Hovering between innocence and knowledge
The Met on a Balthus exhibition in 2013:
Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations explores the origins and permutations of the French artist’s focus on felines and the dark side of childhood. Balthus’s lifelong fascination with adolescence resulted in his most iconic works: girls on the threshold of puberty, hovering between innocence and knowledge. In these pictures, Balthus mingles intuition into his young sitters’ psyches with an erotic undercurrent and forbidding austerity, making them some of the most powerful depictions of childhood and adolescence committed to canvas.
That’s a very Humbert Humbert sort of take. It frames the girls as budding prostitutes, gradually learning how to lure men. It also frames them as being all about sexuality and nothing else, when in fact it’s Balthus who is leering at them.
Between 1936 and 1939, Balthus painted the celebrated series of 10 portraits of Thérèse Blanchard (1925-1950), his young neighbor in Paris. They are regarded as his most perceptive and sensitive portrayals of a young sitter and are among his finest works. At this point in Balthus’s career, the artist was chafing under the burden of portrait commissions, which he resented. So his neighbor’s youth must have been a welcome respite. But then, Balthus always felt a kinship with children; even as a child himself, he had been conscious of childhood’s importance. The portraits of Thérèse show her reading or daydreaming, posing alone, with her cat, or with her brother Hubert.
And lounging with one foot on the floor and the other on the same plane as her body, with Balthus positioned between her knees and her skirt dropped back toward her hips. She’s “daydreaming” and the nice man next door is painting her crotch.
Thérèse became the inspiration of the leitmotif in his oeuvre until the years toward the end of his life, as the artist found other models and muses. In Balthus’s work, all of the girls who play with cats peer into mirrors, read, daydream, or appear completely self-absorbed. Their ostensibly unself-conscious postures sometimes suggest sensuality and languor, sometimes ungainliness—a contradiction that is perfectly in keeping with the phenomenon of puberty. Balthus rendered his young models with as much dignity and importance as someone their own age would have perceived them.
And with their legs wide open for the viewer’s convenience.
I wonder what killed poor Thérèse Blanchard at 25.
Thanks to Sackbut for the link.
“the French artist’s focus on felines and the dark side of childhood.”
Wouldn’t the “dark side of childhood” consist of things like being teased, bullied and abused? Of dealing with peer pressure, ostracism and cliquishness? Negotiating the social ecology of other children? Homework? Fear of clowns? In some places, child labour?
This “dark side” resides in the mind of the artist (or viewer), not in the nature of childhood itself, so it’s not the dark side of childhood per se, but the dark side of the artist’s feelings about girls. That’s something else entirely. Looks like the Met’s copy writer bought into it, though.
Iknklast, Pliny the in Between and Acolyte of Sagan say most of what I was thinking, and more, much better than I do, in the next post’s comments. http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2017/properly-appreciated/#comments
“even as a child himself, he had been conscious of childhood’s importance.” This strikes me as somehow creepy.
Yeah, that ” hovering between innocence and knowledge” line is especially creepy. Those things are not opposites.
How much of a ‘dark side’ would these girl’s childhoods include if it wasn’t for HIM, and adults like him. Objectifying girls who are too damn’ young to have their own sexual intention or agency is horrible.
‘…perceptive and sensitive portrayals …’
That Marlene Dietrich pose in the included image here could not be more stilted and unnatural. What’s supposed to be happening? Is she stirring from an erotic dream while napping on a coffee-table/piano bench?
Pull the other one.
Napping on a piano bench is a bad idea by the time you reach the age of that girl; I don’t recommend it for anyone of any age, especially an unpadded piano bench. But napping in that position? That is not possible. It is only that her eyes are closed that would say “nap” to anyone, because you simply do not sleep in that position if there is any other possible position available.
In fact, her position is strangely reminiscent of the movie “Airplane!” when they told people to get into crash positions, and everyone assumed it was the positions after the crash.
Come now, it’s calisthenics, she’s getting into the position that…um…strengthens…no, stretches…no, extends…well it does something healthy and useful once she’s got her right arm wrapped around her head so that her tits stick out.
Why must it? Why was her ‘youth’ the vital factor for his respite from his burden? Surely he’d have relieved his burden sooner had he not spent so much time painting pervy pictures of the kid next door.
Another thought just struck me: what the fuck were the girl’s parents doing, letting the dirty old man exploit their daughter’s youth?
Yes, that’s an interesting question. Maybe they were arty types themselves and saw it as Art. The Met does, so maybe they did too…although you would think parental feeling would get in the way.
I mean speaking as someone who once was a girl child…it’s not just that the viewer is invited to leer…it’s also that the child is shamed and humiliated. As I mentioned, girls are subject to shaming about Showing Underpants While Wearing a Skirt throughout childhood. (Much less so now, I assume and hope, now that they’re allowed to wear jeans to school.) That “oh her eyes are closed so she doesn’t see us staring up her skirt tee hee” thing is not just prurient, it’s nasty. I’ve heard men sniggering about looking up women’s skirts. It’s a thing. Balthus is jeering as well as leering here.
It’s not just ‘a thing’, it’s a pop-culture thing. Even above and beyond the ubiquitous ‘panty shots’ of anime, you can point to numerous portrayals of voyeuristic conduct in western media (film, especially) as simply something played up for laughs or prurient interest (almost invariably with the girl/woman in the role of the object being viewed–the first two that leap to mind are Splash where John Candy, both as a child and an adult, goes around looking up women’s skirts with a lame “dropped my change” ploy, and Witness, where Harrison Ford’s cop-on-the-run spies on an Amish woman taking a sponge bath. And of course, there’s the almost iconic Shower Scene from Porky’s, which was blatant in using twenty-something actresses to portray nude teenage girls.
Yes, yes it is, and it always makes me cringe and fume. (I haven’t seen Splash or Porky’s, but there are plenty of others.)
I came across an interesting thing about Balthus and Thérèse I thought I’d share for no other reason than I found it interesting if one’s into arty things. It adds perspective for neophytes as to how this painting is placed within the context of the artist’s work.
There’s a cruder version of the controversial painting from a year before.