The Nymphets of Balthus

By ROBERT HUGHES

Down the line from Donatella to Courbet

For the past 30 years, Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, a French aristocrat of Polish extraction better known by his painting name of Balthus, has been one of the least available major artists in the world. The fame of a star painter, Marcel Duchamp once shrewdly observed, depends on an inflation of small anecdotes. About Balthus, none are in circulation. At 69 he has no public face. When Andre Malraux made him director of the French Academy in Rome--a post Balthus held for 16 years until his retirement a few months ago--Balthus kept fastidiously to himself even as the secular cardinal of Villa Medici. His output is small. He rarely exhibits; Balthus' last New York show was in 1967.

All this could be a recipe for oblivion. Privacy, however, is an ingredient of myth. Balthus is an artist's artist: there are perhaps three or four painters alive today whose work is a real addition to the great, tottering edifice of Western figure painting, and Balthus is their doyen. Under the dandy's glare all triviality withers; Balthus' peculiar position is in part the result of his steady refusal to be a man of his own time. Admittedly, his silent paintings, populated by cats and malignant-looking, narcissistic girls, offer their distant homages to surrealism. Balthus' work is, to put it mildly, post-Freudian. But the innovations of the past 40 years' art--the movements, polemics and epileptic spasms that form the twilight of the avant-garde--have not touched it at all. Against all odds, Balthus paints as though the tradition that runs from Donatello to Courbet had never broken. For that reason alone, any Balthus show compels interest; and the group of 24 paintings and drawings, ranging from 1934 to 1977, that went on view last week at Manhattan's Pierre Matisse Gallery is doubly fascinating, being the first view Americans have had of Balthus' newest work.

History--the sense of accumulated time bearing on an image--gives Balthus' painting its weight. There is no more cultivated artist alive; certainly none whose paintings disclose a more strictly developed taste. They are suffused with references to Balthus' two main sources, Courbet (whose stolid, gawky children are the great-grandmothers of Balthus' adolescents) and the early Italian Renaissance The profiles of his girls have the slightly awkward purity of quattrocento medallion portraits. Nude in Profile, 1977, displays her pubescent body with the columnar grace of a figure by Piero della Francesca; light flows around the shallow curve of the wall and invests her outline with a hushed archaic permanence; many coats and scumblings of paint have given her flesh the porous, mat quality of fresco plaster. Balthus' art is about stabilizing the eye, and giving measure, proportion and distance to what it extracts from the world. The rooms in which his figures pose are all ideal architecture: their orthogonal emptiness is the stage for a subtle play of forms in which the way a towel's folds are echoed by the edge of a bowl and the curved iron brace of a washstand acquires an importance verging on the moral. Balthus' world is whole, and everything in it, one is persuaded, is riveted there by prolonged thought.

But it is more difficult to know what we are feeling: Balthus is a master of easing equivocation. His paintings are lifted by a tension between formality and obsessive eroticism. Balthus' nymphets, with their big heads, pale limbs and sidelong stares, are monsters in their way; they have the look of mutants, as young cicadas do when molting their husks. The most extreme case is Balthus' Guitar Lesson, 1934--one of the few masterpieces among erotic paintings made by Western artists in the past 50 years. But the suggestive mood pervades all his work except the landscapes. To encounter it in the mellowed and reduced form of Katia Reading, 1970-76, is still faintly disturbing--as if one of the figures in Seurat's Grande Jatte had turned from its Euclidean stillness and made a gesture of invitation. In terms of formal arrangement, it would be hard to imagine a more organized image than this: the chair could not be shifted an inch, or the angle of the girl's legs a degree, without some loss. But it is also a strangely equivocal picture, a filter of memory, dream and half-sublimated desire, without a trace of sentimentality. It is not a "modern" painting. But no account of modern art that leaves out its author can make much sense.

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