Though separated, he was still married to Antoinette de Watteville and on amicable terms, she having been his most important early child-woman model. In 1962, aged fifty-four, on a trip to Japan, Balthus met twenty-year-old Se-tsuko Ideka, and in 1967 they married. She accepted his grandiosity, becoming the “countess”de Rola. When he went to Rome (1961-76) to restore the Villa Medici, Frederique was still enjoying Balthus’s affection, though his most striking new work was of Setsuko as model, for example in Japanese Figure with a Black Mirror (1967-76). As was noted, when writing of the fleeting pleasure, along with “spiritual risk” young girls gave him, Balthus mentions: “Natalie de Noailles, Michelina, Katia, Sabine, Frederique and...Anna”.62 Reconstructions of these adoring but temporary relationships are sometimes possible, as with Michelina who, with her sister Katia, belongs to Balthus’s period in Rome. Her interview for Mark Kidel’s BBC documentary “Balthus the Painter” exonerates Balthus of any salacious intent in using her as a young nude model. She was not embarrassed, and lost all apprehension when Balthus became so absorbed in his painting that he almost “vanished”. She sees him as fascinated only with the “mystery of life” as the girl becomes a woman, perceiving no “spiritual risk” in the relationship. Her sister Katia, however, does not appear in the documentary; she is the subject of a suggestively leggy picture, Katia Reading (1968-76), which harks back to similarly posed portraits of Therese in 1938. Balthus seems to have been repeating an obsession with Katia, whose testimony would have clarified what models meant when they spoke of Balthus “staring” at them. Further, there is no commentary in the film from Harumi, his rebellious daughter by Setsuko, who underwent changes from “angelic state” to young womanhood under his eyes in the Grand Chalet at Rossiniere. There seems to have been a distinct coolness between them about which she may yet speak.
Nonetheless, the pattern is clear to see of an artist in search of impossible closure to sexual anxiety—impossible by the means chosen, without reconstruction of reasons for the quest. As we have seen, when his mother died in 1969, Balthus was not with her, so it seems the source of anxiety, deeply installed in his psyche, was never properly “known”, let alone “felt” and examined. In The Raven of 1983-6 Balthus was still replaying the anxious fantasy of a dwarfed man carrying his own prison cage dominated by a much larger prostrate naked girl swooning, as a raven looks down from a shelf above.
All the terms needed for understanding a maternal temptress are present, minus the psychological inference. However, the picture is too stagey to be successful.
Balthus was exceptionally clever and manipulative, a master of evasion, his friends thought. His avoidant strategy was well recognized. A woman close to him said: “He’s very weak. He has these two sides. He’s someone who escapes, and avoids (my italics) things. When he sees a problem, he runs around it. He doesn’t face the situation”. The comment continues: “He has always lied”, having a “mimetic personality”. “He knows how to avoid (my italics) obstacles. To protect his independence. He has a sense of mystery.”63 Balthus was indeed enigmatic, also charismatic; young women readily responded to his needs, not seeing them as pseudo needs of demanding a female presence which, at the same time, was kept in abeyance, rendered submissive and passive under his gaze. Many were flattered, even if puzzled, by his lack of empathic portrayal and manipulative control, by the strained body stylizations of poses they were asked to take, or at least were portrayed as taking. However much Balthus insisted that “Paintings don’t describe or reveal the painter”, his pictures confessed the very opposite.64 The paintings are measured doses of self-revelation though held within formal limits, insuring that the artist would not have to experience more archaic conflicted affect than he wanted. They are regulated to an esthetic ideal of universal harmony seen in the best historical painting Balthus knew from childhood excursions in the Louvre. As he said, with both parents artists, “Art became a form of salvation”: “During my childhood, I lived through the experience of redemption through art in a carnal and intuitive way. I knew that art’s contribution and the discovery of beauty, which it generated in the heart, could vanquish every misfortune, and ease every solitude”.65 Yet, apart from a few pleasing landscapes, Balthus’s acknowledged masterful art still makes many viewers profoundly uneasy. Even landscapes do not attain the sublime detachment of Poussin or van Ruisdael, and the nudes break Renaissance conventions of beauty seen from Titian and Rubens until Renoir and the Impressionists. Balthus’s paintings are so loaded with psychological tension that one can only say that something entirely new was happening in the history of western art. As he recalled, when he painted landscapes, “I studied in depth the mystery of morning and twilight mists, the matte velvet of the fields, and the triangular light effects surrounded by hedges”, just as Claude Lorraine or Herman Van Swanevelt might have done in the seventeenth century. But, still dissatisfied,“I studied young girls as seen from behind, looking out the window like a favor bestowed amid nature’s sovereign fixity. And multiple attempts at faces in which the pencil tries to attain a troubling mystery. Frederique consented to it, lending her adolescent face to the insatiable quest”.66
