“He’ll think about paint and he’ll think about glue/ what a jolly boring thing to do.” So sings David Bowie in his 1971 song “Andy Warhol” on his seminal Hunky Dory album. Recently the rock musician himself has been thinking a great deal about art, but with no signs that he or his fans are getting bored. He is prominent among over forty pop celebrities exhibiting artworks in aid of the charity Warchild, to help set up a music and art therapy centre in Sarajevo. And while his formidable collection of modern art keeps growing, he has even turned his hand to art criticism.

The prestigious journal Modern Painters, whose founder, the late Peter Fuller, was critic of the Sunday Telegraph, usually carries essays by the likes of Richard Wollheim, David Sylvester and Robert Hughes, doyens of high brow art appreciation. When editor Karen Wright invited Bowie to an editorial meeting even the most sceptical members were charmed, especially when he claimed he might be able to set up an interview with the highly elusive Balthus, at 86 the last survivor of the pre-war Ecole de Paris. Balthus and Bowie both live in Switzerland, and made friends at an opening for the painter’s young Japanese wife, Setsuko.

“My original intention was just to be the liaison in all this”, Bowie tells me. “I gave him a call and proposed a meeting, suggesting I would bring a ‘qualified’ journalist with me, to which he replied, “Good Heavens, no, I can’t stand art journalists. They are always so intellectual. I’d prefer you to do it, dear boy'”.

“I haven’t been referred to as ‘my dear boy’ in decades”, says Bowie. Asked if he feels a creative affinity with the painter, he says “The common ground we seem to share is the will to work obsessively, and a strong resistance to judgements of our work. Put it out and be damned – quite often, as it happens! Other than that, we are time and worlds apart, which has made for a rather lovely friendship.” The exchange, which took place at Balthus’s gargantuan eighteenth-century chalet at Rossinière in the Vaud, proceeded at a leisurely and anecdotal pace. In fact it runs to twenty pages, by far the longest article ever run by Modern Painters. Their chatter is charmingly under-edited, leaving Balthus’s continental English intact. “Are you still the King of the Cats?”, Bowie asks Balthus, alluding to the erotic overtones of the sphinx-like felines that often attend the prepubescent girls in his paintings. “When you get over 86 things change”, comes the stoical reply. Setsuko interrupts to offer Swiss chocolates. As a photographer sets up equipment around them, testing his flash, Balthus reveals his remoteness from the world of his young interviewer. “Are you used to photographers?” he asks of the supreme manipulator of self-image and pioneer of rock video, the man who has been Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and the Man Who Fell to Earth.

There is little actual talk of art, but plenty of reminiscence about personalities such as Marlon Brando, with whom Balthus used to lunch in the 1950s, and Rilke (his mother’s lover) who championed him when he was still a prodigy. Bowie introduces the subject of English painters, as that is the school he collects. Balthus laments the loss of his friend Bacon, whose paintings he never liked, adding “I have a horror for dear little Freud who I was shocked to hear that he was seventy now. He was a charming young man which I knew when he came to Paris about 30 years ago. I was really shocked by the last thing I saw. So Berlin painting!” And when Bowie enthuses about the romantic landscape strain in British painting, tracing a tradition from Samuel Palmer through Ivon Hitchens and David Bomberg to contemporaries such as Maurice Cockrill, who figures prominently in his collection, Balthus says “Yes, Palmer. I know of him”. It is as if Balthus is not so much from a different generation as a different epoch.

Like many of the artists featured in the Warchild exhibition, which opens at Flowers East Gallery on September 28th, Bowie was at an artschool. Brian Eno and Brian Ferry, for instance, studied with Tom Phillips and Richard Hamilton respectively, and have both collaborated with Bowie musically. But he is sanguine on how much art-training influenced his early development: “My own background in so-called art training was limited to four years from the age of 14 on an art course at Tech. This was the innovation of Owen Frampton, to steer ‘talented’ students through to art school status. But I only had eyes for the saxaphone and life on the motorway. I briefly worked as a junior artist at an advertising agency in London , but was completely hopeless, skiving off to lunchtime R&B gigs or to pour through American imports at HMV.”

“Since the beginning of this year”, he says, “I have been working almost constantly with Brian Eno on what seems to be a thousand and one different projects.” When he was asked to contribute to the charity show, he thought he would just let them have a couple of charcoal sketches from his studio. “I have taken to drawing rather a lot while recording recently, as it seems to stimulate some new ideas in both mediums. But then I thought I’d use this situation as an excuse to experiment with computer collage.” While other celebrities have made small works in keeping with the title of the show, “Little pieces by big stars”, Bowie has produced a portfolio of 14 prints (in an edition of 14) entitled “We saw the Minotaur” and an additional poster. The strange, menacing figure in “Joni Ve Sadd”, a self-portrait perhaps, is made up of tiny computer squares with a tiara of haloes that looks like it has been collaged from one of the occultist publications he collected during his Hollywood years in the mid-1970s. The poster “Minotaur” has a similar 70s look – album cover cum science fiction illustration – with a heavily drawn charcoal figure set against collaged backdrop of what look like mountains from a renaissance painting set within an exotic Moorish arch.

“I would describe them as flashy, faintly topical and vulgar”, Bowie admits, and it would indeed be hard to make too great a claim for them. But is Bowie falling prey to the Swan factor? There is an epidemic among celebrities – pace Naomi Campbell’s ghost-written novel “Swan” – of thinking that being famous for one thing permits one to do anything. Sylvester Stallone is launching a career as painter, model Elle McPherson as actress, Naomi Campbell not only as novelist but as pop star too. John Lyttle, in the Spectator, debunks the wanna-be renaissance men and women of the mass-media age. “Children, of course, think they can do everything without practice, without preparation, without due thought. Stars, like children, are easily deluded.” But Bowie’s interest in the visual arts is of a different order, for they have always stimulated his main career, which has as much to do with image and performance as music and lyrics. Justifying the eclecticism of his music he once said “When you are an artist, you can turn your hand to anything, in any style. Once you have the tools then all the art forms are the same in the end.” But in acquiring those skills he has never lacked modesty and determination. He studied mime with the great Lindsay Kemp, for instance.

