Properly appreciated
From another piece reporting on the Met and Balthus and the petition:
In a 2013 review of the Balthus show in The New Republic, critic Jed Perl called Balthus the “last of the mystics who transformed twentieth-century art.” Perl said mystics are “by turns revered, reviled, demonized, and ignored—and at one point or another in his very long career Balthus was regarded in all of those ways.”
Perl added that Balthus’s paintings of girls “have stood in the way of a full appreciation of his achievement.” He wrote that these works “can be properly appreciated only when we accept them as unabashedly mystical, the flesh a symbol of the spirit, the girl’s dawning self-awareness an emblem of the artist’s engagement with the world.”
Oh come on.
That’s one way of looking at it, certainly, and one way to appreciate it, but if it’s really the only way to appreciate it properly then Balthus fucked up, because another way of looking at it is pretty damn hard to ignore.
What it most obviously is is a very young girl in a skirt sitting with her legs apart in a way that young girls’ mothers teach them not to do when they’re wearing skirts and other people are around. Young girls’ friends and peers and enemies also teach them that, by laughing and shouting and taunting. It’s a thing girls grow up with: the fact that skirts make you vulnerable to accidentally showing your Naughty Bits, and to men and boys who like to put cameras in places where you show your naughty bits even though you’re standing up straight or sitting in a toilet stall.
The glaring fact here is that Thérèse Blanchard would not have been sitting that way in front of Balthus unless he had told her to. He posed her sitting that way. How, exactly, is that calculated pose (calculated by him, not by her) supposed to be unabashedly mystical? How can we tell the flesh is meant to be a symbol of the spirit? What indicates that the girl’s dawning self-awareness is an emblem of the artist’s engagement with the world as opposed to a “look up my skirt” self-awareness imposed on her by the artist?
Mystics forsooth.
Some other writing about it, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Definitely more Humbert Humbert type of ideation, equating one’s own eroticism at seeing young girls underpants with the young girls having some sort of sexual fantasy (of the older perv staring at their underpants, of course, is the assumption).
I may be old, but I still remember being 11, and while there were some budding awarenesses of sexuality as a concept, this doesn’t describe my own worldview at that age (or any other, I might add) but does describe the worldview of those who saw fit to impose themselves on me…men give themselves a pass for their lasciviousness, and even their abuse, by putting it onto the girl’s “budding sexuality” rather than the older man’s bad behavior.
As a semi-pro artist I have a few thoughts. Art like literature is story telling. The story can be complex (Sistine Chapel) or as simple as a single emotion (Jackson Pollack). What we recognize as art are probably just those media objects (sculpture, painting, photos, etc.) that survive the filter of time either through visual merit, emotional connection or due to a highly successful marketing campaign designed to make us all crave it. Art has a technical and an emotional element to it. It’s possible to make great emotional but technically challenged art (like folk art) but soulless pieces never attain immortality no matter how technically masterful.
Creating viewer discomfort isn’t grounds to censor a piece. A lot of great art purposely creates discomfort in the viewer (Guernica , The US Vietnam War Memorial) and we are better for it. Powerful visuals can stir emotions and actions which may not be popular at the time so I tend to fall to the side of avoiding censorship and letting the viewer decide.
The questions here are a bit different – exploitation and sexualization of children. I would argue that exploitation alone isn’t enough. That Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of ‘napalm girl’ taken at Trảng Bàng by Nick Ut in 1972, for example. The photo was a full frontal nude of a 9 year old child. But sexualization is the last thing any reasonable person would conclude from that photo which has lived on as an iconic example of the suffering of innocents in wartime. Horror, suffering and empathy.
I have to admit that the painting in question triggers my Polanski response (technically skilled but convicted of assaulting a 13 year old girl). There are really great reasons we make the age of consent higher than 12 and that includes modeling (but not child pageants but that’s a whole separate can of worms). The artist may have thought that he was illustrating that awkward transition into adulthood or something, but it looks like a swing and a near felonious miss to me. Mystical? WTF
It has nothing to do with the girl’s dawning self-awareness and everything to do with the artist’s sexual fetishisation of adolescence.
