Balthus

Palazzo Grassi, Venice
Through January 6

Think of a twentieth-century landscape painter. Balthus would never spring to mind. Yet in the artist’s Venetian retrospective, perfect landscapes are indeed on view. This might seem like a sidetrack, but actually it is a point of departure: This exhibition, curated by Jean Clair, brings together all the fields of this famous artist’s oeuvre, including the lesser known. What are known (and misunderstood), most of all, are his images of young girls and adolescents. He was loved by poets, directors, intellectuals, yet regularly forgotten by the modern art history handbook.

Balthus was never a Surrealist, a category often used for classifying those who cannot otherwise be successfully pigeonholed. Yet he was never a part of this group, even if during the ’30s he associated with Antonin Artaud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and the creators of “Minotaure” magazine, and even though he was a lifelong friend of Alberto Giacometti. It is difficult to define him, not even if this ample and exhaustive exhibition encourages one to do so.

Balthus, whose real name was Balthazar Klossowski (his brother was the famous philosopher), was born in Paris in 1908 to a refined family of Polish origin. One of his parents’ friends was Pierre Bonnard, and his is a name to remember when trying to understand Balthus’ work, especially his paintings of apparently intimate interiors.

Yet one of his mother’s friends was Rainer Maria Rilke, who also had a profound influence on the painter. The reference might be surprising, if one thinks of Rilke as being more solemn and visionary, but he also wrote poems that talk about childhood (“And so to play: ball and ring and hoops/in a garden that keeps slowly fading—O childhood, O likeness gliding off… To where? To where?”). These poems recall many of Balthus’ works, since the topic of childhood always remained key for him: “How I wanted to always remain a child” is one of the rare utterances that the artist is recorded as saying. Indeed, illustrations of Slovenly Peter, the Heinrich Hoffman character, often pop up in his work.

The third, though really the foremost, reference to bear in mind is Piero della Francesca. In 1926 Balthus, after having spent a year copying Poussin in the Louvre, as Bonnard and Maurice Denis had advised him to do—Balthus had never undertaken any formal studies; but then what are formal studies for an artist?—he went to Italy to copy Piero’s frescoes in Arezzo.

Some examples of these copies are on show, but one can discern references elsewhere, too. In La rue (1933), for example, the work chosen to publicize the retrospective; the man crossing the road with a wooden plank on his shoulder directly refers to Piero’s “Legend of the True Cross” cycle, while the chef, who is strolling down the street, wears a tall hat that owes a clear debt to the Tuscan master.

All these evocations—and many others besides, from de Chirico to the Flemish artists to Asian painting—come together to create a style of painting that mixes echoes of antiquity with private neuroses, quotidian reality with the metaphysical, immediacy with the enigmatic. It is a style of painting that addresses us directly, and a mistake was made in removing it from the annals of modernity.




Elena Pontiggia
Translation by Amanda Coulson