Balthus [antikvár]

Reincarnating the Art of the Painting "What a disappointment! All figurative!" For the casual visitor, Balthus's first solo show (at the galerie Pierre, Paris) must have come as quite a shock. 1934 was the high summer of abstraction and Surrealism, and Balthus's attempt to "reincarnate the art of painting" (as the poet Pierre-Jean Jouve put it) made him, firom the outset, a marginal figure. At twenty-six, the tide was against him. His art was self-evidently founded in equal parts on imagination and a form of realism midway between the Quattrocento and the most extreme Classicism. In an article published in the La Nouvelle Revue Française in May 1934, Antonin Artaud took up the cudgels on behalf of Balthus's incongruous enterprise. "Painting has, it seems, wearied of depicting beasts and extracting embryos. It seeks to return to a sort of organic realism, which, far from fleeing the poetic, the marvellous and the fable, is more than ever bent on them. And now it possesses the means required. For there is surely something a little too facile about playing with incomplete or nascent forms in order to generate the unexpected, the extraordinary and the marvellous. It is not patterns one paints but existent things; one does not forestall the work of nature on the microscope slide merely to extract the inarticulate. The painter confident of his means and powers deliberately sets out into external space, takes possession of the objects, bodies and forms that he finds there, and makes more or less inspired play with them. Balthus paints primarily light and form. The light on a wall, a parquet, a chair, or an epidermis serves to invite us into the mystery of a body furnished with a sex clearly visible in its every asperity. The nude I am thinking of has something dry and hard about it; it is very exactly filled in. And there is also, it must be said, something cruel about it. It makes sex inviting, but does not disguise its dangers. As to poetry, it enters Balthus's painting in the form of a picture entitled Cathy Dressing (p. 6), in which the young, desirable body of a woman asserts its dream-like authority over a painting as realistic as Courbet's Studio. Imagine a painter's model suddenly transformed, in real life, into a sphinx, and you will have some idea of the impression made by this painting. A technique from the time of David is placed at the service of a violent, modern inspiration. And it is truly the inspiration of a unhealthy epoch, in which the artist who conspires with the real exploits it only in order to crucify it the better.' No better definition has ever been given of the singularity and modernity of Balthus. Nor did Balthus ever deviate from this path after that first exhibition at Pierre Loeb's "Why have you that silk frock on, then?" 1933 hidian ink and pencil Illustration for Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights PAGE 6: Cathy Dressing, 1933 Oil on canvas, 165 x 150 cm Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou