Off the trails, Balthus

Dans le rare autoportrait exposé dès la première salle de la rétrospective que consacre la Fondation Beyeler à Balthus, l'artiste a 27 ans. Aucun goût pour la proportion ni la mesure. Mais déjà l'art de déformer les corps, le sien en l'occurrence. Cela fera sa gloire, sulfureuse et, de temps à autre, attirera sur lui et ses portraits de fillettes trop jeunes pour être érotisées le soupçon chronique d'obscénité. Thérèse rêvant (1938), tableau d'une préadolescente les yeux clos, rêveuse et insouciante, dont la jupe remonte un peu trop et laisse entrevoir la culotte, fut ainsi la cible, il y a un an, d'une pétition réclamant son décrochage des collections du Metropolitan Museum de New York. En vain. A Bâle, la toile, qui compte parmi une douzaine d'autres que le peintre consacra à Thérèse Blanchard et à son frère, Hubert, entre 1936 et 1939, n'a pas fait de vague. Peut-être parce qu'elle est cernée par des dizaines d'autres qui, sans éteindre le trouble, le replacent dans un cadre : celui d'un art qui laisse ses sujets en paix mais qui veut inquiéter le spectateur.

Cardboard sets

The proof in 1935, therefore, with Balthus himself, posing the serious and skull mine but the juvenile features, the tiny bust made of a pair of legs far too long.Pocket Napoleon, one hand on the hip, the other flat on the reverse of his jacket, he forces respect for the shaggy and ugly tomcat who rubs his huge round head against the chicken calves of the king of cats.This is the title that the painter has awarded himself, as pompous as derisory.Matering cats, would it be the only ambition of the young man who, as a child, saw his early talent for illustrious artists?Let us quote Rainer Maria Rilke, the lover of his mother, who prefaces the illustrated tale he publishes at 15, or Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard who guide him in his first paintings.The irony of the self -portrait, its cocktail of comic, melodramatic emphasis and solemnity, will tint all the art of Balthus.Like so many others afterwards, the canvas with its elongations makes you smile, then its placid strangeness ends up tense and freeze blood.This slightly distorted being, any more than his companion with demonic eyes are of this world.The trait and the subject, realistic, louvoise towards more twisted, more opaque areas, more impermeable to the representation.

When he paints this self -portrait, Balthus recovers a suicide attempt, which occurred after his first exhibition the previous year, at the Pierre Galerie, had made an oven.He did not sell any of the seven canvases presented, when he hoped a lot, between scandal and celebrity.On the eve of the opening, he was already welcoming: "The most important people parade at my place to see the paintings.It's the dawn of glory.To arrive, she will have to respond to the order and execute portraits of renowned artists (Derain, Miró), aristocrats or rich collectors.He painted them, a little tired and disillusioned, in the neutral space of his workshop.He turns off at home all traces of vigor and expressiveness by preferring brown, ocher or brownish shades.In the same room, the portrait of his first great love, Antoinette de Watteville, painted in 1937, does not flare more.It is stuck in heavy dark yellow clothes and the traces of brushes, for once more fatty and thick, make it beads on the arms and size.The young woman, whom Balthus has been trying to seduce for almost three years, got engaged with another before changing her mind and marrying the artist with growing renown.The other portrait of her then has nothing to do with it: on an armchair, dressed in a unbuttoned blouse that lets see her flesh -colored bustier and a silky white skirt, she lengthens the curve of her legs and plunges intoA lovely reverie.Which ultimately is the only place of Balthus' subjects: elsewhere.

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— Christina Mon Sep 22 15:49:40 +0000 2014

Alangue girls, boasted boys, loved women, toilet women, benevolent old man, busy passers-by: the small people depicted by Balthus in some 350 paintings and seventy years of career (he was born in 1908 in Paris and dies in2001 in Rossinière, in Switzerland) always seems to keep something by details.The characters are there (on the canvas) but their minds, their gaze bear elsewhere.They prefer to fix the void or their reflection in a mirror.Unless they turn their backs and spin their route to the bottom of the painting and these buildings of buildings that have the schematic platitude of the cardboard decorations in the theater.Thus, in the street (1933) and, later, in his counterpart, passage of trade Saint-André (1953-1954), he staged characters to the mechanical process of wooden boys, a back ecclesiastics, aCraftsman with the face masked by the board he carries on the shoulder, a cook wearing a toque and steep like a stake, a mother (back still) with her disadvantaged toddler in her arms.Figures that unkore their immediate environment so meticulously that they would suspect them of playing, under their airs not to touch them, a well -defined role.Which ?The artist was careful not to spin the script of his paintings, simply conceding that the street "had nothing comic" and that "a formidable mystery" hovers "there.

"Painting Freud"

The genius of Balthus and the embarrassment that he sometimes instills come from what he gives wages to the visible and realism, but that he endorsed his characters with a parallel life, with an inner life rich inReveries, desires and secret impulses.Too buried, in the eyes of criticism, which was at the beginning mixed in front of the works of the one she nicknamed the "Freud of painting".Antonin Artaud was more informed than everyone, finding the key with which Balthus was already locking his creatures and their thoughts: "David's technique of time in the service of a violent, modern inspiration, and which is the inspiration ofa sick time, when the artist who conspires reals real to better crucify it.»Dry and smooth surface, without material effect, fine line, erasing the volumes: the Balthus brush dips in a great classicism.Painting does low profile, in a way.She does not take over what she represents.She does not lighten the model, she touches him by also lending him an unreal pallor complexion: white and gray, the green-de-gray allow for example to confer on the young woman in the Cathy toilet(1933) - as well as its housekeeper, who heads her, and even to man in the foreground - a consistency of ectoplasm and a threading body with realism contracted by his disproportions.These dreamlike figures come to haunt other canvases, such as dream II (1956-1957), where a teenager puts forward straight ahead, outstretched arms and closed eyes, while another sleeps on the sofa.Scene of sleepwalking or projection of the dream of the sleeping beautiful, the two girls doing only one, connected by the subtle composition of the canvas which tends lines of force (diagonal and vertical) passing throughObjects as key as it is enigmatic: a checkered pattern, a tank, a prowlled towel, a red coffee maker act as tangible terminals for this vaporous saynet.

Round -headed

The more the exhibition advances towards the last years of the one who has found another title and is now called "Count Klossowski of Rola", the more the canvases grow with objects, fabrics, ornaments that form a caseWarm to the model and a challenge to the spectator: in the red fish (1948), a child, a sort of gnome with a round head, holds a golden cylinder with an air heard and accomplice suggesting that we must have seized the why of howof this staging.The same year, the part of cards saw the players take the form of the patterns of the assets schematically: tile back, feet in the shape of spikes ... The world of Balthus encrypts in an almost esoteric way, much more than erotic.

The latest canvases loans the models (especially the second woman from Balthus, Setsuko Ikeda) in a morning touch that puts on the warmly dressed bodies of folk patchworks, Asian or oriental fabrics (the Turkish Chamber, the Mirror Cat) whoseBigarred patterns extend to the decor, the sofa, the paving and the wall.The model is body with the decor, finds the plumb while the painting, it emancipates and flutter.