Surrealism Balthus may have been at one time, he always professed dislike for its intellectualism that diminished the craft of painting. A more likely association is to Balthus’s own dramatic illustrations to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, a visual reading of the 1848 novel in which Balthus revealed some of his more violent erotic fantasies. His comment late in life on those drawings was: “I find traces of my former rebelliousness, now calmed, and the fierce violence that was inside me. In any case, one always paints oneself and one’s own personal story; otherwise there is nothing but technique and facility”.35 The fantasy of The Window is that of the artist as attacker, wielding a brush as if it were a knife, demanding control over a woman who has received a projection of herself as being dangerous. This is indeed an abusive picture, in which a “story” of violent attack with unknown outcome is implied. For the biographer Weber, this picture is critical in judging Balthus’s pathological view of women. The model Elsa is said to resemble Baladine, Balthus’s mother, whom he secretly wanted to push out of a window: “The painting is the son’s revenge” and “the painted canvas was his means for dominating certain women—Antoinette de Watteville, Elsa Henriquez, his mother—and paralyzing them”, Weber believes.36
Windows are an important motif in Balthus’s paintings, recurring as images of threat but also of escape from oppressive enclosure. Most of Balthus’s erotic portrayals of young girls are set in interiors, enclosed to the point of suffocation, as if taking place in a theatre of the mind. Several paintings with windows, however, give access to outside light and, indeed, his brightly lit landscapes of the 1950s and 1960s seem to be viewed from an elevated window. In Lady Abdy (1935), however, the window gives onto an enclosed city courtyard with other windows and was, in fact, painted in Balthus’s Paris studio at 4 Rue de Furstenberg. The sinister female beauty in the dark red dress is the Russian-born Iya Abdy who played the role of Beatrice Cenci in Antonin Artaud’s production of Les Cenci, a drama of incest and patricide. In the painting Beatrice is seen just after the crime moving aside the curtain to let in light, her guilty face half turned towards the viewer. Unseen in the background is the murdered body of her father, a knife said to be in his back—in this case we may assume the painter Balthus himself has been murdered. Thus Balthus has painted the reverse of The Window in which now his deepest fear of being victimized by a young woman is powerfully imaged. Beatrice’s youth is highlighted but only by wan sunlight, and the room remains very dark. For the purpose of the painting, she herself is the killer, although in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty play (for which Balthus designed the sets) the daughter-raping father is killed by hired assassins rather than Beatrice herself.37 This heightens Balthus’s apprehension of danger from young females. There are dangerous knives in other pictures, for instance the ruined Nature Mort (1937), with hammer, broken flask, knife stuck in a piece of bread and the curiously placed swag of cloth over the back of a chair, elements linking to the more erotic paintings. Still Life With a Figure (1940) associates an unpleasant female with a knife also stuck in bread. The most notorious of these is, of course, The Victim (1939-46) in which the knife on the floor, beneath the presumably dead (but unwounded) girl, is difficult to see.
Balthus’s statement that “I had a very happy childhood ...”, filled with the “enchantment” of reading such books as Alice in Wonderland and Struwwelpeter, is followed by the assertion that, retaining this enchantment, “The adult vision of the world doesn’t interest me”.38 Is he saying that, like Lewis Carroll, he never grew up and that, like Struwwelpeter, he still enjoys indulging in grisly punitive childhood fantasy? Balthus, indeed, seems arrested, unable to move comfortably into the adult world of interaction, sexuality and parenthood. A father of two sons, his preoccupation nevertheless remained with pubescent girls’ excitements and dangers. Why was this?—can a window onto his traumatic past be found? He admitted that “Everything comes from childhood, and the wanderings and successive exiles that world history imposed upon us. How not to flow along the creative current in which our parents lived? Happy days in Paris with my brother, my father, Erich, and my mother, Baladine, whose tender, oval face and sober, mysterious gaze were framed by black hair, parted in the middle.”39 The separation of his parents and Baladine’s torrid affair with Rilke are not mentioned, nor is the confusion of his adolescent sexuality as he idealized Rilke while recoiling from his mother’s intemperate amour. It is likely that the shock of recognizing his mother as a sexual being put Balthus into a sexual limbo from which he never emerged. The evidence of what happened appears in a painting made many years later in 1948, Study for The Week with Four Thursdays. This painting is usually known by its 1949 version in which the figure gazing out the window, with back to the robed stretching woman caressing the cat, is female. She is in fact the sort of young girl Balthus fancied. But the earlier version has the stretched out woman in the chair naked and not touching the cat, while the figure in the window is a young boy.40 This boy is slumped on the window sill, as if in some sort of pain; he is not looking towards the light but suffering inwardly. This is
the young Balthus having just perceived his mother as a sexual being, available to a man not his father and being excessive in her sensual exultation. The picture is not reminiscent of happy days in Paris at all but of the later venue where the affair with Rilke took place. All those years were needed before the still traumatized adult could paint his stricken childhood image, a primary confession not possible at the time, replaced by a lesser confession via the young girl/boy in the painting, of the compromise solution to avoid having to be explicit about what had traumatized him. “Triumph over trauma” was indeed circuitous and complicated
The matter is replayed more boldly in The Room (a large painting of 1952-54), where a gnome-like figure of ambiguous gender, thrusts aside a curtain to let in light on a voluptuous reclining nude in much the same elongated pose as in the former picture. Now the cat watches from a distance. Is the mature young woman drugged, asleep or dead? If dead, her bent leg could not retain its position, so she may be in a temporary swoon after sexual encounter, or even rape, which the malevolent dwarf exposes for our scrutiny. Art historians’ searches into possible artistic and literary sources to explain the picture give no convincing results, and only a circumstantial explanation remains.41 Again, Baladine may be envisaged. If so this is an angry indictment strengthening the painter’s triumph over the childhood trauma of which he could not bear to remain the mere victim. (As late as 2000-01 Balthus was repeating the theme of a reclining naked girl in Girl with a Mandolin—this time with a window opening onto nature.)42 If the interpretation is correct, when Balthus attempted symbolic repair of the trauma of witnessing his mother’s sexuality, he did so in terms of healing landscape. The images of repair were light-filled landscape seen with aerial perspective, charming paintings of young girls, back to the painter, at open windows (1955, 1957) and finally his Painter and his Model (1977) in which the innocent young girl (possibly Michelina), kneeling as if at a prie-dieu is quite separated from the painter, whose head is wrapped and who gazes through a window inscribed with a cross. A religious solution of Balthus’s relational conflict is strongly implied. Is this his farewell to eroticism, signaling a wish to end pedophilic fantasy? We will consider the meaning of Balthus’s profession of Christianity following further discussion of his young models.