Balthus

Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (Balthus), artist: born Paris 29 February 1908; Director, French Academy in Rome 1961-77; married 1937 Antoinette von Wattenwyl (two sons; marriage dissolved), 1967 Setsuko Ideta (one daughter); died La Rossiniÿre, Switzerland 18 February 2001.

Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (Balthus), artist: born Paris 29 February 1908; Director, French Academy in Rome 1961-77; married 1937 Antoinette von Wattenwyl (two sons; marriage dissolved), 1967 Setsuko Ideta (one daughter); died La Rossiniÿre, Switzerland 18 February 2001.

The work of Balthus contains numerous lessons for all serious painters. His self-promotion by reticence - he exhibited little throughout his first 50 years, refused offers of monographs, and perpetuated a myth of detached aristocratic disdain which made him a legend in post-war Paris - is the polar opposite of Pablo Picasso or Antonin Artaud, to name but two of Balthus's influential friends.

This pose was certainly due in part - like that of Marcel Duchamp, whom Balthus resembled physically and to a certain extent intellectually - to an intensely disturbed private psyche, an almost cruel alienation which fired his genius. Here lies an essence in contradiction to the eulogies which abound, praising the obvious "Old Master" qualities in Balthus's work, and - rightly - placing his steady maintenance of figurative principles in the "Abstract" years of the midcentury among the major artistic achievements of our times.

But behind all that, behind his labour, lies the "love" for which that labour was done; this deep erotic content, consistently and exclusively paedophile, and almost exhibitionistically obsessed with barely adolescent girls, fuels Balthus's long struggle with proportion, harmony and dignity in art. In this struggle other painters may find the signs of a new structure, a truth, to beauty in all its forms (however personal or unacceptable the forms) which is ineffably salutary.

It may seem contradictory and debasing to construct a litany of vices (blasphemy, sadism, paedophilia, rape, imagined murder, libel and sardonic wit) around an oeuvre which can and will be described as serene, enchanted, calculated, illuminating, heroic, intelligent and life-enhancing. However, it is Balthus's very insistence on the correlation of these two streams of consciousness, and the disturbed but single-minded intensity with which he sought to comingle them, that speaks to us today.

It may emerge eventually that the great artistic revolution of the 20th century was not Abstraction, but a return of the irrational and erotic to the sources of art, which had been so hypocritically "purified" by the Victorians. The hidden imagery of Duchamp, Picasso's massively fertile erotic vision, even the more obvious Freudian origins of Surrealist imagery have been avoided, or dealt with evasively by generations of critics; all have, to this extent, failed to promote the joyous insanity, "l'amour fou", which was a common stimulus to creativity among widely differing artistic circles.

In the force with which he presented so-called unnatural tastes; in the innocence he was able to maintain through a sublime technique and a rigorous practice, and in the nearly Attic inevitability with which he established a pose or a scene, Balthus forced upon us many of our most disturbing modern complexes. It is not too much to say that he has also purged them, joining again in his art our common madness to a divine order. This is what art was intended to do. We expect it of Phidias or Aeschylus; that a 20th-century man, steeped in the literature of childhood and late Romanticism, who lived a hair's-breadth away from scandal and the law, should do the same is a miracle Picasso recognised when he donated Balthus's Les Enfants (1937) to the Musée du Luxembourg.

Perhaps this grandeur, this respect for flesh and the attitudes of the human body was saved from academicism by Balthus's passions, lent that "note of strangeness in its proportion" without which Bacon maintained there could be "no perfect beauty". Perhaps as well it was an eternal echo of the most amazing influence cast on Balthus's own childhood: his friendship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Indeed, Rilke wrote a text to accompany a suite of drawings by the young Balthus, published as Mitsou (1921). Rilke saw, steeped as he was in the Parisian world of art he met while serving as Rodin's secretary, that the Klossowksi boy (Balthus was born Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) would be a painter, even a master.

From Rilke, it is possible to guess, Balthus drew that habitual façade which helped his worldly career and complicated his private life: feline, elegant, aloof, unavailable. Such a pose, in Rilke, earned the passionate attachment of many titled and talented women (not the least of them Balthus's mother, Baladine, though here it was Rilke who spent his small private funds on educating her two sons); it did not bring him happiness.

So with Balthus a well-born Swiss wife, and, later, a very young and very beautiful Japanese second wife flattered and protected him, while numerous "names to conjure with" from the Paris of the Thirties appear in the roll-call of his firm patrons and protectors. In fact, so well did he establish the myth of his aristocratic necessities and sublime worth that, in the late Forties, a society of friends was founded whose agreement to buy a certain number of canvases a year enabled Balthus first to rent, then to buy, a turreted dream castle, the Château de Chassy in the mountainous Morvan district of France.

The same sense of Balthus's calibre as an artist and value as a social figure led André Maurois to appoint him in 1961 Director of the French Academy at Rome, a position once held by Ingres, and one in which Balthus proved himself a notable teacher and a conscientious historian. His careful restoration of the Villa Medici, which houses the Academy, to an austere Renaissance perfection is a triumph.

Why have we not heard all our lives of this painter, intimate of André Derain and Picasso, master of the Neo-Romantics, represented in all the major museums of world, and written about by enough distinguished authors to fill a volume two inches thick when the moment came (in 1979) for a major retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York?

