Evasion
Balthus’s eroticism aligns to some extent with that of a pedophile. His skill at picture-making turns fantasy into seeming reality, a pedophilic pictorial reality to be examined more closely. Yet a cautionary note is necessary. Because Balthus obsessively drew and painted young girls does not mean that he took sexual advantage without their consent. several of his relationships with adolescent models will be considered, and he did not as a rule choose as subjects very young female children. From age eighteen Balthus would, however, watch them with fascination, although we do not know the ages of girls about whom he told friends. He would “as discreetly as possible observe schoolgirls playing on the Piazza Santa Croce. He would sketch these girls at night.” “He would ‘amuse’ himself enormously by making little girls jump over a rope and studying the acrobatic pirouettes they would perform in the process”.3 Balthus’s biographer Nicholas Weber never labels these or other voyeuristic acts those of a pedophile, which would tend to discredit Balthus’s paintings, but he does comment that the paintings’ aristocratic detachment is a “pose”, to “cover an obsession”.4 Labels are invidious damaging an artist’s painterly accomplishment, so Weber puts it that Balthus’s obsession with young girls is really a re-enactment of his own narcissistic plight when his mother Baladine was having an affair with the poet Ranier Maria Rilke.5 There is surely something to this, but it does not account for the vignette of the Balthus-like boy’s attack on the girl in The Street (1933-35), which Weber also wants to see as a narcissistic attack on the self.6 While Weber sees the attack vignette as the “essence” of Balthus’s “lifelong attitude towards women”, he will not concede that the hostility of rape may be present. Balthus’s need to dominate all females nonetheless centres on pre-adolescent girls, not on his age-mates, so The Streefs incident, disturbing though it is, remains atypical. We should try to decide to what extent Balthus’s voyeristic will-to-control young girls by painting them in often odd poses was pedophilic. Yet, as Balthus well knew, attempts at diagnosis can undermine creativity with a kind of reductionism that devalues actual pictorial achievement. It is never certain that a just critical balance can be struck when thinking about Balthus, the elusive master of paradox.
Balthus was among the most clever of recent artists to insist upon separation of artistic product from its producer, other famous upholders of this dogma being T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Joyce Carol Oates, the latter providing a depersonalizing introduction to Balthus’s Vanished Splendors. Oates quotes his telegram of 1965 to the director of the Tate Gallery on the occasion of a retrospective: “Balthus is a painter about whom nothing is known. Now we may look at his paintings.”7 She realizes that such disclaimers have the opposite effect of whetting curiosity about private life. We might add that noting excessive secretiveness, as commentators on Balthus invariably do, may encourage unfair psychological imputations such as that of pedophilia. The pedophile is typically a clever evader, secretive about his own childhood; if he writes of it at all it will be with guarded selectivity, rather than open inclusive narrative. Indeed Balthus calls his short memoirs “brief meditations, in the style of Montagne”, or “essays” that are “not the product of any testamentary concern” but assessments of “certain moments of my life, which have defined and distinguished it”.8 In other words, he will pick and choose what episodes to tell, and is under no obligation to reveal levels of affect surrounding them, let alone recover those he has suppressed. Rational control remains supreme, with feeling largely excluded. Yet feeling is what we want to know about as it is paramount in choice of subject and its handling in painting. Vanished Splendors (the very title derived from Lewis Carroll) is a maddening contrivance of selection, pruning and avoidant distancing of the emotions that must have coursed through such as life as Balthus’s. It is a highly selected and edited work of “keeping up appearances” by an artist in old age whose lifetime accumulation of paintings and drawings testifies to motives left unexplained. In a moment of candor he confessed of himself in youth, “What mattered was to believe in myself, and bring to light what was obscure stammering and trembling”.9 This is the first sentence of a narrative he chose not to write probably because true emotion had been so long suppressed, overlaid with self-serving aristocratic claims, that the story of shifting feelings was virtually lost. But suppressed affective information from one’s personal history of attachment is never fully lost and, if given a chance, as in painting, it will begin to leak, and then flood, back. Another autobiography or memoir is written in visual language, whether the subject wants it or not. If he censors, or over-controls, the creative act, his paintings will never achieve “beauty”, as Balthus insisted they must at the moment of completion. There is no denying that many achieve a bizarre beauty, controlling emotional dissonance if not quite transforming it as could happen by applying the insights of psychoanalysis.
Dangerous Play
Do the criteria of pedophilia apply to Balthus? The pedophilic paraphilia is a “love map”, as John Money calls it, that is not chosen but comes about developmentally for reasons that often can be ascertained.10 In The Child-Lovers Wilson and Cox note that heterosexual pedophiles are likely to be “situational offenders” rather than committed child-lovers and that they are often married men with children of their own and likely to commit offences with daughters or with near relatives.11 The pedophile attempts to establish “social dominance” over under-aged (and sometimes older postpubertal) girls; interviews elicited “many direct admissions from our subjects that they found children easier to approach than adults”.12 As to parenting of pedophiles, “Responses to our questionnaire yielded the classic picture of the domineering, overprotective mother and weak or absent father that has so often been implicated, theoretically and empirically, in the origins of homosexuality and other sexual disturbances. We also noted a tendency for our pedophiles to produce more negative descriptions of their parents (particularly the father) than did a normal sample of men”.13 Fathers are said to be remote, aloof and distant (in other words, avoidant); while mothers are typified as domineering, over-bearing and strong-willed, along with being overprotective, possessive and suffocating—in other words, given to inducing avoidance in their sons. Some pedophiles “claim that they are seeking to reconstruct vicariously a more beautiful childhood experience by bestowing warmth and love on their child partners”.14 Furthermore, childhood isolation and a sense of inadequacy are typical of boys who become pedophiles, possibly especially of those who develop utopian esthetic fantasies of “untouchable” young girls. Religious inhibitions of sexuality can produce alternative seemingly sexless pseudo-religions of “angelic” adoration which “avoid” true male-female engagement. However this may be, research indicates that “the majority of these men [pedophiles] were indirectly hostile, suspicious and guilt ridden”.15 They are canny and evasive about their sexual disorder.