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Awkward sage: Balthus, 1908-2001 - Passages - Balthazar Klossowski - Obituary

ArtForum, Summer, 2001 by Katy Siegel

BALTHAZAR KLOSSOWSKI, OR BALTHUS, or the Count de Rola, as he preferred to be known later in life, died February 18 at the age of 92. His passing did not go unmarked: U2 frontman Bono sang a tribute at his funeral, and critics Michael Kimmelman and Jed Perl wrote appropriately admiring eulogies, if colored by a certain defensiveness about Balthus's historical position. Other commentators, such as Linda Nochlin (interviewed on National Public Radio), could not be moved to praise, even by his demise. Speaking ill of the dead is no more popular in the art world than in the rest of our culture, but wildly mixed feelings about Balthus were reflected in his obituaries, as well as in the reviews that greeted Nicholas Fox Weber's alternately fawning and hostile 1999 biography of the artist. Many observers seem starstruck by Balthus's aristocratic, castle-dwelling persona, complete with literary pedigree (Rilke was his mother's lover), androgynous svelteness, ublquitous smoking jackets, adoring younger wife, and butle rs; others dismiss him as a pedestrian pedophile (including Linda Fairstein, head district attorney in the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit, whom Weber interviewed extensively for his book).

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If writers and critics seem unanimous In their ambivalence toward the Paris-born painter, artists (along with collectors) make up a sizable majority of Balthus's fan base. Some love him for his connection to artistic traditions, precedents, and conventions that have all but vanished; more appreciate what he represents in late-modern culture: a perverse kind of artistic freedom. Painting in a figurative style, making decidedly conservative formal choices, he has come to represent the autonomy not of art, but of the artist; he's autonomous not as an anarchist (like Pissarro or Barnett Newman), but as an aristocrat. This perceived Individualism is ironic, because the interest in the subject matter (i.e., adolescent girls) that has made him so controversial seems to be largely determined by social forces--our entire culture casts an admiring eye at very young women. But artists tend to see Balthus as painting what he wanted to paint, irrespective of historical imperatives or narratives--an enviable (if improbable ) goal. I talked to a handful of contemporary figures about Balthus. both the paintings and the man himself.

LUCIAN FREUD: When I first came to Paris in 1946, I saw something of Balthus, who was very kind and generous to me. He spoke English perfectly and very slowly. He did everything very slowly. I remarked on his green tartan tie, and he explained, "Actually, I am a Gordon." We often lunched with Marie-Laure de Noailles at her house in the Place des Etats-Unis. She always addressed him as "my pretty little rat."

He asked me to take a painting of his, of a little girl at the top of a ladder, to England where he had sold it. "How about the customs?" I asked. "The customs," said Balthus, "will look at this painting like a cow looks at a train." But customs liked that painting very much.

LISA YUSKAVAGE: Balthus is a window onto the European painting tradition at a time when contemporary pictures seem to reject locating a figure in space as a psychological occasion. He's ahistorical, which is exactly what so many people like or don't like about him. When I was discovering Balthus, I was also discovering Lucian Freud, and I thought, nobody's doing this in America, or at least if they're doing it, they aren't accepted here. When I think of postwar American realists, they never gave up the various painting traditions from the nineteenth century, but they were banished to the basement by abstraction. Modernism and its self-critical way of approaching painting was very powerful here. Balthus's lack of self-consciousness is what is so appealing.

A problem I have with a lot of art, like much "new-media art," is that its references are all from the past twenty years and too easy to see. Even though Balthus references art history, it's more complicated--you can't quite figure out why a Balthus looks the way it does. When I look at his work, I see a painting I've never seen before. Everything comes from somewhere, but I like things that seem absolute, or, in Balthus's case, that seem to spring from nowhere. It's about looking at something. Artists like it not because it's a brainy thing, but because it's an eye thing.

DAVID SALLE: I'm interested in Balthus as a lens through which to look at Courbet--the color, the structure, the interiors seem to come right out of Courbet. Baithus is like Courbet without the masculinity: Courbet is a painter of women and dogs, Balthus is a painter of women and cats. There's a component of European modernism through Picasso that is still nineteenth-century painting. In a way, even Picasso after the late 1910s is looking back as much as looking forward, and that's what you can see in Balthus--painting without the modernism. There's a certain phenomenon among Europeans of his generation, of being an artist of the highest rank without living in the "message center," without participating in those mainstream dialogues. That's a premodern ideal. Is it possible today? I don't know.

Awkward sage: Balthus, 1908-2001 - Passages - Balthazar Klossowski - Obituary

ArtForum, Summer, 2001 by Katy Siegel

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