Contrary to Balthus’s antipathy to psychoanalysis, Pierre readily appropriated it to explain the Marquis de Sade’s hatred of his mother as “a negative Oedipus complex”.27 Instead of hating his father and desiring his mother, de Sade hated his mother’s tyranny and wished to humiliate, even destroy her. The Klossowski brothers’ parents had been separated since 1917, their father (a cultured, rather distant art historian and painter) making his way as a successful stage and costume designer in Berlin, while their mother Baladine moved from Berlin to Bern and Geneva with her sons. Baladine’s relationship with Rilke began in 1919, having greatest intensity until 1922. Rilke’s enthusiasm for young Balthus’s prodigious artistry is well known, but not so well known is the effect on her sons of their mother’s amours with this remarkable man. The intense companionship with Balthus was more than fatherly yet, as noted, Rilke’s primary attraction was to Baladine. The novelist Pierre Jouve described her thus: “The whole person of Baladine is provoking. The way her big body moves makes it difficult to turn one’s eyes from her. A female “bird” would be a fairly accurate way of describing her. Long and shapely legs, a high instep, full hips and breasts linked by a supple waist [...] a broad face, full of feline charm, gray eyes. The lips accentuated by deep red lipstick. As for her hair, provocative also, on the dark side, sensuous”.28 She is described as ardent, passionate and given to grand emotions as her letters illustrate. Her practical, competent self was swept aside by thoughts of leaving her sons to go away with Rilke which, fortunately for them, did not happen. Sabine Rewald writes, “Depending on her mood, Baladine seems to have been a flirtatious and seductive playmate or a preoccupied and distant mother. She led an erratic and unstructured life, always prey to her impulses and emotions. Her self-indulgence could also frighten her children ...”.29
Rewald quotes her letter to Rilke relating an instance of adolescent Balthus being terrified and reduced to tears by thinking that his mother was dying from taking morphine to sleep. Balthus, “who runs after the girls” came home to bed (“for the last two nights he had been sleeping in my room”) only to find his mother heavily under the narcotic. She reports his alarmed words: “Oh Lot-tchen, why have you taken poison? And he went on and on like that, poor dear. He switched on the light, looked for the bottle and found it empty. I thought he’d have a fit, and I had great difficulty calming him down”.30 Sharing the same room would almost certainly have been arousing for the young boy, heightening his sexual anxiety. Imputing a suicidal wish to his mother may have been his own projection, which her slightly mocking tone in talking about the incident would not have allayed. Fear of Baladine’s immanent death was surely traumatic, compounding the over-stimulation Balthus endured from the torrid love affair with Rilke. It should be remembered that Balthus himself was to attempt suicide in 1934 upon disappointment with his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Pierre and severe stresses with Antoinette de Watteville, known since he was four years old but not to become his wife until 1937.31
These glimpses of fatherless Balthus, a prodigy smitten by the attention of Rilke who encouraged the Mitsou drawings, and emotionally tossed by his mother’s stormy eroticism, are enough to raise the question of multiple traumas.32 Mitsou was the fictive found and lost cat of Balthus’s childhood fantasy, clearly a self-object showing fear of abandonment. (He later nominated himself “King of Cats”, with leering cats often witnessing the strange events in Balthus’s paintings.) Even if varieties and levels of trauma cannot easily be discerned, we sense how psychologically at risk Balthus really was. His erotic attraction, yet hostility, to women may be approximated according to what we know of pre-mature erotic sensitizing by his mother’s florid emotions. While there is no way of telling how continually seductive and controlling towards him, or Pierre, she may have been, mother and sons participated with Rilke in what appears to have been erotic “play”. At least it was sexually suggestive, if not physically enacted, and was sure to have been stimulating beyond what even a precocious adolescent could tolerate. The psychoanalyst Estela Welldon writes, “hostility is related to revenge for an early trauma associated with early gender humiliation and/or tremendous fears of not being in control when facing the imagined loss of the primary object or most important person [mother]”.33 Welldon’s emphasis upon loss is a significant addition to Stoller’s model of how pedophilia, or any other paraphilia comes about. “Gender humiliation” is also an important emphasis as the brothers appear to have been drawn to femaleness, to assimilation by their too ardent mother, before feeling the danger of forfeiting masculinity. The un-assuaged pain and anger of these developmental influences appear to have driven Balthus and his brother to painting as a strategy of repair, learned from both parents but with perverse results differing from anything seen in the parents’ works of art. Creativity became a game of risk with desire and avoidance, a game never to be fully won or lost but, in Balthus’s (but not Pierre’s) case, producing some of the most extraordinary paintings of his time.
Coded Sacrifices
Balthus originated his own “Theatre of Cruelty”, displaying in its female roles various strategies of revenge arising from anxious hostility and aggression. Many portraits of women mask the programme of revenge-seeking underlying them, the wish to “triumph over trauma” also being hidden from the artist enacting it. There is a coldness and remoteness about several figures in portraits of adult women, along with curious elongation of the body, as in Lelia Caetani (1935) and Portrait de la Vicomtesse de Noailles (1936), a descendant of the Marquis de Sade and a collector of his works. The stretched, elongated position gives such women a rigid board-like presence. There are no idealizations of motherhood comparable, for instance, to Picasso’s neo-classical portraits of Sara Murphy; Balthus’s resemble more Picasso’s failed attempts to paint the portrait commissioned by Helene Rubenstein. Empathy with the maternal is lacking in Balthus’s depiction of older women, and even La Fa-mille Mouron-Cassandre (1935) shows a mask-like mother with a severe, remote daughter at her side and an isolated son sitting on a table reading as if not in the picture at all. Avoidant conditional engagement for the limited purpose of making a portrait is evident. The averted, avoiding gaze is in some degree characteristic of all Balthus’s depictions of women, with whom his relationships usually seem more voyeuristic than empathic.34
The set piece of Balthus’s theatre of cruelty is The Window(1933), altered before 1962 and misleadingly re-titled by the artist The Fear of Ghosts. The model had been a shy Latin American girl, Elsa Henriquez (said to have been aged fifteen) who Balthus set up so that when she entered his studio he could pretend to attack her with a dagger to produce terror. In the first version Elsa indeed looks terrified and off balance with her back to an open window, albeit with a safety bar behind her. In the second she is simply resisting an advance, though her blouse is opened revealing a breast as if an assault had begun. A tall dark structural column, and also some vertical pipes, rise suggestively in the background, while storm clouds gather above the buildings. The centered figure exudes alarm and seems gratuitously threatened—more unsettling to the viewer than some far-fetched Surrealist painting. But however liberated by