BALTHUS I was born in this century, but I belong much more to the nineteenth century," says Balthasar Klossowski, known to the world as the painter Balthus. As it happens, Balthus was born on February 29, 1908, a quirk of fate, he likes to joke, that makes him twenty-two. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once told him that being born on leap day was like slipping through a crack in time; it gave Balthus access, Rilke said, to a "kingdom independent of all the changes we undergo." For years he has contrived to live in that kingdom, in life as in his archaizing art, divorced from his time in a realm of his own devising. Balthus has been described as a realist painter, but he is a realist of a singular and imaginary sort. His portraits and figure studies, painstakingly and thickly painted, have a calculated naïveté and a predilection for precisely drawn yet somehow mysterious imagery, full of oddities of scale and gesture. His landscapes are dreamy, almost fairy-tale scenes bathed in a granular light, images of time in abeyance. There's a geometry and flatness to the art that can be described as modernist, but in every way Balthus has tried to put distance between himself and the principal goings-on in art of the twentieth century. I have come on a spring day in 1996 to visit him in his sprawling eighteenth-century chalet in Rossiniere, a tiny Swiss mountain village, between Montreux and Gstaad. He and his wife, Setsuko Ideta, also a painter, have lived here for more than twenty years. They tell me that they came once when it was an hôtel garni, found it to be for sale and bought it. The steep rising hills and, on this day, the soft spring colors can bring to mind some of Balthus's gauzy landscapes from a time before he moved here, as if this were a fulfillment of a vision he had had years ago. Before Rossiniere, Balthus lived in grand and often conspicuously remote houses in France and Italy. During the 1950s he painted the view from his dilapidated château de Chassy in the mountainous region of the Morval in central France. Those pictures come to mind here, where Balthus enjoys a kind of isolation. Almost proudly he makes a point of the fact that he has never been to the United States, not even for his own retrospectives over the years at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Balthus has agreed to meet for a few hours. Today he is dressed in a seaweed-green Japanese abbot's robe, short black boots over bright red socks, a gold chain around his neck. Thick glasses perch on his nose. His gray hair is brushed straight back. You can see that he was handsome when he was younger. Though he speaks slowly, in a gravelly voice, he has lost none of his mischievousness or preening finesse. A chain-smoker, he keeps a lighted cigarette bouncing in the corner of his mouth when he talks. "You don't smoke?" he asks me at one point, then, with a dismissive arch of his eyebrows, answers himself: "No, of course not. You're an American." Setsuko, an alert, piquant woman in her early fifties, wears a blue kimono with red sash, her lips bright red, her face white. Filipino servants flutter about the room. I feel vaguely that I have stumbled into a Sax Rohmer novel. Knowing his famous reluctance to say much about himself, I have brought along a book of paintings from the Louvre to talk about because many of the works that have influenced him, the ones he has echoed most often in his art, come from the Louvre. He went there countless times as a young man teaching himself to paint. "The Louvre was the most instructive place for me," he says, "and chiefly because I looked at Poussin." At seventeen, Balthus copied Poussin's Echo and Narcissus there, and later he adapted the figure of the reclining Narcissus in several paintings, as he has adapted other figures from other Poussins, like the sleeping Rinaldo from Rinaldo and Armida in Thérèse Dreaming, a languid image, mildly erotic, of a child rapturously dozing. "I taught myself to paint, and I went to the Louvre to find how the great painters did it. There I understood that if you do not have the means of telling something, you have nothing. Poussin came out of a time when art was a craft. To make an art like the art of the seventeenth century, when Poussin was alive, is impossible today because artists no longer know how it's done." Balthus has got on to a favorite subject, the decline of civilization. "You know, the human being was quite different in Poussin's period," he says, a theory he has put forward before. "And the human being has completely changed, especially since the war. Before the war there was another kind of humanity, but I'm convinced that something has happened to mankind, something terrible, that Mr. Hitler let something diabolic into the atmosphere. There's no longer any culture, if you've noticed." Balthus is scythelike, a wraith. These days he needs help to cross a room. He hears with difficulty, and his eyes are too weak to allow him to draw. Setsuko says she assists him in his studio, calling herself his "studio boy." Just how much assistance she has given him lately is a matter of some art-world gossip. Always slow to finish a painting, he has exhibited only one new painting in the last few years, though he says he paints every day. A friend, the writer Claude Roy, once likened him to a cat: "brilliant, but in that very brilliance, reserved, skittishly secret, courteously open yet hermetically closed." And it is true, Balthus is evasive, and one can get the impression that his remarks-everything about his extravagant persona, in fact-are a little fantastical and to be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, years ago, to the bafflement of friends, he let it be known that he was of noble birth and that his rightful name was the Count de Rola, and moreover he declared, despite his German, Russian and Polish ancestry, a family connection between himself and Byron (in whose onetime home, the Villa Diodati, near Geneva, Balthus happened to live for a time). "We come from a very bloody clan," Balthus claims, and I think I detect fleeting amusement on Setsuko's part. Other people have not been so amused by his reluctance