By dismissing the true developmental meaning of psychoanalysis Balthus forfeited personal and artistic gains. He preferred to go on elaborating, with significant modifications in landscape paintings, the pseudo-solution to his sexual anxiety: arrested pedophilic attraction. Aged eighty-eight, he readily stated in the BBC interview that pedophilic attraction betrays a “sick mind”, and that he and vladimir Nabokov may have something but not everything in common. Thus he once again vehemently denies active pedophilia. Perhaps so, but there is no explanation of what he means by calling himself an “angry old man”, repeated three times. Was he afraid of being tagged “dirty old man” in the scenes with pubescent Anna, wanting us to understand her as purely “angelic” and “untouchable”? As the erotic charge and “contained violence” of many of his paintings is never explained, so idealization of girls is never set in psychological perspective, only repeatedly enacted with variations. Did he frighten some of these girls with stares; did he ever touch or molest them? Too little is known of this, covered up as it is by fastidious evasions. Nor are his affairs with very young women yet fully documented. The source of anger remains inferential, the best guess being that anger was felt for the trauma of witnessing his mother’s dangerous use of drugs and her dramatic sexual behaviour with Rilke. (It was prophetic when Rilke sent the boy Balthus off to the Louvre to copy Poussin’s painting of Narcissus insofar as Narcissism became part of his own defensive system, mitigating the effects of trauma.) But possible sources of anger and menace (including his well-known hot temper) are not probed by Balthus in his interviews. He had nothing to say about the rape scene in The Guitar Lesson (1934) having anything to do with an incident between himself and his mother. such a humiliation would certainly have left him angry. Had he confronted his anger, the result might have mutated picture-making towards the compassionate states that could bring empathy with women as persons and a truer alignment with religion. The need for defensive avoidance would have been mitigated.
Balthus, it seems, was a pedophile of the mind, whose interior fantasy needed the presence of undefiled innocence, the child-woman models, in order to draw or paint them into harmlessness. His pictorial presentations of sexual attraction and danger are quite theatrical, but the cumulative result is more a theatre of anxiety than of cruelty. Pathos suffuses the enterprise. By staging his fantasies he created a never-never land of esthetically reconciled angry disturbance, whose secret well-springs are hidden, yet emerge into fuller view if psychobiographical examination is allowed. Balthus was indeed an aristocrat of the artisan craft of painting which is all he claimed, not wanting to be called artist, which label he detested for suggesting a cult of personality. Nevertheless few in European painting could match his formal achievement. The mood-elevating function of painting one masterwork after another was enough to sustain a very long and emotionally risk-laden life, even if much of it was lived unaware of the meaning. By taking this view of his production, we may well feel less disturbed and more enlightened, while remaining in awe of Bal-thus’s incomparable craftsmanship.
Notes
1. Balthus in His Own Words: A Conversation with Christina Carrillo de Albornoz (New York: Assouline, 2001), pp.26-7.
2. Balthus, Vanished Splendors: A Memoir, as told to Alain Vircondelet (New York: ecco: HarperCollins, 2001), p.105.
3. Nicholas Fox Weber, Balthus: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 110-11. Weber points out that the letters documenting Balthus’s interest in young children are under his embargo and may not be quoted. See Jean Clair, Balthus (New York: Rizzoli, 2001), Four Studies of a Girl Playing with a Diabolo (c.1925), p. 171, show from a sketchbook Balthus’s interest at about age 17 in observing young girls in motion.
4. Weber, p. 168.
5. Ibid., p. 182. Weber’s theory of Balthus’s narcissistic plight is supported by Morris Fraser in The Death of Narcissus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976). When father is absent and cannot be identified with, “the boy turns back on the only love-object—himself. Thus narcissistic inversion takes place and, as he grows older, he remains deeply in love with the child he was then. This is impossible, so he must project ... on to other children of a similar age to this lost child, who thus become love-objects for him.”, p. 20.
6. Ibid., p. 194-5.
7. Vanished Splendors, p. xvii; Oates tries to pre-empt psychobiography: “There is no reason, in theory, why an artist’s work must inevitably be linked to the ‘private life’ that brought it into being.” (p. xviii) Yet if the private life “brought it into being”, why not reconstruct the private life to explain and enrich the work? Oates’s reason for forbidding biographical reconstruction is that she believes that artists work from childhood “instinct” through a constructed “artist self’, exclusive of actual personal relationships. Attachment theory disproves such a view.
8. Ibid., p. 107. Balthus’s dictated and guardedly edited memoirs have little of Montaigne’s distillation of experience or power of reflection.
9. Ibid., p. 135. He simply observes that as a young man he was “anxious, solitary, and aggressive”, without pondering what this might mean.
10. John Money, “Pedophilia: A Specific Instance of New Phylism Theory as Applied to Paraphilic Lovemaps” in Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions, Jay R. Frierman, ed. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990), p. 446f. “The pedophile’s lovemap dictates that, for him or her, sexuoerotic attraction will be able to occur only if the partner is a member of a specified age group. In pedophilia, the age is juvenile and prepubertal. When the younger partner matures and enters a higher age group, then the glue of sexuoerotic attachment fails, and the relationship, if it continues, becomes one of friendship, mutually devoid of erotic passion”, p. 450. It was, however, precisely the maturing of young girls, their passing from child to woman, that fascinated Balthus. Thus, with the excitement and risk of entering womanhood prompting so many of his pictures, he does not quite match Money’s definition of a pedophile. Money usefully adds that pedophilia has a range of variants, commenting that “The pedophile’s attachment to a child represents a merger of parental and erotic love. This merger originates, at least in part, in the childhood of the future pedophile during the developmental period when the lovemap is differentiating ... the stage of juvenile rehearsal play.... If sexual rehearsal play is subject to being thwarted or warped, then the outcome may be a permanent thwarting or warping of the lovemap and, possibly, the subsequent appearance of pedophilia or some other paraphilia”, p. 457. It is just such disruption of normal rehearsal play that must have occurred when the youth Balthus witnessed his mother’s affair with Rilke. A “traumatizing sexual affair with an older partner” is also possible but lacks evidence. (For further discussion of the origins of pedophilia see, Andrew Brink, Obsession and Culture: A Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), pp. 125-6).