His collecting has often related to his creative interests. In the mid-70s he went to Berlin, partly to escape an unhappy time in America but also because of an obsessive interest in Germany of the 1930s. Left-wing friends disavowed him of his infatuation with Nazi regalia and symbolism. Meanwhile he discovered artistic soulmates in the Brücke Museum. “I waded quite heavily into Expressionism”, he admits, collecting Heckel (who influenced the title track of his “Heroes” album) and Schmidt-Rottluff. “Not the paintings but the woodblock prints at which I think they excelled.” His own drawing style is heavily indebted to expressionism, but as much to the British painter David Bomberg as to the Germans. “I constantly return to his and Lanyon’s work. Both in their own ways lift the taut skin of the British character and reveal the stunningly romantic nature underneath. I learn something new from every piece I have.”

Bowie has always kept up with music fashion, often, of course, anticipating it. His most recent album, “Black Tie, White Noise” incorporates elements of acid house, for instance. Critic David Buckley has compared him to the Beatles as a brilliant popularizer of avant garde ideas. But in relation to the latest neo-conceptual art he is robustly sceptical. “Recently, I was looking at some work with a well-known European dealer. Part of this display was a video of a young artist chastising himself with a whip. I mentioned to the dealer that the artist didn’t seem to be swishing very enthusiastically, to which he anxiously replied ‘Oh, I can assure you that in about 20 minutes he really brings up quite a blush on his buttocks’. I forgot to ask the price.”

He finds time for at least one avantgarde maverick however. “I had that Damien Hirst in the back of my taxi the other week. Actually it was at dinner. So much bullshit is talked about his work. For me the act of killing a sheep or shark and putting it in a smart box is entirely evocative of the senselessness of most of our actions in this the latter part of the millennium. I don’t care if it’s art or not, I appreciate it as an expression.”

The post The Thin White Duke: David Bowie, 1947-2016 appeared first on artcritical.

 This essay, originally titled “This Bud’s For You,” is one of four published in the exhibition catalogue for Walter Robinson’s career survey which was seen at the University Galleries, Illinois State University, Normal in 2014 and travels early next year to Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia (January 23 to March 12). Other essayists are Vanessa Mielke Schulman, Charles F. Stuckey and the exhibition’s curator, Barry Blinderman. The essay appears in artcritical’s “extract” series devoted to important exhibitions by New York-based artists not scheduled to be seen in the city. There will be a book signing by the artist at Max Fish, 120 Orchard Street, New York, November 5, 6-8PM.

Walter Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from the Boston Globe who exposed sexual abuse by priests in the Diocese of Boston. He is also known for his musical compositions, especially his lyrical song “Harriet Tubman.” A noted radiologist, he heads the Department of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois. A legendary cricketer, he is also the front man of the Jimi Hendrix tribute band, Haze of Purple. There is an elementary school named after him in Bayonne, New Jersey.

But THE Walter Robinson is the co-founder of the legendary by-artists- for-artists magazine, Art-Rite, and while avoiding painting he served as editor and chief reporter and critic of the online journal Artnet. He was the dryly hilarious regular correspondent on the pretense-tweaking television show, Gallery Beat, and he remains one of the toughest competitors on The Kostabi Show, Mark Kostabi’s name-the-painting cable-TV program.

Robinson thinks he was a contributing editor to Art in America from 1979 to 1996, but actually he is still on its masthead. As a critic and observer of the world of art, he is a paragon of educated and enlightened drollery. But all of this is window dressing. Despite all his attempts to prove otherwise, Walter Robinson is an artist.

Many of the women in his heroically romantic paintings might have appeared later in Richard Prince’s Nurse paintings, or they could be the daughters of the models seen in Mel Ramos paintings. In any case, perhaps under the influence of gin or pep pills—and Robinson has painted those kinds of intoxicants too—the pulp fiction heroines exemplified vice as virtue and sin as salvation. He also did spin artist, long before Damien Hirst, and Walter’s spin paintings are more centrifugally forceful and more evocative of the rotary LSD experience. They really set the controls for the heart of the sun.

A famous raconteur, Walter is known for his bon mots and so he is a much sought after speaker who will go to great lengths to disappear before reaching the podium. Last December I asked him to be part of a panel discussion on value and the art market and he accepted. When he didn’t appear on the dais I was worried but later I found that he was simply unable to tear himself away from the buffet at the event.

A man noted for sound and resilient appetites, Walter translates his lust for life to the canvas with verve, panache and a wit that ranges from extra dry to demi-sec. His food paintings don’t take a back seat to those of Ramos or Wayne Thiebaud. And when it comes to depictions of sheer concupiscence, his oozies are doozies, his slatterns are comfortingly slatternly, his hussies aren’t fussy and his wantons aren’t frontin’. The guy can paint and, in doing so, conjure a world so gone it never existed. Is he the Elizabeth Peyton of insensitivity? The Francis Picabia of peccadillos? The Balthus of swingers? Some of his titles, like Savage Destiny and Divine Weakness, suggest the lambently lustful nature of his visual lyricism. What does it amount to? I’ve always thought that apotheosis strikes when you least expect it.

The pen (or Sharpie), they still say is mightier than the sword, but with the pen and the brush combined, you’re outclassing both the blade and the bludgeon. It’s a great pleasure to see the full return engagement of an artist who has been too absent from the center of the scene, while documenting it brilliantly from the periphery with a sage and not entirely jaundiced eye. Walter returned to exhibiting when the time was right.

Fifty-six years ago Elaine de Kooning related, “Fairfield [Porter] says: ‘Why is irrelevancy so often taken for profundity?’” Walter Robinson has no truck with irrelevance. Having surveyed the eld he knows what he wants, and all claims to the contrary, he knows how to get it. He understands the humanity of art that ventures beyond the pale of chic and institutional chicanery. Relevance is perhaps the new forbidden fruit. Two decades ago this world was not ready for the full bloom of Robinson’s art, but the world has grown up and lost its prissy faux innocence. Someday soon prurience will return with a vengeance. As I once said, “an erection caused by art is no mean feat.”

