Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Talk    
Subject:   20th Century  

In 1984, on the occasion of his retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the painter Balthus - or Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, as he prefers to be known - issued a statement of protest. He had been upset, he wrote, by the catalogue of the exhibition in question, a pernicious text which contained “a vast amount of biographical material, most of it irrelevant, indiscreet, or untrue.” Balthus went on to declare that “This ‘getting to the facts’ appears to me a misleading and harmful screen placed between the viewer and the painting … I very much disapprove of the habit of feeding the public with details and anecdotes on a painter’s private life together with the implication that the latter somehow explains his paintings.”

At least Nicholas Fox Weber, author of Balthus: A Biography, cannot be accused of pandering to his subject. In this remarkable book (too often remarkable, it must be said, in ways that its author is unlikely to have intended) Fox Weber takes a determinedly forensic view of Balthus’s work. He treats almost every one of the artist’s pictures as the scene of a crime, tangible evidence of  Balthus’s seething perversion. Despite the artist’s refusal to cooperate with his biographer’s attempts to get inside his head (or perhaps because of it) his works are considered as so much psychic evidence. It is an approach which could not be more perfectly calculated to infuriate the painter.

Exhibit A is The Guitar Lesson, of 1934, perhaps the most memorably unpleasant work painted by the artist during the years when his work reflected the influence of Surrealism. The industrious biographer tracks this rarely seen image of a sado-masochistic sexual encounter between a music teacher and her hapless but unresisting pupil to the New York boudoir of Stavros Niarchos - an appropriately decadent setting for a consummately corrupting picture, he feels. He finds the painting in the bedroom. “Next to the lavish Louis XIV bed, on the delicate marquetry table, stood, in plain view, a king-size container of Preparation H. It was almost as large as the delicate base of the porcelain lamp next to it. And at the foot of the bed there was a VCR on a scale generally found in bars packed with sports fans. I imagined a film version of The Guitar Lesson, directed by a master of pornography and starring skilled sybarites, being shown on it.”

His imagination, the reader may feel, is a resource on which Fox Weber draws rather too heavily. Ensconced in “the private chamber of the exotic potentate”, sipping the large cappucino brought to him on a silver tray by a considerate butler, he settles down to lengthy contemplation of the painting. Shortly afterwards, he is blessed with what he decides is an all-revealing insight. The sadistic music teacher, playing with the cruelly exposed body of her pupil like a musician tuning her instrument - this evil, manipulative monster is nothing less than a portrait of Balthus himself in drag. Having made this initial, astounding breakthrough, revelation follows upon revelation. For if Balthus is the teacher, he is also the vulnerable child, disturbed yet simultaneously aroused. On another level again, the painting is taken as confirming evidence of the painter’s “reverse Oedipus complex”, the mental malaise which (according to Fox Weber) he developed in his youth and which had left him with a lifelong suppressed desire to kill his mother.

Like so many of the sensational psychic scoops which enliven Fox Weber’s book, none of this can amount to anything more than unverified - and, given Balthus’s complete silence on all matters personal and psychological, unverifiable - conjecture. The author entertains the possibility that Balthus might have painted the picture as a deliberate affront to bourgeois and puritanical sensibilities such as his own - but clearly prefers, none the less, to regard it as a piece of raw psychology, a scream of the id. Perhaps the notion that it might be a conscious attempt to depict subconsious experience (a common enough enterprise, in Surrealist Paris) holds little appeal, to the biographer, because it makes the picture less of a scandalous confession and more of a work of art.

It is of course possible that there may be some truth to some of the author’s ingenious interpretations of his subject’s pictures. But Fox Weber does not, generally speaking, advance his theories in a way calculated to inspire confidence. Lying on Stavros Niarchos’s bed, coffeecup in hand, he leaves us with the nagging suspicion that he, not Balthus, is really the one on the psychiatrist’s couch. “The discomfiting sight of this half-comatose child submitting to tyranny felt like a nasty imposition, not a happy choice. The violation of a girl close in years to my own daughters was heinous. But the effects of Balthus’s virtuosity had left me no room for escape.” The biographer’s determination to interpret and explain looks suspiciously like an attempt to exorcise his own trauma. In its misguided way, his book pays tribute to the powers of Balthus’s calculatedly enigmatic, disconcerting art.

Frustrated by Balthus’s fastidious refusal to discuss his motives, erotic or otherwise, in painting naked prepubescent girls, Fox Weber adopts some divertingly unusual investigative techniques. At one point, stymied as usual by the silence of his subject, he goes so far as to seek out the expert opinion of a one Linda Fairstein, chief of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, on Balthus’s oeuvre. Confronted with a photograph of the painter’s The Victim, of 1938, Ms Fairstein helpfully opines that the subject “looks like a sex murder victim” - an interpretation which the author takes as the pretext for some fairly predictable speculation of his own.

For a long book, Balthus: A Biography is surprisingly thin on actual biographical fact. Its author gives the impression of having sketched in just enough material to lend his own, compulsive psychoanalytical delvings into Balthus’s work a semblance of credibility. The only part of the painter’s life to be brought to life with any degree of conviction is his youth. His mother, Baladine de Klossowska, took up with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who became a volatile second father to Balthus, encouraging him in the exciting idea that he was a prodigy, but then letting him down by dying, young, of a mysterious disease now presumed to be leukaemia. Balthus’s unstable and unhappy childhood is said by Fox Weber to have left him with a number of complexes, chief among them a desire to control all those who came within his orbit, a deepseated need to humiliate and degrade women, and an unhealthy erotic obsession with adolescent girls. Substantiating evidence for this is found in his pictures; and herein lies the essential, unsatisfactory circularity of the book.

