96 Years of sodom: Benjamin Ivry on Pierre Klossowski - Passages - Obituary

ArtForum, Nov, 2001 by Benjamin Ivry

EVEN IN DEATH, Pierre Klossowski was inevitably linked with his younger brother, the painter Balthus. Almost all obituaries of the artist, writer, and translator, who died in Paris this August at age ninety-six, mentioned that his more famous sibling had died only six months earlier. Both vied in wry self-deprecation: Balthus summed up his own painting by saying, "I do surrealism in the style of Courbet," while Klossowski claimed to be no artist, writer, thinker, or philosopher "but first, foremost, and always, a monomaniac." His monomania consisted of a remarkably free expression of Sadeian erotic imagery in writing and drawings. This integration of frankly pornographic scenarios with philosophical and literary concerns made him attractive to writers like Georges Bataille and Pierre Jean Jouve, and later Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. As a draftsman, Klossowski made an endless number of clumsy, large-scale images in graphite or colored pencil, typically showing, for instance, a clergyman fondling an ado lescent boy, or a nude woman tied to a bed while a dwarf and another man both make plays for her. The key word here is "plays"--the work of both Balthus and Klossowski was much imbued with theatrical imagery, a legacy of the productions they'd seen in childhood. Klossowski stated, "My drawings, like my texts, are of a dramaturgical order.... For me, the most authentic vision of what I do is in what I show."

While Balthus always denied the obvious eroticism of his own languid, pubescent girls, calling them "angels," Klossowski's images, thanks to their theatrical presence, are highly self-aware. Hannibal Lecter, in Thomas Harris's best-selling novel Hannibal, not only admires Balthus, but claims him as kin: "[Hannibal] sent catalogs of the most interesting art shows to his cousin, the great painter Balthus, in France." By contrast, Balthus's own brother rejected him as an artistic influence; instead, Klossowski claimed lineage with great literary and visionary artists of the past whose work also dealt with an element of eroticism, such as William Blake and Henry Fuseli. In rejecting Balthus as an influence, Klossowski also set aside many of his obfuscations.

Klossowski was refreshingly candid about his goals as erotic artist and writer. Unburdened by the acolytes who touted Balthus as "one of the great twentieth-century painters," Klossowski always enjoyed a tiny but influential coterie of admirers. This guaranteed him publication by prestigious small presses and regular exhibitions of his art that continued up to his death. Nonetheless Klossowski spent his last decades in low-income subsidized public housing in Paris' 13th arrondissement. (Given the erotomania of his work, many found it fitting that he lived at Number 69 on the rue de la Glaciere.) Unlike his elusive brother who preferred to stand alone in his generation establishing few sustained artistic friendships or alliances, Klossowski always said that he created art as a search for "accomplices." His many friends and admirers were attracted by his peculiarly French combination of intellectual credentials and erotic quirks.

Klossowski was still a teenager in 1923 when his mother Baladine's lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, introduced him to Andre Gide, a celebrated pedophile. Gide quickly persuaded Klossowski to send him pornographic stories and drawings about gay sexual adventures, to the point where the promiscuous Pierre found himself running out of true accounts and had to invent material to please the insatiable older man. In exchange, Gide introduced him to literary personalities of the day, including Jean Paulhan. An especially important friends was established with Bataille, whose own works allied transgression, eros, and death in a highly Sadeian way. After a religious crisis during World War II, during which he tried and rejected monastic life, in 1947 Klossowski married Denise Marie-Roberte Morin-Sinclaire, a former French resistant who had been deported to concentration camps by the German occupants. She became central to his future writings in the guise of "Roberte," a wife who is offered as sexual partner to all the writer's friends, in books like Roberte ce soir (1954); and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1959), part of the literary trilogy Les Lois de I'hospitalite. Also in 1947, he produced what has remained perhaps his most celebrated work, Sade mon prochain (literally "Sade My Fellow Human Being," although the English translation was titled "Sade My Neighbor"). Several more works appeared, including Le bain de Diane (1956) and Un si funeste desir (1963), all focusing on erotic imagery in the light of Sade.

Throughout, Klossowski maintained an intellectual curiosity and an appetite for literary labors. In the '30s, he attended the series of renowned seminars on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind at Paris's Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, given by the philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, sitting alongside other prestigious listeners like Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Queneau, Raymond Aron, and Andre Breton. Kojeve's analysis of Hegel's thoughts on the Master-Slave relationship, an interdependent one, would resurface in Klossowski's later work. His intellectual interests went beyond Hegel and Sade to Nietzsche, and his writings on the last made him a significant figure in France's modern appreciation of that philosopher. He also translated many works requiring sustained application that no mere dilettante could have accomplished. They included Les Poemes de la folie (1930), a pioneering translation of Hoderlin's poetry realized in collaboration with Jouve, as well as works by Walter Benjamin, Kafka, Nietzsche (The Gay Science and Posthumous Fragments), Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), Paul Klee (Journal), Suetonius (The Twelve Caesars), Heidegger (On Nietzsche), The Trial of Gilles de Rais, Tertullian, and Virgil's Aeneid. The last translation, published in 1964, was admired by Foucault for its attempt to create a language somewhere between Latin and French, as a "negative." Translated word-for-word from the Latin, disregarding French syntax, Klossowski's oddball version of the epic poem nevertheless, according to poet and critic Jacques Drillon, "has nothing missing...and has the extraordinary beauty" of the original work. Drillon added that Klossowski's version of The Aeneid is a "kind of unsurpassable masterpiece, but it's impossible to translate the way he did!" Once again, like all writers on two freres klo, we can compare and contrast with Balthus, whose favorite writers, according to his biographer Nicholas Fox Weber, were Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland. More unsettlingly, Weber paints a devastating portrait of Balthus as denying his own Jewish origins and spouting anti-Semitic remarks in public, such as repeatedly referring to Metropolitan Museum of Art curator William Lieberman as "a horrid little Jew." By marring a former resistant who had been deported, Klossowski made clear his own stance on France's modern capitulation to fascism.