In that spirit, rarely has a retrospective seemed so prospective. I declare that now is the time for this sort of unashamedly manly art, and for artists unafraid of riotous condiments, of smegma and sublimity, of Vaseline and gasoline, and of the explosive redolence of drool and sti es. In the bouquet of aestheticism, there are blooms and thorns, pollen and petals, but Walter Robinson, this Bud’s for you.

The post “The Balthus of Swingers?” Glenn O’Brien on Walter Robinson appeared first on artcritical.

Juliet Helmke on aerial photography
Kurt Ralske on Richard Prince
Sabrina Mandanici on Samuel Fosso
Alexandra Nicolaides on the photographs from Ferguson, MO
Lindsay Comstock on Melanie Schiff
Lee Ann Norman on appropriation
David Carrier on Harry Roseman
David Carbone on Balthus

Full index entry for “photography” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical

The post Recent Photography at artcritical appeared first on artcritical.

David Cohen was joined in an email exchange recently by six painters and a poet – all sometime or regular contributors at artcritical and/or The Review Panel – to discuss the exhibition, Balthus: Cats and Girls which remains on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 12, 2014.

DAVID COHEN  Balthus was something of an anomaly: A maverick amidst modernist friends who emulated old master technique; the self-taught painter who went on to direct the Villa de Medici (the French Academy in Rome) and who is thus, in a way, the heir of Poussin.  What strikes us most as we enter this show: his naïveté or his mastery? Maybe Balthus is proof of the degree to which those qualities are by now inextricably linked.

DUNCAN HANNAH  If one is as single-minded and precocious as Balthus, and having grown up in such an illustrious artistic atmosphere (Rilke, Matisse, Bonnard, Derain, Stravinsky, et al.) the fact that he was “un-trained” doesn’t count for much. When I entered the show I was overwhelmed by his mastery, not naiveté. It is as though he always confidently knew where he was going.

DENNIS KARDON  There is certainly a confidence about his paintings that is immediately striking, if that is what you mean by mastery. There is none of the uncertainty that you see in early Matisse for example. But what grabbed me fairly early was the sense of loneliness and isolation that pervades the paintings. I don’t think of them as old masterish in technique so much as not attempting a radical break with the past.

DAVID CARBONE  There are a number of myths surrounding Balthus, one of which is that he was self-taught. Ultimately, of course, every true artist does end up being self-taught if they come to possess a genuinely personal vision. Nevertheless, Balthus was home-schooled by parents who were painters.  Their social circle included Pierre Bonnard and Andre Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski, was also an art historian who wrote a major work on Daumier and illustrated a play for puppets, written by his close friend, the key champion of modern art, Julius Meier-Graefe. It was Balthus’s father who drew a parallel between Cézanne and Piero della Francesca as inventors of forms that exhibited strong tensions in the surface of the picture even as they kept their placed in a fictive space. This key bridge between modernism and the early Renaissance opened a unique path for the child artist. By the time he gets to visit San Sepolcro, after yearning to do so for several years, he is still only 17.

COHEN  He was obviously exposed, then, to better and more exclusive tutelage than students at any of the art schools of his day.  But he was, perhaps, relatively free of a beaux-arts syllabus or the pressures of avant-garde anti-academicism.

CHRISTINA KEE  Naïveté or mastery? I find myself feeling that the works possess neither.  It lacks the charm, or charge, of the first trait, and the interest associated with the latter. I have to say that, for me, Balthus is an artist smitten with the heady cultural innovations of his time, and with the “look” of traditional figurative painting, who spent his painting life well-satisfied with the resulting, and uneasy, pairing of dissonant form and content. I believe on his list of priorities the sexual life of girls-becoming-women wasn’t even that high, as I don’t even feel the finished paintings express sincere eroticism. The works instead seem to be the end result of a highly self-conscious desire to place a intentionally-intense subject matter within a tidy container. The two opposing forces cancel each other out.

CARBONE  If Balthus’s paintings have the “look” of the past for you, I suggest that you compare them, say to any 17th century realist and you may notice that past realists never sacrificed modeled forms to simplified planar shapes where a certain “non-finito” is always possible and in places, perhaps necessary. After all, these imagined rooms are also the work of memory not necessarily of specific events but of aspects of awareness. Balthus, as an anti-modern or post-modern, is necessarily one who has reshaped his language through modernism; his idiom is uniquely his own. As to your last comment, I feel that we live in a culture where dialectical thought is rarely found and in Balthus its use seems to express the anxiety of being.

KEE  Balthus is no Courbet. The difference between Courbet’s very visible, material, engagement with his subject matter and Balthus’s more, well, “utilitarian” use of his medium is the difference between participation and illustration.
.      Illustration isn’t necessarily a negative (it’s an impulse that is quite wonderful in Balthus’s early “Wuthering Heights” sketches, for example, which feel more true to me than other works) but it’s a mode in which the painter is somewhat removed from the immediate implications of each stroke.. I simply don’t feel Balthus’s way of making paintings includes the kind of subtle play of medium you are seeing in the work. Where you are seeing deliberate explorations between volume and plane I’m seeing a premeditated deployment of economic means towards an end. I have the same problem with John Currin’s work- the intentional distancing from the subject just doesn’t produce a charge for me.

VINCENT KATZ  If we consider mastery to be self-mastery, Balthus certainly knew who he was in a big way, and set that up clearly for the rest of his career.  In terms of technique — in one of those coincidental, or perhaps not so coincidental, juxtapositions that living in New York City provides as a matter of course — I found Balthus in this exhibition less technically adept than René Magritte, as evidenced in the current exhibition at MoMA that opened the same week.  Except for the amazing painting The Victim (1939-46): there I felt Balthus’s technique was in synch with his subject to haunting effect.

KARDON  I have to disagree with Vincent. As a painter, Magritte (at least in the MoMA exhibit) was merely a journeyman. That’s because he was more of an image-maker than a painter.

