44. Weber, p. 304.
45. Balthus in His Own Words, p. 26; Balthus mentions his letters to Antoinette de Watteville, which his son wanted to publish. (Vanished Splendors, p. 131)
46. Vanished Splendors, p. 220. The subject is Antoinette at Champrovent, a farmhouse in the French Savoy where they went to live at the outbreak of war in 1940. A photograph shows that the tree had a rotten spot at its base and was not put there by the painter. Poussin’s “Autumn” is the prototype. See Vanished Splendors, p. 177-8 where Balthus speaks of “secret exchanges” with great art of the past as necessary to enrich of his own.
47. Ibid., p. 235.
48. Ibid., p. 180. For comments on “The Moth” see pp. 76, 110. Could “The Moth” be an allusion to Nabokov’s obsession with butterfly collecting?
49. Jean Clair ed., Balthus, p. 348. See especially among portraits of Frederique “Young Girl with Folded Arms”, p. 348.
50. Vanished Splendors, p. 130.
51. Weber, p. 325. Whoever the model may have been, Weber comments that Balthus turned her into his “usual, preferred mix of victim and culprit”, while Derain appears as “a hedonistic, mendacious troublemaker”, p. 328. The sexual connection is obvious to Weber. (p.329)
52. Ibid., p. 353. That the critic Linda Fairstein finds Miro’s 8-year-old daughter’s pose indecent may be excessive; there is no doubt about the father-daughter portrait’s moving humanity. (Weber, 352f)
53. Vanished Splendors, p. 25; yet he admits, “Some of my paintings are autobiographies in themselves, suggesting that I should stop writing my memoirs, since I’ve long been convinced that I express most about myself in my paintings”, p.217. Further, Balthus comments: “What interests me is the awakening of things and life, the birth of things. I’ve constantly worked to paint these childhood secrets”, p. 235. These statements suggest that flat denial of interpreting meanings cannot be quite true.
54. Ibid., p. 65.
55. Ibid., p. 66.
56. Ibid., p. 66 Yet what was this if not the “secret story” he said he painted?, p. 93. Other denials of eroticism appear for instance on pp. 157, 175 and 184, where he insists upon young girls being above any “mortal state”. Balthus’s memoir is a masterwork of the unspoken and, perhaps, unsayable to which only the pictures dare testify.
57. Ibid., p. 204.
58. Giovanni Carandente, Balthus’s Drawings, p. 109f. See Vanished Splendors, p. 213-14 where he discusses the “dreamlike crossing to secret things”, much as the hated Surrealists might do. The dreaming seems to be part of a “disappearing act” through which he wanted to put girls in a safe place, “escaping from fleeting, harmful time”, pp. 90-1, 109.
59. Vanished Splendors, p. 170.
60. Weber, p. 396. Balthus staring, or overly intent gaze, could be disturbing to young girls, however quickly it might shift toward full engagement with his painting. There are few if any comments from young girl sitters on his projective distortions of their body forms—strained poses, oddly shaped limbs etc. They appear not to have questioned what he was “saying”, through awkward physical poses, about their enticement yet unavailability and remoteness.
61. Jean Clair ed., Balthus, pp. 314-15. See the Catalogue Raisonne for a striking set of crayon drawings of Laurence Bataille made in 1947/8: D 557f; some are head and shoulders: D. 557, D 562 and D 570.
62. Vanished Splendors, p. 65. See Jean Clair, Balthus, p. 149 for Michelina’s report of a sitting for Balthus, the overall feeling being of conditional engagement along with studied avoidance of her presence as a person. He would converse, tell stories and even sing arias from Don Giovanni, giving the sense of her entering a “private world” of deep trance. Later Michelina did not recognize herself in “some highly sensual poses”, p. 150, and struggled to find reasons why Balthus sought the sorts of model he did. She was aware that many viewers found Balthus’s paintings “scandalous” and the artist “bizarre”; but she readily fell in with the rationale that he was most concerned with a girl’s transition into womanhood. Eventually she broke away from this entrancement to lead a more normal girl’s life. A sense of what the relationship must have been like may be gained from her words and the visual evidence of another child model Anna prominent in the BBC film Balthus the Painter, made when the artist was 88. As appears in the Catalogue Raisonne of the Complete Works (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), Balthus obsessively drew the sisters Katia and Michelina . Between 1967 and 1971 there are approximately 80 crayon drawings of the budding Katia—sequence and titles are inexact. Many of Katia are head and shoulders, some sitting with arms crossed, while others are more erotic with one raised leg. From 1970 to 1975 Balthus made approximately 90 crayon drawings of the slightly older sitting and standing, sleeping and waking Michelina, breasts and genitals sometimes exposed. (See for example: D1250, D1273f, D1311f and D1321f.) In the Catalogue Raisonne groups of obsessively observed exposed young girls alternate with groups of nature and still-life drawings that completely alter the subject matter and mood of Balthus’s enterprise.
63. Weber, p. 467. Weber admits that resisting Balthus’s attempt to enlist him in his world of fantasy was difficult and that the biographer’s independence was in periclass="underline" “once I realized I was writing about someone as unscrupulous as he was brilliant ... I pretty much stopped meeting with Balthus”, p. 235.
64. Jean Clair ed., Balthus , p. 131
65. Vanished Splendors, p. 165.
66. Ibid., p. 88.
67. Ibid., p. 150.
68. Balthus in his Own Words, p. 9.
69. Vanished Splendors, p. 230.
Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornelclass="underline" Avoidance and Enchantment
The attachment system has been conceptualized as a mechanism for regulating distress. Securely attached infants are able to turn comfortably to their caregivers for alleviation of distress. Insecurely attached infants cannot do this, and so these infants need to develop their own strategies for affect regulation. Mothers of avoidantly attached infants appear to avoid negative affect in their infants as they do in their own significant relationships. Avoidant infants are thus seen to use avoidance as a strategy for affect regulation.
—Susan J. Bradley, Affect Regulation and the Development of Psychopathology, p. 16.
Fragments and Absences
Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) is known as a Surrealist-inspired American maker of boxes containing enigmatic assemblies of natural and man-made objects. The boxes are among the most hauntingly beautiful products of twentieth century art and are endlessly discussed by critics trying to decide what they mean. I wish to step outside these discussions to examine their psychological utility as instruments of affect regulation. To do so requires psychobiographical commentary on Cornell’s early attachments and life-long attraction to, yet avoidance of, women as erotic objects. I believe that the boxes’ main purpose was to transform sexual anxiety into less disturbing images of beauty.