There are two paintings of 1933, when Balthus moved to Paris and came under the influence of Artaud, that should be mentioned for the sharp contrast they make with most of his portrayals of young girls: Alice and La Toilette de
Cathie (Cathie Dressing). Both are of full breasted seductive women, one combing her hair, the other having her hair combed by a prim maid. While the name “Alice” is a wry look at the Victorian child idealized by Lewis Carroll, the picture is more salaciously repellant than anything Carroll would have envisaged.43 Her pose is hard and cynical, as if she is preparing for some test of her sexuality. The raised leg, exposing her sex, suggests the will to conquer a reluctant lover, and the mask-like face, with seemingly blank eyes, exudes menace. The model was a showgirl Betty Leyris, who told Weber that her body type resembled that of Balthus’s mother Baladine. Betty Leyris and her husband “characterized Baladine Klossowska as sturdy and earthy—both in physique and personality.” “She was”, the Leyris recalled, “a sensible no nonsense sort of person—with precise views on how to clean a room, and a figure that suited her nature”.44 She may have been bold and forthright, but perhaps Balthus saw something else causing alarm at the calculating sexuality of a mature woman.
In Cathy Dressing, its title a glance at Balthus’s fascination with the eroticism of Wuthering Heights, the almost naked female stands awkwardly posed while a fully clothed man, clearly Balthus himself as a sort of brooding Heathcliff sits behind her in a state of troubled preoccupation. He looks down irresolutely, while she looks up in a kind of determined perplexity as the stolid maid combs tangles from her Medusa-like hair. There is no essential contact between persons, yet each has a story to tell, a story with which Balthus tantalizes us. This time the model was Balthus’s future wife Antoinette de Watteville, her right foot firmly placed on the mat’s red circle, as if a target of desire about which there was uncertainty. Her left hand lightly grips a phallic strut on the mirror, but this is no prelude to love-making. There is avoidance in all directions, with the colours muted and sullen. Balthus’s marriage in 1937 to the well-born Antoinette produced two sons. She did not interfere when he appropriated younger female models before divorcing to permit marriage to the much younger Japanese beauty Setsuko Ideta in 1967. Separated on amicable terms from Antoinette since 1946, it was to this phase of his life as a painter that his most accomplished pictures of young girls belong. Antoinette’s essential passivity appears in La jupe blanche (1937), and his tribute to her is voiced in Balthus in his Own Words.45
None of Balthus’s paintings of young girls is so dominated by aggressive sexual display as in Cathy Dressing; they are more concerned with secondary relational attraction-avoidance than with attempts to grapple with the trauma produced by his mother’s sexuality. They are indeed about a sort of pedophilic compromise solution by idealizing young girls on the verge of womanhood and thus avoiding adult sexuality. Unable actually to return to childhood as Balthus said he wanted to do, he spiritualized young girls but with a sort of controlling hostility that leaves them less than angelic. (Indeed their frequent gazing into mirrors casts girls as unresponsive narcissists.) Doubters of such a generalization are likely to point to idyllic pictures like The Cherry Picker (1940), the subject being one of Balthus’s innocent girls (Antoinette in fact) with back turned to the viewer while she picks cherries from a ladder. The picture is a brilliant study in angles, with an escarpment as background. His comment is: “The young girl who climbs a ladder to pick cherries is a distant sister of one who does the same thing in Poussin’s Arcadian landscape. What can one say to complement this? The only goal is to achieve deep spiritual beauty, located far from the world, on canvas”.46 Even if it does not say everything, this is surely a believable statement confirming that his art grew out of earlier classical art. Balthus certainly did strive for innocence: “What interests me is the awakening of things and life, the birth of things. I’ve constantly worked to paint these childhood secrets”.47 Despite its phallacism, a picture such as The Moth (1959), with a budding young woman protecting a moth from flying into a lamp, remains a vision of innocence. It is first of all a careful composition controlled by its light, no matter what allegory one may decide upon. As Balthus said, “I’ve devoted my entire life to reaching the sacred glow that halos twilight and dawn, a lactant light of creation that I think I attained in The Moth and Young Girl in a White Shirt.4 Young Girl in a White Shirt (1955), a portrait of sixteen-year-old Frederique Tison, is an acknowledged masterwork, “a pure and noble presence”.49 Frederique was Balthus’s niece who came to live with him at Chassy in 1954; she had first been his model, aged nine. Young Girl in a White Shirt may seem remote like Egyptian statuary, yet this portrait of Frederique is one of the few given any empathic presence. In these two paintings Balthus has truly entered another realm of visual wonder in which interpretations seem superfluous and the viewer is not coerced into alien moods. Girl at a Window (1957), however, is of Frederique, back turned, gazing from a window upon a spring courtyard. It may have been that the back turned, and closed gates beyond, say something about the state of their relationship. The chair to her right, with its male vase-like centre inside a female arc, echoes the closed gates beyond, making unmistakable the muted erotic meaning of this picture.
The old ambivalence always sets the female subject at a distance while creating her desired image. The ambivalence was clearly coded into Young Woman in Green and Red (1944). The picture is thematically related to Still Life (1937), with its knife stuck into bread and evidence of violence in the hammer and broken flask—perhaps the aftermath of anger, with a length of mysterious blue cloth submissively draped over a chair back. (The draped cloth on a half-seen chair, implying another presence, in turn relates to the dark blue (or black) draped cloth in Girl With a Cat (1937), a feature not easily noticed in a picture exposing the young girl’s white underwear.) Girl, knife stuck in bread, wine and apples appear in Still Life with a Figure (1940), and other oral sadistic interconnections appear the more one looks through Bal-thus’s oeuvre. In Young Woman in Green and Red (1944-5) he pushes symbolism at his viewers: feminine silver dish, masculine candle holder and candle, knife in meat (or bread?): tunic showing just a hint of breast development divided with green (go) and red (stop). The stolid shaded face, dividing dark from light, of a very young girl culminates the pyramidal composition. The picture makes a statement about the powers, yet uncertainty, of young womanhood. she is like a priestess at an altar of cultic eroticism, the effect unsettling. Symbolism, including the ominous heavy cape over her right shoulder, may be too obvious, but the picture succeeds.