to acknowledge his Jewish ancestry, which includes a maternal grandmother and a grandfather who was a cantor in Breslau, nor by the lengths to which he has sometimes gone to attack those who have pointed out his heritage. Until lately, Balthus had a horror of interviewers and photographers, which is not to say he wasn't sociable. It is, of course, possible to be both socially ambitious and reclusive when it comes to public scrutiny, and this was Balthus's situation. His most repeated remark for the last thirty years is that "Balthus is a painter about whom nothing is known." The statement implied that whatever people thought they knew about him or his work was wrong. And even now, as he accepts with his wife's encouragement a degree of the attention he once shunned, he is impatient and dismissive with questions about his art. Partly he believes it should speak for itself. But partly he has a dread, not unfounded, that people will ask him about his infatuation with adolescent girls, for although he has done hundreds of works, he is inevitably linked in the public's mind with his paintings of young women in enigmatic and sometimes suggestive poses. Skeptical and censorious Americans, in particular, tend to regard him as the Humbert Humbert of the art world. "I really don't understand why people see the paintings of girls as Lolitas," he volunteers, to get the issue out of the way. "You know why I paint little girls? Because women, even my own daughter, already belong to this present world, to fashion. Little girls are the only creatures today who can be little Poussins." Poussin seems to be a play on words: in French it means a little chick, and can be a term of endearment, but it also implies a figure from the works of Poussin, pure and timeless. "My little model is absolutely untouchable to me," he insists. "Some American journalist said he found my work pornographic. What does he mean? Advertising is pornographic. You see a young woman putting on some beauty product who looks like she's having an orgasm. I've never made anything pornographic, except perhaps The Guitar Lesson." An image from 1934 of a girl naked below the waist and draped over the knees of a bare-breasted woman, The Guitar Lesson is a painting Balthus said was contrived to attract attention when he was virtually unknown. Courbet, whose paintings of lesbian lovers, among other works, alarmed nineteenth-century viewers, was clearly a big influence on Balthus's work. "For the people of his time he was probably very irritating. He did what he could to shock. And he was a peasant." But there is a more direct source than Courbet. The figure of the girl, it has been pointed out, mimics the dead Christ in the fifteenth-century Avignon Pietà in the Louvre; it's a link that, by its blasphemy, heightens the shock. And implausibly Balthus therefore denies the connection. "I absolutely never thought of that, never," he protests. "I'm Catholic. I'm a member of the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazare!" I decide to change the subject slightly. What, by the way, does he think of Lolita, whose author, after all, was almost a neighbor of his when he lived in Montreux? "It's very Russian," he says of the Nabokov novel, dryly and after a moment. "But the subject doesn't interest me." Balthus was born in Paris. His father was an art historian who wrote about Daumier. His mother, Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro, known as Baladine, was a painter so close in style to Bonnard that, so the story goes, Bonnard once saw a work by her and asked, "When did I do that?" Balthus recalls Bonnard as "a great friend of my family, and as far back as my memory goes, I see Bonnard. Americans don't understand Bonnard, which is very sad for America because he's probably the greatest painter of the century, and such a wonderful man. The letters between him and Matisse during the war gave me a new view of Matisse, I must say. They are just two old survivors writing to one another. Certainly Bonnard's work was important to me in that it gave me a sense of what painting ought to be. It's difficult to say whether it had a direct influence on my work but it had an influence on my way of looking at things. Vuillard, too. One can say that painting was still alive when those two were alive." Balthus was thirteen when Mitsou was published: it was his story of a stray tomcat, for which he also drew pen-and-ink illustrations. Despite his claims to abhor all popular culture, since Mitsou he has always had a surreptitious romance with old advertisements and illustrations, from which he sometimes cribs. "But not modern ones," he says. "When you look at older popular art, you find a similarity to Courbet, but in modern illustrations you find nothing at all. What I like are the illustrations that artists call kitsch, from children's books, in which they are keeping the tradition that goes back to great painting. I don't think they're kitsch." I ask if he also admires Delacroix's illustrations of Shakespeare, because they, in particular, have something of Balthus's intentional expressive awkwardness. "They have been very important for me," he says. Already there were characteristics in Mitsou that would define Balthus's later art: an imponderable sense of narrative, a strange otherworldliness and a desire for pictorial order. As a boy, Balthus moved to Switzerland and Berlin with his mother and brother, Pierre. His mother, who had separated from his father, had become close to Rilke, who wrote the preface to Mitsou and later dedicated "Narcisse" to Balthus. He also found patrons to help pay for Balthus's travels. From Switzerland it was possible for Balthus to go to Arezzo and Florence to see the great frescoes by Piero della Francesca, Masaccio and Masolino. Works like Balthus's The Street, of 1933, make oblique references to them, and in general in Balthus's art, the combination of stillness, symmetry and powdery, bleached color, like the color of ancient stone, can be linked to those frescoes. I show him a Piero portrait in the Louvre book. "It's true, there is a strong connection," he says. "But with Masaccio, I feel even more related. Piero I admire