The altar for cultic sexual offerings appears again in Therese, (1938) among Balthus’s most famous images of a young girl. Therese Blanchard, the youthful model most drawn and painted by Balthus between 1936 and 1939, sits insouciantly in a large chair, behind which is an empty, white draped, ta-ble—a kind of altar. (We remember that in The Victim (1939-46) the female body is supine upon just such a white sheet. The violent sacrifice of bread and wine had appeared in Still Life (1937)). Therese, however, is very alive if preoccupied and unaware that her naked somewhat parted legs are on display. The barefooted legs are evidently the subject of sacrifice, unbeknownst to the head whose facial expression appears unaware of her body. The implication of Therese as a female sacrifice on the altar of male aggression is ever so gentle, lacking The Victim’s sinister connotations. Eroticism alone is not the problem, as Balthus himself said: “Believing that my young girls are perversely erotic is to remain on the level of material things. It means understanding nothing about the innocence of adolescent languor, and the truth of childhood.”50 Eroticism would be easier to paint than what Balthus actually accomplished in portraying the vulnerability of innocence subject to a damagingly avoidant male gaze.
Pedophilic excitement is more evident in Girl with a Cat (1937) and Therese Dreaming (1938), both exposing white underwear covering genitals. other compositional features are worth noting. in Girl with a Cat a crepe-like cloth is mysteriously draped like a bowed head peering into the crotch, which is emphasized by the green skirt’s tented angle. The unassuming girl is seated firmly on what may (provisionally) be called a sacrificial altar, the sock on her raised leg pulled down as is the corresponding sleeve. A mass of crepe-like cloth behind her back grips her body pushing it towards the implied bowed head. The cat below seems to know something that can’t be given away. (Balthus liked to be known as “The King of Cats”.) The girl’s hands held behind her head inscribe a cross, and they could even be imagined to be a mock halo connecting the two crepe-like masses of cloth. Far-fetched though this may seem, more than “innocent exhibitionism” is going on, with the red tunic a subliminal sign we have come to know. In Therese Dreaming, the shoes are red, while a red skirt surrounds the white clad genital area. The sacrificial altar/ table has a red cannister, a rumpled white cloth, an open mouthed green vase and a taller slender translucent vase. If these are female and male symbols, they are much subtler than the symbolism in Girl in Green and Red. Was Balthus aware that the twist in the white cloth imposed on a vertical fold makes a cross, that the twist points to the white panties, and that the white cloth can be read as a slumped-over male face? The face’s slanted eyes are looking at the girl’s genital region, while the cat below laps up cream from a plate. Again, the girl’s hands on head, eyes closed, suggest a cult-sacrifice—as she leans back on the green pillow, associated with verdure and linking visually with the objects aligned on the table top. It is a masterful “religious” composition, reminding us of the much more erotic Nude with a Cat (1949), The Room (1952-4) and others in which female nudes are “thrown” in ecstasy but also expended in sacrifice. There are more arousing pictures of the child-woman nude, such as Georgette Dressing (1948-9), and explicit reminders of the fire of lust as in The Happy Days (1944-6), but there are none so eloquent of inhibited, guilty and retaliatory erotic wishes as these representations of Therese. They echo the sadism of The Guitar Lesson (1934), with its black cloth surrounding the assaulted child’s middle. We remember that in the 1949 crayon drawing reminiscing The Guitar Lesson, it is a Balthus-like man who holds the cincture in his teeth, an oral attack on the angrily sacrificed female who should have been nurturing rather than a source of anxiety. (The relevant drawing is D 654 in Balthus: Catalogue Raisonne of the Complete Works. p. 254) Balthus appears to have been trying to work out trauma without ever allowing himself to state exactly what it was that needed repair.
There are a few paintings and drawings that bring together male figures with young girls. The unforgettable Andre Derain (1936) can be read as an older man suffering pangs of conscience having sexually violated a young girl, who sits passively half-clad behind his massive figure. When Balthus insisted to his biographer Weber the absurdity of such a reading of the picture, he did so “clearly preoccupied with the eroticism he was denying so vociferously”.51 Balthus identified with Derain, it is argued, using him as a scapegoat for his own anxiety regarding arousal by young girls. Balthus’s portrait of the painter Miro and his young daughter (1937-8) is an altogether more benign creation. One does not realize from this seemingly serene and humane picture what a struggle Balthus had with the seven-or eight-year-old daughter Delores to cooperate in the sittings—reportedly praising Miro but disciplining her by “put[ting] her in a coal bag”.52 In other words, the issue of control of females arose even in achieving this remarkable double portrait. Other male-female pictures, such as The Happy Days (1944-5), openly insist on the inflaming effects of sexuality. Here an alluring young woman contemplates herself in a mirror while stretched out, legs splayed, on a piece of furniture that may be seen as a green altar. A white basin on a table behind her head is in tension with the upright white mirror she holds. The male builds a symbolic fire of lust in the fireplace, one fire dog being a totemic female bust, tongs standing beside. The narcissistic female is dominant, while the shirtless male “plays with fire” at his peril. The Game of Cards (1948-50), is also a “battle of the sexes”, her relaxed knowing pose, perhaps at the point of playing the winning card, contrasting with his tense, aggressive forward motion as he waits to play his own card held behind his back. Judging by his forward motion, the red-shirted male, agent of the phallic candle on the altar-table, should be the dominant one, but she “holds all the cards”. The girl wears a white dress of purity and sits on a throne-like chair; when the feet are considered, hers are set forward while his are passive—though his horizontal left calf is aimed under the table at her pubic area. It is a complicated drama of gendered dominance and submission, which theme Balthus repeated in similar pictures. He seems to have believed that females are treacherously dominant, necessitating control by the phallus in ritual sacrifice rather than romance.
This is an inference, as Balthus “never interpreted [his] paintings or sought to understand what they might mean”.53 By forestalling his own insight and dismissing viewers’ curiosity, he set up hypothetical reconstructions based on hints and allusions to actual relations with the girls he painted. Confessional statements are limited: “I’ve always had a naive, natural complicity with young girls, like Natalie de Noailles, Michelina, Katia, Sabine, Frederique and more recently, Anna. Spiritual risks occur during long posing sessions”.54 There is no investigation of what “natural complicity” might mean, or of “spiritual risks”, the next sentence being a deflection from the carnal temptations implied. He will only admit to aiming at “the miraculously musical balance of my young model’s faces”, evading physical attractions, asserting interest only in “That which lay beneath their bodies and features, in their silence and darkness ...”.55 “Grace” and “prayer” are sought when drawing: “That’s why I always reject stupid interpretations that my young girls are the product of erotic imagination”.56 Yet we recall the comment that “one always paints oneself and one’s own personal, secret story” which, in Balthus’s case, entailed a “fierce violence” he claims to have relinquished. It should be remembered that Vanished Splendors is a late life selective statement of achievement, a summary of his position close to death after many years of successful marriage to Satsuko and parenting a daughter Harumi. The piety of this writing may be suspect, yet it is not altogether false piety when seen as attempted esthetic repair of a damaged soul.