduce” some moments, unusual encounters, when my visions of the beyond pierce through.
In 2013 I had an opportunity to write about him for The New Criterion. The occasion was “Cats and Girls” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
One sometimes wishes that he would summon the ingenuous verve of his eleven-year-old self, put a damn shape down, compose the rectangle, and be done with it.
But the mature Balthus was attempting to accomplish Piero’s certainty by way of Cézanne’s patchwork, in which the canvas is a web of relations that must be assembled one strand at a time, each of which is a consequential problem. Meanwhile, influences as diverse as Georges Braque and the Song painter Guo Xi weighed on the effort.
Before filing copy my editor advised me to look at prior items on Balthus in TNC archives. He meant well and only wanted to spare me from repeating an earlier author. But one of the prior items was a 6,000-word essay from 1983 by no less than James Lord. The pressure was intense, though I remain pleased with how my effort turned out.
By 2013 Balthus’s reputation had started to founder. “The girls are self-possessed and serious, and Balthus always denied any hint of paedophilia,” wrote Jason Farago on the same exhibition. “But get real: these are erotic images of children. Some, especially the Thérèse portraits, show real invention and even a little humour that make them difficult to dismiss outright. Others, especially the mannered domestic scenes of his later career, are barely competent acts of voyeurism.”
Farago is entitled to his thoroughly mistaken opinion. Resolve sometimes eluded Balthus, but not competence. I have homaged him in my work more than any other painter. I refer you to Instigation from last week in the hope that you’ll see the connections. Farago talked of how Balthus “despised much of what we now think of as the greatest achievements of modernism,” but his work evinces a deep appreciation of Braque as a colorist and composer. Picasso admired his work and bought an early canvas in support of the younger painter.
I merely cite Farago as typical. In 2017 a New Yorker circulated a petition to remove Thérèse Dreaming from display at the Met, for “supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children.” It garnered 6,000 signatures. Jonathan Jones remarked with evident anger:
Back in 1989, liberals knew where they stood: unequivocally on the side of artistic freedom. While museums wrestled with the right’s pressure to close the “obscene” Mapplethorpe exhibit, the left were protesting on the streets outside, projecting Mapplethorpe images onto buildings to defy censorship.
Some will say it is a lot more complicated today. When it comes to banning art, I disagree. It is not complicated at all. Throughout history people have found reasons, which seemed perfectly good to them at the time, to condemn works of art. In Reformation Europe works of art were destroyed for being Catholic. In Nazi Germany modernist art was classed as “degenerate” and museums were ordered to take it off view. Do we really want modern liberalism to ape such illiberal precedents?
The answer was that some “liberals” very much did. This was the same year that artist Hannah Black entreated the Whitney Museum, “I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting ‘Open Casket’ and with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum.” By 2021 it was clear that the arts had taken a postliberal turn.
Since Balthus’s last birthday, pedophiles have been trying to re-brand as Minor-Attracted Persons. They even acquired a pride flag, to the dismay of the overwhelming majority of homosexuals who are entirely innocent of such predation. Notable progressive author Noah Berlatsky, who authored a hit job on Bret Weinstein that I contradicted for The Federalist, went on to work at an organization that wants to make the world a better place for pedophiles. Would changing attitudes among a certain progressive set mitigate the most emotionally loaded complaints against Balthus? It would seem not. Last year, the Art Institute of Chicago deaccessioned the magnificent La Patience, which the museum acquired in 1964 from Pierre Matisse.
You don’t have to traipse around a chateau in a kimono under a mostly confabulated claim to Polish royalty to think, at times, that modernity is a fouled sluiceway. You need only read the news. How far has the postliberal turn proceeded? Here’s Bari Weiss on her recent talk at the 92nd Street Y:
[F]or a sense of the state of Jewish life in America these days, you need only to have walked by the building [last Sunday]. You would’ve found that police had cordoned off the entire block—and for good reason. Anti-Israel protesters, many wearing masks, gathered to intimidate those who came to the lecture. On the way in, you would’ve been screamed at—told you were a “baby killer” and “genocide supporter” among other choice phrases. You might have even glimpsed Jerry Seinfeld being heckled and called “Nazi scum” on his way out of the talk. (Classy.)
This is of a piece with what’s happening across the country at Jewish events.
Farago’s 2013 characterization of Balthus as “a vile anti-semite” is nearly baseless. One acquaintance cited in Nicholas Fox Weber’s famously beleaguered biography told of Balthus’s “perpetual anti-Semitic quips.” Yet those quips were not so perpetual that Balthus was ever recorded uttering one. Meanwhile:
On Monday at the University of Berkeley, to choose one of so many examples, a violent mob gathered outside an event featuring an IDF reservist. The students who gathered to hear him—and never got a chance to—were forced to evacuate. One student reported being physically assaulted. Another says he was spat on. Various students say the mob yelled slurs including “Jew, Jew, Jew.”
As Jones put it in 2017, “It is right to criticise art, question it, argue over it – but forbidding it should be left to the fascists.” Fascist behaviors have been taken up anew by those who would describe themselves as the enemies of fascism, and their vileness passes without rebuke. Do they hate fascists, truly, or do they envy them?
The enduring loveliness of Balthus’s art is encoded in a peaceful vision of order. Its darkness is that of the human psyche, which left unconfronted at the individual level leads to the abominable displays in Berkeley, New York City, and many cities besides. “I’ve understood that stupidity is increasing in our world like an avalanche,” Balthus told an interviewer in 2001. “I’m a pessimist.” So he moved out of the path of the avalanche. To be misunderstood was a small price to pay for not being crushed.
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Balthus has never particularly moved me. But that's neither here nor there as we're all moved by different imagery. Still, I completely support your opinions throughout the piece. Watching the world take shockingly illiberal turns is a daily adventure. (Btw, you write, "The artist, born in 1908, would have been 29 today." Wouldn't that be 116?)
While in grad school, many of my classmates, and I, considered Balthus one of the great 20th century painters. My opinion has not changed. He was idolized simply for his formidable work; my, have things changed. To the post-liberalists of the world, like Hannah Black, I say, no one is making you look at anything and who are you to dictate the destruction of a work of art?