A Foundling of the Louvre

It

would be hard to make a case for Balthus, who died last week at his chalet in Switzerland at the august age of 92, as one of the great artists of the 20th century. He knew many of them and swam in the same water as they did, but he was not a giant fish like Picasso, Matisse or even his friend from early days in Paris, Joan Miro. Nevertheless he was a good artist, very good at times, though his later work fell far short of his best, most of which was done in the 1930s-50s. And he was, to all intents, the last celebrity of the old School of Paris--not quite a central figure but able to turn his marginality around so that it looked like aristocratic refusal of a slightly questionable limelight. "Balthus," he told a writer in the '60s, "is a painter about whom nothing is known"--and he did make every effort to lay false trails for would-be biographers.

In his last years, living in a grand house outside Gstaad, he insisted on styling himself the "Comte de Rola"--a genealogical fiction. His father Erich Klossowski was both a painter and an art historian; his mother Elizabeth Spiro was a painter who liked to be known as Baladine and had a long, intense friendship with one of Germany's greatest modern poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, who became young Balthus' mentor. Thus from childhood Balthasar Klossowski, to give his actual name, was steeped in an artistic milieu, and he grew up with a considerable sense of himself as a prodigy. But young Balthus never enrolled at an art school: he learned from impassioned study and much copying of museum art.

The definitive influence on him, however, was the 15th century Italian painter Piero della Francesca, whose cycle of murals Legend of the True Cross Balthus saw on a visit to Italy in 1926. Piero's unique combination of physical intensity and complex, abstract formality seems to have shaped Balthus' deepest pictorial ambitions. But the streak of ambiguous desire he brought to his imagery of the nude was peculiar to Balthus, and it invested his work with a permanent scent of scandal.

From the 1950s on, he was routinely compared to Vladimir Nabokov because he was fascinated by the uninnocent sexuality of young girls. How many times has one heard Balthus' familiar images of pubescent females, naked in bare rooms or stretched catlike in the firelight, called nymphets or Lolitas? For his part, Balthus insisted that his nudes had no element of sexual provocation. They were just form, color and glimpses of domesticity. This was quite unpersuasive. Balthus' interiors can have a chilly and highly stage-managed perverseness, as in The Room, 1952-54, where the young girl sprawls on a chair in utter abandonment, flooded with the light from a huge window whose heavy curtains are being pulled back by a sinister dwarf.

But Balthus' talents did not run to avant-garde ambitions. He was entirely a figurative painter--there was no abstract phase to his work--and his reverence for past masters, from Piero and Poussin to Courbet and Manet, was so absolute that his work is a virtually seamless homage to them, not so much in subject matter as in studiously quoted poses and meticulously conscious structures. His power of organization was awesome; his spread of quotation, wide. What caused the individual citations to hang together, though, was his eye for nature. Nowhere is this clearer than in his huge composition of 1937, The Mountain. Every one of the figures on this plateau of the Bernese Oberland is quoted from somewhere else--the girl lying down in the foreground comes from a Poussin, and so on. The green-capped rocks are real, but they are also inspired by Courbet's landscapes. But what so lifts the picture is its soft, rapturous golden light, bathing every complicated shape in clear air--and that was Balthus' own. He did not want to hide his sources. He made no bones about being the child of museums--the foundling, as it were, of the Louvre.