There’s another picture of his, a street scene, in which a young girl is being grabbed from behind by a man, and she clearly isn’t enjoying the experience. That again says nothing about the girl and how she sees herself, but everything about the man grabbing her and ultimately about the artist and what he thinks about pubescent girls.
https://www.wikiart.org/en/balthus/the-street-1933
But then, so much of his work is problematic. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that if anybody created pictures of this nature today in Britain, especially in photographic form*, they would be risking prosecution for creating indecent images of a child.
*for some reason, ‘art’ seems to get a pass when it comes to the law. Is it because a photograph depicts the person whereas a painting or drawing is only a representation of a person? Doesn’t seem that great a difference in my mind, especially if the painting is an accurate portrayal.
I think the expression on Thérèse’s face looks like she smells something bad, or she has a migraine.
Not rapture.
chigau, and as you pointed out earlier, her head is grossly out of proportion to her body. It’s almost as though the artist’s mind was elsewhere….
Given Acolyte of Sagan’s link @ 3, I understand.
At least it’s easier to see this as abusive.
This guy would fit right in with these folks:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/idols-of-perversity-9780195056525?cc=ru&lang=en&
These paintings definitely disturb me because the artist clearly has no insight into his subjects. Actually I kind of take it back–that fact, and the paintings themselves, don’t disturb me as much as the men academically bullshitting about them. I agree with whoever mentioned in a comment to another post here that it would be of some value for women academics to write about them.
I think that this curious refusal to recognise what is actually there in these paintings has a great deal to do with the long tradition of pretending that in ‘high art’ (in particular the ‘high arts’ of painting and sculpture) there is no real eroticism because the erotic (and dangerous) is somehow rendered innocuous and un-erotic by the ‘aesthetic’ values of the work, and that it is the aesthetic values only that the properly high-minded lover of the arts, schooled by Kant, is cognisant of. Never mind that Renoir said he painted with his prick. Never mind all those nudes, from Rubens to Goya and Manet. Never mind the obvious homo-eroticism of some of Michelangelo’s works, or, say, of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s sculptures of shepherd boys and a variety of young men displaying their genitals. Certainly those I have mentioned are great artists, and their work, though deeply erotic, does not have the voyeuristic quality that Balthus’s work displays, but it is deeply erotic – and appeals to coldly aesthetic values really do not make it less erotic. The power of these works lies in their eroticism, as does Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Theresa. But nearly the whole of the post-kantian tradition in art criticism has consisted in a denial of, in particular, the erotic in art.
I am reminded by these paintings of Balthus of Iachimo’s great and greatly disturbing speech in Innogen’s bedroom in Cymbeline; soliloquies in Shakespeare’s time were intended to be spoken to the audience, as though to some trusted friend. Iachimo’s speech is horribly voyeuristic, but the disturbing thing about it is his unstated expectation that the audience will be on his side, allies in voyeurism, enjoying what is his abuse of the sleeping Innogen. But Iachimo’s speech takes place in a context, and by putting the audience in the uncomfortable position of being spoken to as though they were enjoying the voyeurism as much as he, the audience is made aware of dimensions and a standpoint beyond this vicious closeness, and the speech is judged. There is no such judgement in Balthus’s paintings, which assume that the viewer is as much a voyeur as he is.
Well, Manet’s Olympia is still a break with the genre, as the subject has be bad taste to be fully awake and facing the viewer. NOT ‘artfully’ draped in some exposing pose while ‘dreaming.’
John, she also has the nerve to appear to be well over the age of consent. How very dare she!
There is a sense in some corners that “art” is untouchable. The various nastinesses I encountered in the “interpretation” of my own work this summer is one example. The overt (VERY overt – so obvious NO ONE could miss it) sexualization of my strong, intelligent female character was brushed off by “well, people laughed, and the play is a comedy, so lighten up already”. No, I will not lighten up.
This is as much a symptom of the problem as a cause (probably more a symptom) but it continues to normalize particular views of women and sex that are, to say the least, disturbing. It gives comfort to patriarchal ideas, that no matter how high a woman might rise, she is still a sexual being with air between her ears instead of gray matter.
Artists have spent a long time dissing science on every front (in some cases, totally justified, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments). Well, science listened, and we now have a lot of ethics rules in place that didn’t exist in the past. It is now time for “Art” to be willing to hear criticism of their field with at least as much thoughtful reflection and consider what actions, if any, are appropriate to deal with the almost constant manifestations of patriarchy and rape culture in works of art.
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I’m fairly sure all bets are off with Guitar Lesson.