COHEN  I’ve got to say I always thought Magritte’s technique was intentionally dull – with the bland touch of a sign painter – compared to either the inventive lyricism of Miró or the virtuoso slickness of Dalí.  Balthus is that rarity, it seems to me, an artist who is totally authentic within a self-consciously outmoded painterly idiom.  He doesn’t seem to be intent on juggling several historic styles to make a contemporary one; nor on passing himself off as belonging to a specific past period; nor on playing the kind of stylistic games that were or would soon become current (Picasso, Derain, Picabia).  But intensely as he might be looking at Courbet, Piero et al. he isn’t occupying their respective period looks as if trying to pass himself off as a contemporary of one of them either.

KARDON  Magritte was only interested in pictorial ambiguity and not painterly ambiguity: he needed to paint only what was necessary to make the meaning for his image, but was not really interested in the painting process. Whereas Balthus was totally concerned with the ambiguities of paint in creating an image. Not only are you staring right up Thérèse’s crotch but – because the surface breaks to reveal the reddish brown under painting – it appears she has just gotten her period. This is missing in the earlier Art Institute painting and goes to my point about the ambiguous meaning from the substance of the paint rather than Magritte’s ambiguity from the image.  And note that this painting has been hung significantly higher here than when it is in the permanent collection, presumably to enhance the crotch point of view.

CARBONE  The flat-footedness of Magritte’s realism is an intentional take down of traditional academic painting that has to do with a Dadaist play of signs.  In a somewhat related way, Balthus uses a more complex realism in the 1930s and early 40s to evoke a Biedermeier style of 19th century northern painting that he then subverts with a severe simplicity taken from children’s picture books to which he adds a range of tonalities that evoke a claustrophobic and melancholy air.

HANNAH  I agree that Balthus’s unself-conscious techniques that appear to be from an earlier time. And, unlike Magritte, there is a great deal of interest in the paint, rarely covering his tracks, using a kind of classical shorthand. I find his surfaces gorgeous and economical, always in the service of the spell he is casting.

KATZ  I like David Cohen’s phrase “intentionally dull” for Magritte’s technique.  First of all, that it was intentional.  And second, dull in the sense of lack of flash.  We are conditioned, I believe, by the discourse, to look only at Magritte’s images.  If however, one takes the current MoMA exhibition as an opportunity to analyze technique in the service of imagery, one finds the technique not only proficient but actually fluid in a subtle way.  And in fact, David’s phrase, “authentic within a self-consciously outmoded painterly idiom,” could be applied to Magritte’s technique as much as to Balthus’.  However, in terms of imagery, I remain impressed by Balthus’s decisions and the clarity of his obsessions and prefer them to Magritte’s.  Indeed, that is where Balthus’s originality and lasting appeal lies.  He remains uneven, with some paintings being much more successful than others.  One of my favorites is Thérèse (1938), in which the girl leans back in an armchair with her face turned toward the viewer.  Her eyes travel even a little farther to the left, not focusing on the artist/viewer — or is it that she is slightly cross-eyed?  Her entire gesture is understated, and, instead of looking up her skirt, as per usual, we are able to see her arms and hands and legs as something ordinary, yet suddenly of heightened interest.  In other words, the point of view, in this painting, does not highlight the specifically sexual identity of the girl, but rather her sensuality.  It is a subtle distinction, but one I think worth making.  I also love the background of this painting — not only the Mondrian-esque bands of color that compose the far wall, but particularly the table and its wrinkled cover cloth, which reminds me of the work of Rodrigo Moynihan, who I feel is somehow relevant to a discussion of Balthus.

NORA GRIFFIN  I’m interested in this comparison between Balthus and Magritte, two painters who played with the dialectic between “painting” and “image,” in explicit fantasy-constructed painted worlds. David Cohen’s critique of Magritte (“the bland touch of a sign painter”) is precisely what to me, makes his painted images so powerfully democratic. It feels accessible the way pop songs used to be accessible to many strata of people, whereas Balthus’s paintings seem to me a kind of perverse delicacy for an almost comically dark European sensibility. Balthus’s stylized (agonizingly stylized, sometimes) figures also put me in mind of Max Beckmann without the saving grace of allegory, metaphor, or myth. These are truly myth-less paintings for an unenchanted, impossible, violent 20th century. I’m not sure what use they have in the 21st century, but that’s a whole other matter.
.      And by using the word “perverse,” I’m thinking not of Balthus’s notorious subject matter, but more of the way the paint is handled and the sheen of yellowish-bluish death pallor that permeates many of his surfaces and skin tones (The Victim, 1939, is the clearest example of this). I agree with Christina that the eroticism of his work is not apparent through his explicit subject matter of adolescents in subtly sexualized poses. Instead, for me, Balthus’s eroticism is expressed in the juxtaposition of bodies and furniture, how a bent child’s leg mimics the spindly table legs in The Blanchard Siblings and The Salon, and how ornamental details pop out, such as a silver sliver of knife embedded in a round loaf of bread in Still Life with a Figure. The bodily sense of containment emphasized by the repeated horizontal wallpaper featured in many of the paintings is also somewhat of an erotic device, far more than the motifs of candlestick or blazing fire.

KARDON  I sympathise with Christina and Nora’s inability to connect with these paintings, but for me, the connection has to do with the sense of isolation from the world that I come away with and not with any real eroticism, except the liminal representation that comes with being disconnected from actual sex. I think Balthus had a rather peculiar childhood with a highly sexualized and creative mother and a cuckolded father, and with a lover of his mother (whom most children would ordinarily have resented) who embodied a high cultural position and in fact encouraged his career, publishing the drawings he did at 11 which concerned the finding and loss of a feline companion. I think loss and the inability to connect to the world or hold on to the evanescence of passing life are the animating force of his paintings and a feeling that resonates strongly with me.

KATZ  I entirely agree with Nora’s take on Magritte and her analysis of his popular appeal versus Balthus as a taste for a particular elite.  But I don’t take that view of Balthus to be a negative one.  Regarding Balthus’s paintings’ lacking the saving grace of allegory, metaphor or myth, I am not so sure.  The Guitar Lesson seems to partake of all three, though they can’t necessarily be pinned down on a one-to-one basis.  But even his less functionally explicit paintings have something metaphorical about them, in my opinion.  I liked how you locate Balthus’s eroticism in the non-human elements in his images.  But do you feel that those elements support the main subjects of the paintings or work in contrast to them?

