11. Glenn D. Wilson and David N. Cox, The Child-Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society (London: Peter Owen, 1983), pp. 124-5.
12. Ibid., pp. 124-5.
13. Ibid., p. 127 See also pp. 27-29.
14. Ibid., p. 29.
15. John M. W. Bradford et al., “The Heterogeneity/ Homogeneity of Pedophilia” University of Ottawa Journal of Psychiatry 13, no. 4 (1988):224.
16. Robert J. Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), p. 4.
17. Ibid., p. 6. See also pp. 103, 106.
18. Ibid., p. 9. See also p. 105.
19. Ibid., pp. 149, 152.
20. Weber, pp. 91, 48.
21. Ibid., p. 74.
22. Ibid., pp. 247-8.
23. Jean Clair ed., Balthus (New York: Rizzoli, 2001), p. 236f.
24. Weber, p 234.
25. Ibid., p. 155.
26. Ibid., p. 237. Weber also makes a point of Balthus’s denial of his mother’s Jewish origin, a different matter from recoiling from her provocations.
27. Ibid., p. 233. Balthus’s well-known dislike of psychoanalysis is recorded in Vanished Splendors, p. 90 (“I am extremely wary of psychoanalysis.”), p. 114 (discounts a “Freudian interpretation” of The Mountain), p. 159 (along with Pierre Jouvre, Balthus rejects Surrealism, a product of Freudianism). Like Jouvre, he replaced “calling on the subconscious” with “mystical callings”. Jouvre was well acquainted with Freud as he and his psychoanalyst wife, Blanche Revershon, had translated Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. (J. Clair ed. Balthus, p. 236). Balthus also rejected his brother Pierre’s psychobiographical study of de Sade’s childhood, although failing to offer a reasoned argument against it. His interview for the 1996 BBC film contains another lordly dismissal of psychoanalysis.
28. Sabine Rewald, “The Young Balthus”, in Balthus, J. Clair ed., pp. 45-6. By the end of 1922 Rilke was criticizing Baladine’s emotional instability, her craze for amusement, her naive and stubborn behaviour.
29. Ibid., pp. 45-46. “Merline’s [another nickname for Balthus’ mother] appearance was strikingly like that of many women who had been close to Rilke: she had a brooding, dark, vaguely Mediterranean look. She seemed like a version of Loulou or Claire Studer-Goll or even a younger Lou Salome, though she was gentler than most and pleading in her demeanor.” Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), p. 455. For all the passion of their relationship (including a large correspondence published in 1954), Freedman describes Rilke’s “fear of commitment”, showing how he “set up boundaries”, serving “his morbid anxiety about being tied down”, pp. 457, 475.
30. Ibid., p. 46 . (Letter of May 15, 1921)
31. Jean Clair ed., Balthus , Appendix on Biography, p. 485 (1934); Weber’s account of overdosing on laudanum, Balthus’s suicidal incident staged for Artaud’s benefit is helpful, but it does not point out his emulation of his mother’s seemingly similar attempt which had so frightened him . See Weber, pp. 279f.
32. Ibid., pp. 204-9; for the theory of “cumulative trauma” see M. M. R. Khan, “The Concept of Cumulative Trauma” in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child vol. 18 (1974). Rilke had a guilty, idolatrous interest in young boys of the androgynous sort, along with many tentative heterosexual relationships. Striking photographs of adolescent Balthus suggest why Rilke was so fascinated with this artistic prodigy (eg. Clair, p. 43, plate 1; p. 48, plate 12). For Rilke’s interest in androgyny see Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet, p. 496. Weber discusses Balthus’s own ambiguities of gender as illustrated in his paintings, p. 266.
33. Estela Welldon, “Perversions in Men and Women” British Journal of Psychotherapy 12, no.4 (1996): 481.
34. See for example Woman at the Mirror (1948), one of a series of drawings and paintings in which a figure, probably male, just inside the frame, watches intently as the woman undresses. See also Girl Getting Dressed (1948) and Georgette Dressing (1948-9), Giovanni Carandante, Balthus: Drawings and Watercolours (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), plate 39 etc.
35. Vanished Splendors, p. 93.
36. Weber, pp. 254-5.
37. Ibid., p. 271. Collaboration between the impressionable 27-year-old Balthus and Artaud induced the painter’s most daring visual pursuit of his fantasy of danger from females and symbolic reprisals that they seemed to justify.
38. Balthus in His Own Words, p. 9. See also Vanished Splendors, pp. 83, 131.
39. Vanished Splendors, p. 119. See also p. 208.
40. Jean Clair ed., Balthus, p. 302f. See also p. 306, plate 1, for a nude in white sox, and the drawing Study in which the figure opening the curtain could be a boy. The drawings appear together in Virginie Monnier and Jean Clair eds., Balthus: Catalogue Raisonne of the Complete Works (Paris: Editions Gallimard/ New York: Abrams, 1999), D 625-D 636. Two drawings, D 629 and D 630, reveal a male figure holding the swooning female, making it an explicit erotic encounter. The boy in the window appears in D 633 and D 634. There is also a photograph of 1956 in which the grown Balthus and Frederique Tison enact this scene in the studio at Chassy. (Plate 152) This seems to have been a restaging of the long-ago trauma.
41. Ibid., p. 328.
42. Ibid., p. 439
43. A detailed comparison of Carroll (Charles Dodgson, 1832-98) and Balthus as similar artistic mentalities would be rewarding. Both assumed names of convenience behind which to conduct their representations of female children, Carroll by photographing “unspoiled beauty” and Balthus by painting them to reveal “their slow transformation from an angelic state to that of a young girl, to finding and capturing the moment of passage”. (Vanished Splendors, p. 66; the very title of this memoir is taken from Through the Looking Glass “as the secret ‘paradise of vanished splendors’”, p. 65) Carroll’s fascination was for much younger, but equally untouchable, girls, and he used the quick new photographic technology, whereas Balthus laboriously painted his models sometimes taking years to complete a canvas. A brief discussion of Carroll, the Victorian nude and photography is found in Alyce Mahon, Eroticism and Art (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 59f.