enormously. He taught me many things, but I feel nearer to Masaccio and Masolino. I can't really tell you why, except that Piero is too near perfection, so near that he's squashing. However, who can say for certain about such things? For instance, I made a nude and only afterward did I realize that it had been inspired by a work by Simone Martini. A friend of mine pointed it out to me, although I really wasn't thinking of Simone when I painted it." Beginning in the 1930s, Balthus started to earn a reputation among the leading poets, writers and artists in Paris, where he was living. He met Gide, Camus, Paul Éluard, Antonin Artaud (to whom Balthus became so close that his portrait of Artaud, gaunt and arresting, is nearly a self-portrait). He also met Picasso. "Dear old Pablo. Personally I loved him very much," Balthus reminisces. "You know he bought one of my paintings when I was young. He said he was intrigued because everyone else was making Picassos except me. He covered me with such compliments that I can't repeat them. As for his work, I liked it in the twenties, after Cubism." He is talking about the Neoclassical works. "But I looked again at the Rose Period recently, and really you can't find anything in it to nourish you." This is interesting, considering that there is an affinity between Balthus's art and the Rose Period, a certain dreamy silence, which Balthus claims not to see. "I knew everyone around Picasso, you know. Jacqueline I didn't like." Jacqueline Roque was Picasso's second and last wife. "But I liked Dora Maar very much." Maar, Picasso's lover in the 1930s and early 1940s, was a gifted, often witty photographer and later a painter, now sadly little remembered except for her part in his life. If we would recall her even less well had she never met him, we might also recall her more for what she did in her own right. In later years she became an intensely private and deeply religious woman, an oblate. Picasso had made her into his Weeping Woman. "Women are suffering machines" was his notorious remark. She told the writer James Lord: "All his portraits of me are lies. They're all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar." Balthus remembers her warmly: "A very interesting person, very dignified." Balthus got to know Derain and Miró, too. His portraits of them show the one as rock-solid, the other as tender as a sparrow. "Derain was one of the most extraordinary men I've ever met because he was like a cloud," he says, though this is not quite the image that his stony portrait conjures up. "He'd change every day. He was tremendously amusing. Miró was quite different. He never said a word, and you never knew what he thought. I don't know whether he was intelligent. He was really like a little child, with the astonished expression of a six-year-old. His earlier works I admire, the self-portrait that was like a Spanish primitive, for instance. But then I didn't like what he did very much. Picasso said to him, 'Look here, Miró, at your age, making paintings like this!' " Like Miró, Balthus was courted by the Surrealists, but the courtship didn't last long. He wasn't the type to join a group, least of all one headed by André Breton. "I couldn't stand him," Balthus sniffs. "Did you know he was the son of a gendarme? My first break with the Surrealists came when they talked of Novalis, and I said, 'None of you know German well enough to understand Novalis and I consider you all uncultured.' And of course that was the end." Someone else briefly in the Surrealists' orbit, but someone Balthus admired enormously, was Giacometti. The two of them, despite their dissimilar personalities, became joined by their love for the art of the past, their self-critical reluctance to regard a work as finished and their passion to represent reality in art, albeit a reality that each one conceived differently. I notice that Balthus owns a bust by Giacometti. "A woman once went to see him, and he was completely bored by her so he said, 'Sit down, madame, and I will make your portrait.' When I saw it in the studio, I said, 'How beautiful,' and he said I was the first person to think so, so he gave it to me. "I remember we went to visit him in Stampa once, when his mother was there." Stampa was Giacometti's childhood home in Switzerland, to which he regularly returned. "What was funny was that my parents knew the Giacomettis, so his mother had met me as a child. But this time I came with my wife, and Giacometti's mother asked me if I was also Japanese." We flip through the Louvre book, past Lorenzetti and Sassetta, Giorgione and Mantegna, all of whom he says, without further comment, that he admires, and I stop on Georges de La Tour's picture of cardplayers, because it is a subject to which Balthus, in his own paintings of cardplayers, has given an especially weird, malevolent spin. He gazes at the La Tour, admiring what he calls its abstraction. It is true that the revival of La Tour's reputation, like Vermeer's, came in the modern era, after hundreds of years of neglect, and had to do with the way his cylindric bodies and geometric forms appealed to tastes attuned to abstraction. But what, I ask, does Balthus mean by abstraction, considering how little regard he always says he has for abstract art? He simply shrugs, so to prod him I mention that the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of Balthus's oldest friends, once told me that he could see a link between La Tour and Léger. This causes Balthus suddenly to perk up. "Oh, my God! Léger, whom I knew very well, could never have painted this. He was very stupid. You know Gide once said nothing was more stupid than Léger. Most of the people who did abstraction were stupid. Art is a métier," Balthus declares, having worked himself into a lather again. "I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a worker. Unfortunately now this idea seems useless, because if you look at modern art you see that now everybody can do everything." He shakes his head in disgust. "And in fact nobody does anything." Excerpted from Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere by Michael Kimmelman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