CARBONE  I’m very much in agreement with what Vincent says about Magritte and Balthus. Magritte’s metaphysical play remains the work of thought and by contrast Balthus’s the work of feeling. Vincent has also raised my curiosity by bringing up Rodrigo Moynihan. I see him as part of the  “new realism” of the 1960s and ‘70s, where one would find Philip Pearlstein and the early Gabriel Laderman, among others re-engaging with the nature of perception and the formulation of a post-abstract expressionist pictorial language.  For me, Moynihan’s still lives remain external description even as their spareness articulates an abstract structure in the painting’s surface. Consequently, I’m interested in how you relate to Balthus’s animated description of objects.

KATZ  I like your phrase “their spareness articulates an abstract structure” in relation to Moynihan.  I guess it is abstraction, in its widest sense that I am seeing in both Balthus and Moynihan.  True, the significant objects in a Balthus tend to have an almost spiritual animation, as you call it.  But the “less significant” elements of his pictures interest me too, and it is those I’ve tried to bring out — walls, floors, background, tables.  I’m interested in a history of interiors.  If we think of the modern interior, it is interesting to note how light-infused and porous are the genteel interiors of Bonnard and Vuillard, while Picasso and Braque seem to introduce the terse sense of interiors as places of contest and confrontation (even with oneself), significant as sites of intellectual (and possibly sexual) work.  Sex, when implied, becomes part of the intellectual’s work activity, as opposed to a leisure pursuit.  It is into this history of the interior that I believe Balthus and Moynihan both directly fit, albeit with definite differences.

CARBONE  As I entered the first room, it felt immediately clear that Sabine Rewald would have liked to have done a much smaller show of just the ten paintings of Thésèse Blanchard. It is a pity that she couldn’t obtain them all. Still, despite their varied virtues, only Thésèse Dreaming is a major work.  Balthus may not have been a card carrying Surrealist but here he has composed the depicted world to force the viewer to participate in the upending of the sentimental Victorian genre of children at play and rest.  Thésèse’s raised leg is the only way into the picture and forces the viewer to look up her skirt. As my eyes explored the picture, I became aware of how everything around Thésèse had been closed down in a manner that followed synthetic cubist thinking.  Is this naivité or sophisticated in a manner closer to Max Ernst’s collage novels or the early Magritte?

COHEN  I find the earlier girl paintings utterly captivating, as images and as painting, and both of course are guilty pleasures.  I wonder if there isn’t indeed some correlation between reworking pre-modern styles and gazing at under-age girls.  Post-1946 I see – occasionally, not always, there are still real gems – excessive stylization for which I’d be curious to know if there is some biographical or career explanation: just when you’d think he’d think he is “in” with his own style he seems to flatten and roughen the picture surface and almost biomorphize the figure (Nude in Front of a Mantel, 1955) as if to keep up with (or at least fractionally approach) the Jones’s of post-war Ecole de Paris.  Was he at all worried about the political associations of the prewar style?  That doesn’t seem in keeping with what one senses of his character.

CARBONE  I agree that the girls are captivating, but I don’t share David Cohen’s guilt, rather I am engaged with the specific moods Balthus is able to reveal in his portraits of Thérèse. As many of you may remember from your own childhood, it is rare for a youth to be seen and treated as a complex human being and that is what I experienced in the first room. There really is a change in ambition that occurs during the Chassy period but I don’t think it has anything to do with keeping up with the post war school of Paris. On the contrary, Balthus refuses to give up the memory of the past and recent past to explore automatism and the “facture” of Tashism with its entropic view of nature, like Wols, (an artist too rarely seen whom I also admire).  In the last room the later paintings that seem successful to me are the large Girl at the Window, of 1955, The Girl in White, from the same year, Nude in Front of a Mantel, also 1955, and finally The Moth from 1959. Le Reve 1, also of 1955, has always been spoiled for me by the spectre’s likeness to Lenor Fini’s special brand of surrealist kitsch. In that series, the Tate’s recent acquisition of The Golden Fruit is successful even though the spectre’s face isn’t.  While I suspect that there may be some idea of the figure’s faces dematerializing in order to stimulate a sense of escaping the self in dream or reverie, I find the idea mostly fails. For me these works are a rebuff to Social Realist painting in Russia, Italy, France and England, indeed to any populist role. Balthus isn’t for everybody, and I suspect he liked it that way.

COHEN  Not that I wish to become the standard bearer of puritanism but my mention of guilt is in relation to the age of consent rather than to eroticism per se, and I was teasing out some linkage – a state of joy uncorrupted – between pedophile imagery and a reversion to premodern painterliness.

HANNAH  The Thérèse room was indeed moving, from her initial forlorn 11 year old self, to a purposeful collaborator with Balthus at 14. That room was the most focused, but the following rooms engaged me just as much, (until the Chassy room, where he goes for a more generalized pastel reverie). The second room’s tableaus of childhood daydreams and indolence, with their very European props (pianos, slippers, couches, wallpapers, silver, rugs, etc.) were orchestrated with great skill. I find him to be one of the great odd colorists, along with Sickert and Gwen John. His tones are always spot-on. All of which adds up to his own world, hermetically sealed while World War II rages outside. To create a signature, identifiable world is no mean feat, all with a minimum of narrative. Bringing the past he loves into the mid-20th century.

