This picture is consistent with that of perversion offered by the psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller. Stoller’s general theory is stated as follows: “Perversion, the erotic form of hatred, is a fantasy, usually acted out but occasionally restricted to a daydream (either self-produced or packaged by others, that is, pornography). It is a habitual, preferred aberration necessary for one’s full satisfaction, primarily motivated by hostility. By “hostility” I mean a state in which one wishes to harm an object; that differentiates it from “aggression,” which often implies only forcefulness. The hostility in perversion takes the form in a fantasy of revenge hidden in the actions that make up the perversion and serves to convert childhood trauma to adult triumph. To create the greatest excitement, the perversion must also portray itself as an act of risk-taking”.16 Stoller adds, “My hypothesis is that a perversion is the reliving of actual historical sexual trauma aimed precisely at one’s sex (an anatomical state) or gender identity (masculinity or femininity) and that in the perverse act the past is rubbed out. This time, trauma is turned into pleasure, orgasm, victory. But the need to do it again—unendingly, eternally again in the same manner—comes from one’s inability to get completely rid of the danger, the trauma”.17 An additional comment should be noted: “In [every perversion] is found—in gross form or hidden but essential in the fantasy—hostility, revenge, triumph and a dehumanized object. We can see that someone harming someone else is a main feature in most of these conditions.”18 The basic fear, produced by trauma or overstimulation, is that the young male “will not be able to remain separate from mother”, and that merger with her will nullify his masculine existence.19 The perversion (whichever it may be) becomes a desperate strategy of psychological repair of gendered self, a repair created by fantasies of controls and punishments inflicted upon women.
To what extent does this apply to Balthus and his work? Are not his portrayals of girls covert and insidious attacks upon their personhood; aren’t the models more like puppets than real people, and isn’t there a compulsive repetitiveness about this thematic preoccupation? Perhaps a case for symbolic triumph over trauma can be made for Balthus’ paintings, but what then was the trauma? As Weber writes of Baladine, Balthus’s mother, “She worshipped Balthus: ‘This child is marvelous and braver than a grown-up...’”. Further, she is quoted, “My sons were my school and my pleasure and I was their playmate. When [the poet] Rilke came, we were four happy children”.20 The biographer’s interpretation is also telling: “Baladine, in the pivotal years of her son’s adolescence—the period of life that has been the obsessive theme of his art ever since—was both attached to the boy and completely distracted because of her romantic obsession with Rilke. Balthus was her genius, her companion, and the puzzle preoccupied her, yet she was even more obsessed with someone else. One suspects that her beloved son was, for all his closeness to his mother’s lover, furious.”21 Admittedly speculative, this is a possible formula for erotic attraction-avoidance. Weber sees Balthus’ interest in teenaged girls as fusing his emergent self (from age eleven) with his passionate mother in the era of her affair with Rilke. The girls are thus “self objects” but also alluring external persons who reflect the danger of abandonment by mother. They belong to an emotionally charged adolescent “theatre” of nearly unbearable excitement and fear.
It is impossible to be precise about actual traumatic experiences suffered by Balthus (and his older brother Pierre, an intellectual artist with perverse interests following the Marquis de Sade). Overstimulation combined with feared abandonment by mother can be documented, yet there are likely to be sceptics who want still more facts together with evidence of traumatic results. This is admittedly the limitation of psychobiography—the most challenging subjects often being most adept at covering their tracks. There are also confounding influences such as the role of Balthus’s Scottish nanny, and the possibility that he was sexually overstimulated by Rilke himself, who took an inordinate interest in the talented boy. For Balthus the psychobiographer lacks a traumatizing “cousin Ursula”, as is recorded by Bellmer himself, with Balthus having been successful at hiding all such evidence. Weber comments: “As young men, both Balthus and [his brother] Pierre developed consuming obsessions, yet they are determined that no one find out too much about their origins”. The secrets of their home, “that flat in Geneva will probably never be unlocked”; while the psychological effects are obvious, “there may have been something more”, he writes without further disclosing his suspicion22. Cleverly (sometimes indignantly) evading enquiry during his lifetime, Balthus provoked would-be psychobiographical reconstructions. He himself is responsible for the hypotheses that stand in place of solid reconstructions. Psychobiography must thus proceed by looking for the “best fit” of theory to withheld and distorted biographical fact. The pictures tell us most, being the locus of defensive avoidance of the very femininity that bedazzled the young Balthus while filling him with anxiety.
The Painting Game
Admirers of Balthus’s paintings may not agree on levels of attraction-avoidance in each example of his work. Most judgments of the degree of defensive distrust of women are subjective, but a few examples are beyond dispute. Among those that by consensus contain menace is the disturbing Guitar Lesson (1934) which, by Balthus’s own perhaps not altogether trustworthy account, is a study in Lesbian desire and cruelty. The healing music implied in this painting containing piano and guitar (Balthus was passionately fond of music, especially Mozart’s) is marginalized , giving centrality to an erotic assault by a teacher upon an adolescent girl student, sadistically “playing” her as a sexual instrument. Sabine Rewald claims to have shown that a painting by Eugen Spiro, Balthus’s mother’s brother, is of the teacher Baladine “offering her son an Oedipian sexual experience through transposed persons”, in fact raping her/him.23 Was this the adolescent trauma from which Balthus recoiled? His identification with the young girl is necessary to Rewald’s theory, and we also need to account for the 1949 drawing Etude pour La legon de guitare in which a grown man savagely holds captive in his teeth a naked young girl with a cloth around her middle. This drawing, in fact made long after the painting, reverses gender in the sadistic attack as if to say that the grown victim has decided to take revenge on an innocent young girl for the crime inflicted upon him in adolescence. As Weber writes, “The object of humiliation in this canvas—the girl on the teacher’s lap—is the prototype of the character Balthus would continue to subjugate, albeit far more subtly, for the rest of his painting life”.24
Weber’s conjecture aligns with Stoller’s idea of perversion being a “triumph over trauma”, a way of symbolically transforming sexual overstimulation into manageable esthetic experience. Following remarks by the painter Andre Lhote, Weber writes that Balthus “would paint women as seductresses without making them seductive and arrest our attention while leaving us always feeling in want. One might conclude that this was his means also of neutralizing the effects of his mother’s allure”.25 Balthus wanted it thought that he adored his mother and was always loyal to her, but the truth seems to have been that she made him anxious and angry. Weber comments: “friends of the artist have reported to me that in the 1940s and 1950s, he was visibly ashamed of her. When Balthus and Baladine attended the same parties in Paris, he avoided her (my italics). Balthus himself recalled to me that whereas Pierre was with their mother at the point in 1969 when she was dying, he was absent.”26 But avoidance of mother’s “allure” alone is insufficient cause for a wish to dominate and subdue her, a wish which appears to be displaced onto young girls unable to defend themselves.