Sacred Profanity
With the advent of psychoanalysis leading to Surrealism in the arts, something changed which can never be changed back; nor should it be. Balthus heard the call of the unconscious, bravely enacting as much revelation of inner conflict as he dared and admitting his “troubling mystery” to be inescapably personal. But his attempt to turn the clock back by stylistic tributes to historical art, by reactionary aristocracy and orthodox Christian faith, did not succeed, or did so only at a cost and with qualifications. Talk of his spirituality does not quell the viewer’s uneasiness with pathological themes in the paintings of girls and young women who could not be seen fully as persons in their own right. Late in life Balthus said: “I believe that a painter’s work must attain the most sacred things. Attain the forms, designs, and colors that are closest to divine things. Fra Angelico and Pierro della Francesca did likewise, approaching God’s mystery with complete modesty”.67 He was backing away into an unattainable past consciousness which was in fact closed to a post-Freudian. “Extremely wary of psychoanalysis” he might have been but there was no escaping its claims about intra-psychic and interpersonal contributions to artistic creativity. However wrong in detail Freud’s psychological study of Leonardo da Vinci (1910) may have been, such writings put an end to the estheticism that placed art in an inviolable realm apart from the artist’s biography. Balthus must have realized this, being so connected to the intellectuals of his time and unusually well read. (His intense dislike of psychoanalysis was undoubtedly reinforced by exposure to Jacques Lacan’s difficult and arcane theorizing, though Lacan’s views on mothering, fathering ,“desire” and “alienation” could have led to productive reflections had Balthus followed them.) Theorizing was never Balthus’s forte, and the more his art unfolded, the less he wanted to reflect on what it meant in interpersonal terms, seeking to assimilate it to religion.
His recourse to orthodox Christianity must therefore be seen as an act of desperation, the most powerful antidote to experiences and feelings that art alone could not tame or dispose of. Supposing that Balthus carried the trauma of seeing his mother and Rilke in sexual union, having himself been aroused by Rilke’s attention, he would have hoped to feel that his art had triumphed over trauma; but evidently it did not and he could feel no release. Balthus thus stepped up the power of imagination by embracing a sort of christian asceticism but, strangely, apart from The Painter and His Model (1980-81), the art did not much change thematically. As noted, this picture just hints at the painter, head wrapped as if from an injury, facing away from the model (herself in a prayerful posture), exposed to light framed by a cross made by the window. The scarcity of such religious imagery is surprising in view of the vehemence with which Balthus insisted upon his faith: “Christianity is the importance of Christ. ...I’m a Catholic myself and believe in resurrection. I’m a very religious person. My painting is a spiritual discipline; in some ways it’s a prayer”.68 Among his final published words are these: “One should die amid the sweet promise of meeting God, in the splendor for which, I’m convinced, painting always sought to pave the way. To paint means to approach. Close to a light. The Light”.69 Who would be so bold as to dismiss or devalue such words? Yet in their otherworldly fervor they also seek self-justifying validation of his entire career in secular painting. Balthus was trying to replace a pseudo-salvationist private cult of adoring young girls with a religion the wider community agreed upon. By profession of asceticism, prayer and fidelity to the Christian promise of afterlife he attempted to normalize the pedo-philic preoccupation that drove his extraordinary career in art. Adored young girls are normalized to Christianity by calling them “angels”, but the effort doesn’t convince. Adoration and femiphobia remain unreconciled, and the avoidant impersonality of his subjects never mutates into any higher consciousness than formal esthetic resolution could confer. The net artistic achievement is exceptional for the buried pain it reveals, along with the unrealized hope that it can somehow be transmuted into fuller life.