KATZ  I still feel there are stronger and weaker paintings in each phase.  As I argued earlier, the painting Thérèse (1938) was the most effective one in that group for me.  I am struck by the wonderfully forceful effect of the cropping (having the subject’s feet go off frame for example) that pushes the figure and her angled chair practically into the viewer’s space.  This feels very modern to me (paradoxically perhaps, as it relies on illusionistic perspective, but this paradox is at the crux of what makes Balthus great) compared to more conventional compositions of Balthus’s, in which the figure is more clearly and remotely situated in an interior space.      As I mentioned earlier, I found The Victim to be one the strongest and most enigmatic pieces in the exhibition.  The Golden Days is another painting I find intriguing.  It was enlightening to be able to compare the study with the final painting and to examine Balthus’s choices and process for arriving at an image.  I found his choice to remove the cat highly effective.  By the way, what do people think of the whole cat thing?  It began to wear on me after a while, especially when they look more like people or birds.  I love how he invented the murky figure in the background of The Golden Days, tending to the fire, and I find the left side of the painting particularly effective, with again, modernist elements in the shapes of wall and furniture and the provocative cropping of table and basin.  As in Thérèse, Balthus uses the table top as a subtle indicator of spatial depth.
.      I find the idea of “guilty pleasures” intriguing.  First of all, do we find these paintings pleasurable, that is to say erotic?  If so, why not just call them “pleasures”?  I don’t think anyone would call them pornography.  If we do not find them erotic, then why not?  The Guitar Lesson is Balthus’s most Surrealist picture, in the sense that it can be rationalized as a psychological fixation.  I found the quote by one his models, Laurence Bataille, that in her sessions posing for Balthus, she “had to lift her dress a little more” each time perfectly captures his essence: it is about liminality and the artist’s attempt to find just that perfect borderline that evokes the obsession without tipping over into it.

CARBONE  Nora, does “perverse” as applied to Balthus’s use of green-purple-greys in “The Victim” mean that the correct and honest thing to do would be to paint their proper flesh tones? Isn’t this use of color a manifestation of felt metaphor you claim Balthus lacks? And hasn’t it been more than hinted at, not least by Jouve, that this painting was a lament for the war?
.      In the later Balthus there are certainly dialogues with Braque and with Vuillard as well as more remote, pre-renaissance traditions. For example, The Moth is a painting I find fascinating. Can we still say this is a young girl? Isn’t this what you might call one of his “agonizingly stylized” figures?  When you look at Balthus’s working drawings you see him constantly reshaping both gesture and form moving far from dogged description. If we are to find allegory and myth in Balthus, we have to look to the larger world art traditions that from the very beginning inspired him. In this case the Mosaics in Monreale, where Balthus has fused the proportions of both Adam and Eve into one figure.
.      Although I acknowledge the scrupulous research into Balthus’s life that Sabine Rewald has accomplished, her efforts have forced biography onto the paintings in such a way as to flatten all meaning into confession and this has obscured much of the pleasure to be found in the paintings as paintings with layered meanings and not just some vague idea of “formal research”. This is the Oprah Winfrey version of art history.

KARDON  Perversity is merely a deconstruction of acceptability. Perversity is at the heart of postmodernism and as an idea really became visible in the 1980’s with the rise of the AIDS epidemic and the difficult acceptance of homosexuality by the heterosexual world. Since it has to do its initial work in the closet, it is a quality that allows art to be subversive. Labeling something as perverse is an attempt to separate it from the discourse, to pretend that it isn’t a part of “normal” consciousness. If you think what suddenly became visible in the ’80s, especially in America, you not only have Balthus, but Otto Dix, Henry Darger, and Lucian Freud who really wasn’t known in America at the time unless one had been to the UK. And of course, Mapplethorpe, and Serrano, who really opened the door to visibility for the others. I believe ‘80‘s postmodernism brought Balthus back into the discourse and the reason we are discussing him now.

COHEN  An analogy that occurs to me in regards to my earlier thoughts about authentic utterance within a superseded mode of expression, is of writing poetry in a “dead” language (placed in quotes because as soon as you write a new poem in Latin, say, the language is by definition re-enlivened – assuming there is some life in your poetry.)

KATZ  I think maybe the analogy would be to a poet writing poems in a supposedly “dead” form — as the sonnet was considered not too long ago.  Not many poets I know could write a poem in Latin; only Latinists could, and few of them are poets.  Which is an interesting point.  How many painters could have achieved what Balthus did — technically and in term of social meaning?  On those terms, he really is unique, if maybe an acquired taste.

KEE This idea strikes a chord. My first thought was that that would be the sort of poet who would have to belong to some sort of club where his efforts would be appreciated. And I suppose that is my last thought on Balthus – he leaves me feeling that you are either in or you’re out. The most insight into his work definitely comes from those who are “in”, and I have been very moved by the exceptional comments from those among this roundtable who have a true and hard-earned understanding of Balthus’s work and contribution.

CARBONE  I think this analogy to writing poetry in a dead language is an answer to the continuing relevance of painting and by extension to Balthus and our time. Painting has been declared dead in every generation since the French revolution, or so it seems. Regardless, painting seems to remain the most elastic language/medium of all, allowing an unlimited range of expressive possibilities. Goggle Balthus images and flip back and forth between photographers who have restaged Balthus paintings, every one of them is pornographic, unlike their painted models. This to me is another proof of the intellectual “flatness” of discussing paintings only as images and subject matter and ignoring how paintings  reshape reality through the culture and sensibility, let alone skill, of an artist, and create affect.
.      For me, a great wall of works in this exhibition is in the third room centering on the magical The Room of 1947-48 flanked by The Week of Four Thursdays and Nude with a Cat, both of 1949. Like Balthus’s later great tenebrist work of 1952-54, The Room is in conversation with Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare in Detroit. The earlier painting in the Hirshhorn Museum seems to me to also be inspired by another work of Fuseli’s, a drawing titled “The Fireplace”, in a private English collection. It features a large woman in a chemise flanked by two smaller, almost fairy-like, servant girls.  The paint shears away the adult fetishism of Fuseli and presents us with a pulsing interior that exists beyond the laws of projective geometry. if one follows the spatial implications of the fireplace and the wall it is embedded in, one should find a sharp corner behind the standing girl. Instead, the the standing girl fills almost the whole height of the painting, and in conjuction with the close harmony of glowing warm tones, seems to both be around her and within her at once. This willed palpitation is confirmed by the ambiguous construction of her right breast which is and isn’t. Such a device sends a sign of Balthus’s use of non finite paint handling seen here in the hand. As we can tell from related pictures, the girl is not looking at us but into a large mirror, which is the painting. The pictorial palpitations signal the unnamable feelings she senses. We are invited to see ourselves as her, for we are on the other side of the looking glass. Somewhere Balthus has said “To a certain extent, you have to become what you paint or draw in order to express it better. Great Western art is not the art that represents things but the one that identifies with them.” In this Balthus echoes Dante.

