33. Ibid., p. 172.
34. Ibid., p. 173.
35. Webb, p. 16.
36. Ibid., p. 26. Taylor speculates that Ursula’s lack of a father made her susceptible to Bellmer’s albeit narcissistic attention and that she wasn’t crudely seductive. p. 57
37. Taylor, pp. 144-5
38. Ibid. See p. 173.
39. For example, Lichtenstein Plates 38 and 39, with its suggestion of pregnancy.
40. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913; Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 75-6.
41. Brett Kahr, D. W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait (Madison, Ct: International Universities Press, 1996), p. 8.
42. Quoted in Lichtenstein, p. 5. Webb agrees, urging a “cathartic” purpose for Bellmer’s art, p. 38.
43. An important recent Paris exhibition catalogue of Bellmer's art offers little discussion of its psychological origins. Introductory essays to the comprehensive Bellmer exhibition, organized by the Centre Pompidou, emphasize the surgical precision especially of his drawings while claiming that, as with medical patients, there is no "victimization". The argument is that with consenting female subjects, “his drawings manifest no (external) violence in the sense that nothing is forced. Everything in Bellmer's world is done voluntarily and nothing could be more alien than rape”. The drawings reflect only “a cool and controlled obsession”. (Michael Semff and Anthony Spira eds., Hans Bellmer (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007), p. 24. While he set out to “disrupt the body's integrity”, “Bellmer's line is like a sharp, incisive scalpel that disconnects, mutilates and isolated details, yet is supple enough to fold and unfold itself in multiple curves” p. 38. That Bellmer specialized ad nauseam in hostile and abusive fantasies about nubile females is not explained in the catalogue, nor is his statement, “Painting: I know beauty through fear” taken as a challenge to attempt an explanation p. 238. For the larger literary and artistic context for fear of female allure leading to misogyny see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). For the Surrealistic photographic context see Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville, 1985)
44. Taylor, pp. 33, 201; Webb, p. 26.
45. See, for example, L. Gerity, Creativity and the Dissociative Patient: Puppets, Narrative and Art in the Treatment of Survivors of Childhood Trauma (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1999).
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Desire and Avoidance in the Paintings of
Balthus
I’m for beauty at a time when beauty is unappreciated. Dostoyevsky said, “Beauty will save the world”.
—Balthus, Balthus in His Own Words, p 7
Behind the Curtain
Balthus (Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola 1908-2001) seems a much more humane artist than Bellmer and, by comparison, might be called a humanist. Yet, strangely, Balthus celebrates young girls while avoiding their personhood. His erotic paintings are studies in avoidance, albeit less punishing than Bell-mer’s mechanization of female flesh. Desire for young girls combines with establishing safe distances from them. Girls are observed, but they do not advance towards the viewer; they do not invite approach or touching. They are indeed “untouchables”, static female effigies of some nameless attraction that is also avoidance. Eroticism is held in suspense as if the female part of humanity inhabited a different sphere of life needing the protection of an artificial theatrical setting. Occasionally Balthus’s young females are in relationship with males, other females, diminutive figures or cats, but the most arresting of them are solitary, remote and disturbing. Balthus is no bionic engineer of the female body like Bellmer, nor does he remotely approach Picasso’s misogynic degree of dismemberment and reconfiguration of female portraits; but viewers are apt to find Balthus’ paintings more hauntingly disturbing. Bellmer and Picasso are so extreme in their distorting inventiveness that the results can be dismissed as simply bizarre, but Balthus is a classicist and realist accommodating to every-day reality. They are “real” in the sense that ordinary people perceive each other, yet they seem constrained by some pathology of which Balthus was not fully aware or, at least, was unwilling to disclose.
The first thought is that Balthus was a sort of pedophile, not so much seeking children as young females just entering adolescence. Pubescent girls,
developing the outlines of womanhood, are Balthus’s speciality, the state of femaleness he so eloquently insisted upon in painting. They look like an “obsession”, something happening in the mind for which visual equivalents were repeatedly sought. Girls, not mature women, preoccupied Balthus all his life, and there is reason to suppose that adult sexuality did not much appeal. He confessed, “I could never paint a nude woman. I find the beauty of young girls more interesting and perfect than women’s. They embody becoming, a pre-being, in short they symbolize the most perfect beauty. Woman is a being already ... whereas the adolescent ... hasn’t yet found her place. A woman’s body is generally too defined; a girl’s body is more beautiful. ... Young girls are sacred, divine, angelic beings”.1 We will note comparison with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, vehemently denied by Balthus who felt that his public altogether misjudged him in the matter of erotic preoccupation with young girls. His plea was for a spiritual reading of these creatures, an idealization perhaps more suspect than convincing.
“Angelic” is not a real assessment of young girls unless you don’t know them, observing only from a distance. Nabokov was far more astute in showing the self-centered, bitchy and demanding aspects of the young girls obsessing Humbert Humbert. Balthus spiritualizes them in words, but that is not what his pictures reveal of his feelings. There are no rapturous idealizations of sexual partners such as Picasso painted at the beginning of affairs only for them to collapse into misogynic dismissals. Balthus’s adolescent females are uniformly distant and self-possessed, even waxen icons, exuding more foreboding than allure. They are more nearly the products of voyeuristic fascination in which there is no sexual activity than they are pedophilic prey in which under aged females seem to invite assault. What these feelings were and why they occurred are questions arising from what can be gleaned from Balthus’s biography. Of what “story” are they a part? They belong to the life-story which Balthus rigorously excluded from painting, saying: “the artist must not become a storyteller. The anecdote should not exist in painting. A picture or subject imposes itself, and it alone knows how profound and vertiginous it is. Nothing happens in a picture, it simply is ...”.2 Such denial should not prevent us from asking about the larger “story” surrounding Balthus’s preference for relatively defenseless young girls over experienced women. What was he affirming and what avoiding by isolating, captive in frames, images of desired but unapproachable posed girls? If these images so disturb viewers by arousing the anxiety of sexual fascination and alienation, they must mean something worth knowing about Balthus’s masterful productions. He was often called the greatest painter of his age, yet with the qualification that disturbing subjects are at odds with displays of exceptional skill and perseverance that he demonstrated in following the great historical painters he admired.