For all the complexities of interpretation which his approach engenders, Fox Weber’s notion of painting itself seems distressingly simple-minded. He appears to regard all Balthus’s works of art as if they were blurted confessions of the artist’s innermost desires and fantasies - and having decided, fairly early on, just what those desires and fantasies are, he spends much of the rest of his book doggedly combing Balthus’s oeuvre for evidence to support his theories. Like a bad detective, if he cannot find it, he will plant it. Balthus’s 1938 portrait of Joan Miro and His Daughter Dolores might seem, to less suspicious eyes than those of Fox Weber, a rather touching and sympathetic portrayal of two refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Isolated and vulnerable, we see a father clinging to his daughter. In the eyes of each figure there is a vacancy, as if there is something within them - the memory of some atrocity, perhaps - that they cannot tear themselves away from. But this, needless to say, is not what Fox Weber sees. To his eyes, the painting pullulates with unpleasant sexual inferences. The artist has travestied his rival, Miro, by making him into the image of the pervert and paedophile which Balthus knows himself, secretly, to be. Eyes glazed with lust, he  presses his reluctant daughter’s body to him with lubricious intent. Lest there should be any doubt about this, our author calls once again on the expert testimony of Manhattan District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit for confirmation of his suspicions: “Linda Fairstein pointed out to me that ‘Miro is cupping what is about to be his daughter’s bosom’. Even though she is only eight and her breasts have not developed, this is not generally how the father of a girl that age would hold her. Beyond that, the girl is not just sitting on his lap; she is pressed against his inner thigh.”  The Keystone Kops (or should that be Keyhole Kops?)  have kracked it again.

Balthus does not emerge from this book as a particularly pleasant man, and it is clear enough that he has lived a far from exemplary life. Fox Weber catches him out in a number of lies - proving, for example, what many have suspected, that his self-styled title of Count is entirely bogus - but the worst of his crimes turn out to be little more than a compulsion to spin false, self-aggrandising yarns about his background, and an enduring snobbishness. Reading between the lines, it seems that this frail but mischievous old man may well have played a somewhat cruel game with his biographer - inviting him to his Swiss home for weeks at a time, leading him on with the promise of personal revelations, only to feed him a bland diet of anodyne, unilluminating anecdote, and send him haring off on any number of false trails. But however untrustworthy Balthus is made to seem, his biographer is certainly no model of even-handed objectivity, and as the book goes on his attempts to read every picture as a graphic illustration of his subject’s state of mind come to seem worse than ill-conceived. Soon, it seems, he begins to see sexual threat and innuendo everywhere, not just in art. Interviewing one of Balthus’s former sitters, Marie-Pierre Colle, Fox Weber is scandalised to notice that she is absent-mindedly scratching an itch on her chest. “To this day,” he concludes, “I do not know if she was trying to lure me or if it was the memory of Balthus that was prompting her to fondle her own breast in front of me.” It would be interesting to have her account of their meeting.

Baffled, dodged and stonewalled by Balthus himself, his biographer takes out his evident frustration on his pictures with an ever-increasing analytical violence. As the book lengthens and the plot thickens, it becomes difficult to tell whether one is reading a biography or an autobiography, such is the extent to which the increasingly irascible author forces his own emotions and history on us. His prose, weak at the best of times, takes on a nearly rabid quality of self-justifying rage. Here he is, for example, on Balthus’s mildly sinister and faintly Hogarthian depiction of teenagers playing cards, The Card Game, of 1948-50: “The girl smugly fancies herself to have played the winning card, but the boy may trump her yet with what he is holding folded behind his back. That phallic candle at the center of the composition, its light taper thrusting into darkness (forgive me, Balthus; laugh and deny as you will; but I’m not the one who devised this scene that so patently depicts the drive “to dip your wick”), symbolises the goal.”

There is doubtless more than meets the eye, to Balthus’s art, but the art itself remains inscrutable, and in the absence of confirmation or denial from the painter himself all interpretations must remain just that. Fox Weber is by no means the first writer to have suspected (for example) that the painter’s depictions of adolescents express an unhealthy sexual interest in young girls. But it should also be said that that is not the only way of looking at them. Janet Hobhouse, for example, in her fine book of essays on the nude in twentieth-century art, The Bride Stripped Bare, sees the pictures as a series of reflections on themes of innocence and experience (an interpretation which at least concedes some artfulness, some consciousness of his own purposes, to the painter). In the end, the fact that the enigma of Balthus’s pictures persists - the fact that, despite his best efforts, the biographer can prove not an iota of what he suspects - this is what truly enrages Fox Weber. His complaint, finally, is not against Balthus, but against art itself, for having the temerity to remain open to differing views.

Balthus: A Biography is a sporadically entertaining addition to the canon of biographies successfully sabotaged by their unwilling, incommunicative subjects - a book in the same venerable tradition as James Lord’s melodramatic and similarly fantastical Giacommetti, or Deirdre Bair’s impeccably unrevealing life of Samuel Beckett (the publication of which was noted some years ago, in the London Times Literary Supplement, under the headline “Exit, pursued by a  Bair”). Having set out to write an account of Balthus’s life, Mr Fox Weber has, rather, furnished the necessary material for a case study of himself.