KATZ  This elegant exegesis on Fuseli makes clear something we had not touched on earlier — the element of magic in Balthus.   By then, Balthus’s sense of interior (and importantly also of exterior, with the paintings of Frédérique looking out the window) changed drastically and become more modern, in the sense of being patterned, two-dimensional surfaces.

HANNAH  I love Carbone’s Balthus quote, “Great western art is not the art that represents things but the one that identifies with them”. Balthus certainly achieved this absorption into his work, giving him the “authenticity” that Cohen noted earlier on. I also love Carbone’s memory of seeing his first Balthus, and saying “I felt seen”
Much has been said about Balthus’s so-called perversity in these exchanges. I’ve always had the notion that the voyeuristic gaze in these paintings was that of another child, perhaps Balthus’s 12 year old self, not that of a predatory adult. It is the same atmosphere as Nabokov’s novel “ADA”, the unconsummated but hot-house passion between two cousins in a stately home. In fact, a couch plays a very vivid part in the book, as the two children watch a fire out the window.  I posited this theory to Ms. Rewald years ago at the Studio School, and she said I was very naive. Perhaps I am, but that is still the way that I read his paintings. Balthus is a guy who wished never to grow up, so he looks back to the golden days of his youth for the raw materiel of his subject matter. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes also parallels Balthus themes.
.      It’s unfortunate that his controversial subject matter is all that most people will see. To me, he was heroic in waving a tattered banner for an alternative route into  art history’s future, bucking against the conformity of the prevailing trends. sui generis. Each of his paintings is composed of hundreds of aesthetic decisions, which reveal as much as how he feels about painting, as they do about the content. The roughness of the paint gives me a satisfaction I never get from Magritte, who many have been discussing here. His open-endedness draws me in, whereas Magritte’s way of nailing it all down shuts me out. In that regard, Balthus is generous, allowing the viewer to make visual connections where something is only suggested (see the bench in Thérèse on a Bench). I am always surprised to see how chewy his surfaces are when seeing them in person, since they compress so neatly in reproduction. These are not illustrations. They are the work of an eccentric artist fully immersed in his task.

KARDON  I take back what I said about the show losing momentum after Thérèse, as the two Girl at a Window paintings as well as Golden Afternoon both give us sharp contrasts of the shallow space of the interior as contrasted with the bright expansive and beckoning landscapes seen out the window. But mainly it is his creation of a painting as mental companion into which he can fill with his own sense of emptiness, and escape loneliness by concentrating on the sensation of creating representation through the experience of transferring the goo of paint onto canvas from a hairy stick. He makes innovation seem beside the point. His first show at 26 where he hoped to engage the world through the intentional provocation of The Guitar Lesson was a bust (though the show could have used the inclusion if just to show how he moved away from that intentional perversity).

KARDON  Duncan pointed out to me the cat licking the saucer. The flash of tongue is accomplished by the slightest tonal flicker, and if there must be eros in this painting this moment is where it occurs. A very precise flash of movement in a painting that is existing in an eternal stillness. And yes, I will argue that it makes sense that the onset of menses breaks the spell of childhood the way the cat’s lapping breaks the spell of stillness in the painting. It is the way Balthus subverts theatricality through absorption and painterly invention that keeps these paintings from becoming distancing. The theatricality of the gestures is merely a subversive way of keeping the beholder in tension with the painting. Also observe the fire iron in Golden Days. Another of my details, it is a little dark phallic woman who mediates between the narcissistic girl on the couch and the man/boy stoking the fire of passion. The tension between the absorptive theatricality of the girl and the absorptive labor of the guy really provide quite an amazing tableau to explore. I am also surprised no one has mention Watteau, a major model for Manet in the 1860’s, whose presence first hit me in the Gilles like presence of the nude in the room. If you think about the vignettes of Watteau interiorized and pushed into the Freudian 20th Century, you will get my point.

GRIFFIN  Dennis, I’m glad you bring up Watteau and Manet. After leaving the Balthus exhibit I headed straight for Manet’s The Spanish Singer (1860) and Boy Carrying a Sword (1861). Besides the obvious references to Piero della Francesca’s geometrical faces/bodies, I also thought of Manet’s signature grayish-brown fade background that so many of his figures are embedded in, without the slightest hint of a real room or interior. This to me is pure theatricality in paint — a push/pull between the finely detailed and anonymous figure (friend/relative? actor? model?) and the 19th century equivalent of a green screen. I’m drawn to the Balthus works that push this tension the most, but I find that the inclusion of “story” however slight, into the picture plane leaves not enough room for me to dream as I enter the painting. For me there is more mystery, and hence more power, in the weird starkness of Manet’s portraits. They are deeply thoughtful, but are thankfully pre-“psychological” in the Freudian sense of the term.
I’m also surprised that the idea of the girl getting her period in Thérèse Dreaming from the way the paint is handled should elicit debate or discussion. It feels like searching for clues in tea leaves; sure you can do it, but why? and how does it open up the painting’s true content? The overall image is so much more powerful than these isolated moments. I guess this might be why, for me, Balthus is more interesting to look at in reproductions than in real life. A few years later and Francis Bacon was pushing the paint-blood relationship to shocking effect, demanding the full attention of a viewer the way a Balthus (to me) never demands.

