“John, What do I think about Titian? In one word on a postcard: flesh. Love, Katya”

“John, I try to find an answer to the question ‘What made him paint?’ And I can only hear one word, coming from all the chaos of physical matter, as if from the bottom of a black well. Desire. His desire (as befits an eminently virile painter) was, if not to cut into appearances, at least to penetrate and lose himself in the skin of things. Yet, being human and being a painter, he came up against the impossibility of doing this…”

“John, Titian, painter of flesh and guts, their rumblings and liquids. Painter of hair and the tamed beast in man. Painter of the skin as an entry or exit…He was the painter of flesh which commands rather than invites. ‘Take me.’ ‘Drink me.’, it orders. He may have disguised himself for me as an old man or as a dog, but he also disguised himself in women. Titian as Mary Magdalene, as Aphrodite! And here I think we come close to something concerning his power: he wore the disguise of everything he painted. He was trying to be everywhere. Competing with God. He wanted to create from his palette nothing less than life…”

Here is a woman’s voice describing her sense of Titian’s engagement. His great, staggering engagement. His engagement with sexuality and his engagement with life – in this sense, Andreadakis is also commenting on Titian’s courage. In contrast, there is something in Balthus’ subject matter (and certainly Currin’s) and his aestheticizing that point to a kind of frailty, and a fear of engagement with the fullness of life. We are stuck and sentenced to a stage of adolescent and prepubescent desire. And yet, as we begin to allow for this – if we even parenthetically make a space for his artistic obsession — there is a growing sense that this too, called for a kind of courage, certainly a lesser kind, but courage nonetheless, to claim for himself his truth and to place it in paint, to follow his actual, individual trail of desire as creative source.

I agree with Kee that Balthus’ desire-at-a-distance feels ‘utilitarian’ and self-consciously intentional. It is the eroticism of fantasy trumping the eroticism of life, a fantasy that serves to keep actual life at bay. It seems to me that men carry the possibility of this illusion of disengagement more than women – or perhaps just differently, a different visual fantasy. The intactness of our bodies, coupled with desire, anxiety and the ensuing wish to control – well, painting pictures isn’t a bad solution to the mix, considering some of the other alternatives.

That said, I always feel a great sense of air and expanse and fresh possibility looking at Balthus’ landscapes – free of burdens. Maybe that could be the next Balthus’ exhibition?

The inclusion of the Fuseli n the discourse reminds me of Schiller’s ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’, where Schiller proposes that modern expression is sentimental in its reflexivity, whereas classical form is simple, outward and direct. In this light, Balthus’s work, particularly the later paintings, seems to aim at a direct and simple narrative of otherwise complex forces. These forces of repressed desire, however, are complex because of our culture of psychoanalysis aimed at internal subtleties. The paintings of Balthus, on the other hand, formalize this internal drama to the minimum extent, and solely through the utter absence of Beaux Arts classicism. Another painter who achieves a similar mood of mute attention to girls is Hopper.