To some extent the artist's own reticence - composed in equal parts of sense of a genuine sense of creative privacy, a canny awareness of the value of a legend, and a fear of the potential for scandal implicit in any psychological biography - is the answer to this question. But far more important is the extent to which Balthus could not be placed in the context of any "movement" in art, while at the same time being an obvious rebel unacceptable in his emotional shock-tactics. This fine and fatal "otherness" glows in even those examples of his work which border on the twee, with an unearthly light that is at one moment the remembered glow of childhood and at the next a lurid fire of desire, both fused in a radiance distilled from Piero della Francesca and Poussin.

Though some of his finest work was in the landscape genre, this golden light emanates steadily from picture after picture of clothed or naked adolescent girls - reading, sleeping, walking, splayed on unmade beds, revealed in darkness. Genitalia are often at the centre of compositions whose extreme geometry makes them unavoidable to the spectator. Strange attendants survey rituals of awakening that strike terror into the heart of the viewer. Compared to this art, Dalí's coprophiliac coyness or Picasso's neo-classical day-dreaming seems tame. Is it any wonder we did not find Balthus's canvases pinned up in our schoolrooms?

But it is to be hoped that our children will. The art which recognises our early brilliance - sweet and cruel, innocent and preoccupied with sexuality as it is - must be some of the finest created in our era, and, as such, some of the most elevating and educational. Given the emotions we are made to feel by Balthus, who rarely depicts the acts we think we have seen in his pictures, genius is inherent in every composition, so simple, so slowly painted, so time-worn in surface.

A critic once described Balthus's most explicit painting, La Leçon de Guitare (1934), as showing a woman with a girl across her knees, her skirt pulled up, touching her sexual organs; in fact, the woman merely caresses the girl's thigh while pulling her pigtail; the composition, reminiscent and perhaps derived from a pietà, does the rest.

James Kirkup on Balthus

For much of his long life Balthus was a victim of nudgingly snide comments and inept professional art criticism. He scorned being drawn into such cheap snap judgments of an innate purity of soul whose innocent eye informs all his work. For a long time he was snubbed by puritanical officialdom and passing avant-garde faddists, but to the end he went his own way with the oriental calm of a Zen monk. After his happy marriage to his Japanese wife Setsuko, he even began to look like a portrait sketch by Hokusai, his fellow "artist mad about painting".

With his elder brother Pierre Klossowski, writer and painter, he had had an ideal childhood of aristocratic vagabondage all over Europe, where his artistic and scholarly parents were friendly with many of the leading figures in the arts. The two brothers were ardent readers of Alice in Wonderland with the John Tenniel illustrations, and they loved Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwelpeter fantasies, which in 1960 influenced Balthus's L'Enfant aux pigeons. He was particularly fond of Blake and the Brontës, and in 1933 did a series of illustrations to Wuthering Heights displaying many of his obsessive themes.

At the age of 16, he spent three months in the Louvre making a copy of Poussin's Echo et Narcisse: it was so beautifully accomplished that Rilke in his last letter to him in 1926, just before his death, asks it to be sent to him as a parting gift.

Nineteen thirty-three was the date of the painting that was to make him more widely known: La Rue, a minutely organised street scene full of characters and action in suspended motion, plunged in a kind of intemporal accident. La jeune fille au chat (1937) shows a pubescent girl lying on a curious wooden couch, one knee raised to give a glimpse of virginal plain white panties; but her face has Balthus's trademark look of innocence and experience. The cat is a favourite theme; inevitably we associate it with the feminine form of the word, "la chatte", which also means "pudenda". It was wittily used in this ambiguous way by Paul Verlaine in his playful little poem "Femme et Chatte", which Balthus surely knew.

Balthus was averse to reporters. But there have been several interesting documentaries about him, the latest and best by Mark Kidel (1998) where Balthus appears with Setsuko and their daughter Harumi, the master himself in a sober grey kimono of raw silk with a sash of sage green. Both Setsuko and Harumi, appear in brilliant formal kimonos. The latter worked with John Galliano and made a name for herself as a designer of fashion jewellery.

Balthus preferred a very private lifestyle. However, he visited his exhibitions all over Europe and America, and was a great success in Japan. One of the most impressive shows was his first at the resplendent Reina Sofia art museum in Madrid in 1996. He visited his parents' homeland only once, in 1998, when he went to see his exhibition in Wroclaw, Poland, where his parents had met and married. His memoirs are to appear next month from Editions du Rocher, and Gallimard is to publish in June the sumptuous Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre complÿte of Balthus's works.

In an age when we are all accustomed to the spectacle of tennis players and ice-skating stars in tight miniskirts and exiguous panties, it is amusing to think that in 1996 the labels on 30,000 bottles of the 1993 vintage of Château Mouton Rothschild for the American market had to be changed because they showed a Balthus painting of a naked girl which aroused puritan outrage. Balthus took the insult with serenity. As Rilke once told him, being born on a Leap Day was like "falling through a crack in time" so that four years of his life counted only as one, thus giving him access to "a kingdom independent of the changes we ordinary mortals have to suffer".

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