KEE  From the conversation so far, it seems a given that the challenging issues raised by Balthus’s work, namely those associated with the desirability and sexuality of early adolescent women, are legitimate as subject matter for painting.
.      I think, however, I would be among those female viewers (of whom Sabine Rewald is subtly dismissive in her essay) who don’t connect to Balthus for a number of reasons. I don’t mind saying that the attitude towards sexuality it expresses is one of them. My distaste springs from the same point I fear I have belabored – that there is something detached and programmatic in Balthus, and hence something a shade insincere, and – i’ll say it- creepy in his claustrophobic scenarios. These rooms aren’t necessarily nice places for a woman to project herself into as a viewer.
.      I think a mostly unaddressed point might be worth following up on here as well, as I believe it was Vincent who asked, what’s up with the cats? The show title, an intentionally tawdry-sounding one I would presume, certainly isn’t shy about them. David Carbone emphasized how they suggest the existence of instinctive, “animalistic” aspects of human nature. And there is no lack of other “cat” associations at the ready: sly, stealthful, playful, coy, shadow-seeking. In Rewald’s essay she points out other associations cats have had in painting – as influences aligned with latent, dark, feminine sexuality, the corruption of innocence and even evil. In short – the cats in the paintings evoke the same clichéd caricature of feminine sexuality that women have been dealing with for years. And yes, they are also surely a stand in for the painter, who allows them to loll, lick and frolic in ways that make his desire explicit. I find their grinning depictions sort of sentimental, even silly.
.      There is of course the age question. Youth is beauty, and there isn’t anything inherently wrong with artists from Nabakov to Carroll to Courbet to Mann recognizing this, or even, – within the “safe” medium of art – in exploring the more dangerous question of the nature of sexuality before it is fulfilled in a mature sexual being. Balthus’s near single-mindedness in the choice of his models and subjects is troubling to me. I can’t help but feel that in his consistent choice of schoolgirl models, which I believe lasted pretty much his whole life, there is an implied dismissal of adult women, those perhaps his equal, as worthy subject matter. Balthus is a painter obsessed with a specific, fleeting moment of beauty, and his works are steeped in the anxiety of its passing.

KATZ  Thank you, Christina, for these detailed and personal responses — and I must say, for the bravery of them.  Your statement that “These aren’t nice places for a woman to project herself” was something that needed to be said.  And not just for women.  I have to say that Carroll’s images of Alice Liddell always seem to me to be filled with adoration as opposed to desire.  I’m not sure how, but he is able to project love onto his subject through the medium of photography.  (This is of course always apart from whatever may or may not have actually happened in real life between artist and subject).  Sally Mann is definitely someone we should consider in this context.  Her kids are sexual, sensual, beings looked at by her with a mix of awe, admiration, and surprise.  Your point about Balthus’s implied dismissal of adult women is very cogent; I hadn’t thought of it from that angle.  But your next sentence, “Balthus is a painter obsessed with a specific, fleeting moment of beauty, and his works are steeped in the anxiety of its passing,” which I think is marvelous, actually is an argument in his favor, in my opinion.  It brings out the tragic side to his work, which is little commented on in general.

CARBONE  I strongly agree with Vincent about Christina’s cogent summing up of Balthus’s obsession. And there certainly are other things Nora has mentioned that I would have liked to explore further. The fact that Balthus did paint both of  his wives makes me regret the absence of  the pictures based on Setsuko finished in 1976, after a ten year gestation.  Here are images of an adult woman in works that seem filled with a sense of fatality, that anxiety of being that underscores Christina’s acute comments for me. Finally, and more to the point of the show, I greatly miss the inclusion of Cat and Mirror #1, 1977-1980, a great picture that can stand alongside late Braque or Bonnard; its embodiment of the enchantment of a child’s world is set against its incandescent, ghostly colors that appear to retreat into the fresco-like surface, as sea foam sinks into sand.

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September 26 to December 21, 2013
976 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, (212) 744-2313

In its first effort to represent the estate of Balthus, the Gagosian Gallery is presenting an exhibition of 35 photographic works and an unfinished painting, the whole of which carries a whiff of brimstone and in my opinion suggests a scandalous disregard for an artist’s wishes.

Who exactly is the author of these 35 works: Balthus or whoever arranged them as groupings? In close collaboration with the artist’s family, it appears that Nicolas Pages and Benoit Peverelli, the “editors” of the two volume book of 2,000 Polaroid images, published by Steidl, have actually manufactured the combinations of 155 Polaroid images on view to simulate the up-to-date “look” of serial images by Duane Michaels or multiple image panels by Nan Goldin. It is a very clever way to hawk a wide range of images that vary greatly in subject, intent and quality, and have them range from $20,000 to $240,000 in price. And they have done a very fine job of obfuscation: one has to look closely before the smell of sulfur begins to emerge.

Balthus was known to be very reluctant to allow people into his studio while he worked, or to see work in progress, as Pierre Matisse once complained. Thus the exhibition of this unfinished work is nothing less than a betrayal by the family. Looking at the tiny Polaroid images of weak stages of paintings in progress made me wince. As a painter, in these last years, Balthus was “not the man he once was”, as he said himself in Damian Pettigrew’s film. And I write this as one who would champion the best of the late paintings as great.

After his eyesight and hand co-ordination had seriously deteriorated, Balthus took up the Polaroid camera as a substitute for drawing with three kinds of results: studies, accidents, and independent photographic works.  There is much on view that represents genuine searching to find the telling image for a painting and explore the crucial particulars needed to adjust the “single-eyed” perspective of the camera to reveal the spatial relationships wanted by the artist.  One might become familiar with this sort of search by viewing the sketchbook drawings of Edouard Vuillard. Yet, Balthus is known to have destroyed many of his drawings done to this end. The useful images are clear and as normative as many photographs that appear in magazines. Then there are the accidental images created by a shaky hand, works never meant to be seen.

From these accidents, Balthus seems to have pursued an idea both appropriate to photography and subversive of what I would call the medium’s innate materialism. The idea was to use the subtle movement of the camera, and the movement of the model to suppress detail through blur and create a sensation of fading consciousness, that plays ambiguously between the viewer and the subject. With moving intimacy and poetic affect Balthus evokes, in these images, both a sense of Anna’s drift from lassitude into dream and his/our fatality. In these works, a “young” photographer has melded the tenebrism of Titian to the futurism of Duchamp in works that are truly “deskilled” by a master.

By blending all three kinds of images into “super-sized” products, the estate has sanctioned a diminishment of his real achievement as a photographer. And by displaying a feeble and effaced canvas they have given comfort to those who would deny Balthus his due. Such work belongs in study collections like the unfinished drafts of poems, not in public exhibitions.

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