Balthus, born Balthasar Klossowski, in 1908, was sixty-two when we met, some forty years ago. I had never known a great artist, and he looked the part, especially in paint-splattered trousers and a rakish silk scarf. His manners were lordly, and his languid speech caressed the French language even when he was bemoaning something, especially his work, which was always going badly, or modernity, with which he was at odds. He affected an air of tragic weariness, yet he still had the agile grace of the ephebe he had been, as well as a bad boy’s appetite for surprise.
I was in my early twenties, fresh out of college, living abroad, and unformed in every sense. Physically, I could have passed for one of the adolescents in Balthus’s paintings. If they were not naturally ungainly, he posed them in awkward positions, kneeling on the floor over a book, or asleep on a divan with head thrown back and limbs splayed in such a way as to guarantee a stiff neck and numb extremities upon waking. They tend to have poignant bodies rather than model ones: dense and round, with legs that seem even shorter in white anklets. Their unself-conscious imperfection renders them vulnerable. In one of his most famous pictures, “Nude Before a Mirror,” a plump girl, as white as the marble fireplace, is rooted to the floor by her large flat feet (my feet exactly). She is represented in profile, facing a mirror, so you can’t see her features. She lifts her hair—a dark cascade—off her shoulders. There is so much of it, and it looks so heavy (my own hair weighed me down like a lead blanket) that her gesture seems to defy the gravity that her form conveys.
Balthus was, when we met, the director of the French Academy in Rome, which is housed in the sixteenth-century Villa Medici, on the Pincian Hill, above the Spanish Steps. He had spent years trying to reproduce “Pieran blue,” as he called it—the blue of Piero della Francesca’s frescoes—for the walls. He had also recently married his second wife, Setsuko, née Ideta, a much younger woman of nubile charm, whom he had met on a cultural mission to Japan, where she had served as his interpreter. Setsuko was always dressed in a kimono (Balthus also wore kimonos from time to time), and she glided through the halls of the palazzo with tiny steps. I had been invited, with my French boyfriend and his parents, for a brief stay. The servants wore white gloves and called Balthus “Signor Conte.” (He styled himself “Le Comte de Rola,” an invented title.) From the beginning, he addressed me familiarly, as one would a child, though I always said vous to him—on the rare occasions when I dared to speak. “Judith is very pretty, but isn’t she a bit stupid?” he asked my boyfriend’s mother. She knew that I would treasure the remark.
The “Nude Before a Mirror” is posed against a wall of Pieran blue. I also posed against such a wall—though for Setsuko, not for Balthus. She was a painter, and she asked me to sit for her. A baroque armchair covered in its original fraying damask was pulled up to a window that overlooked the villa’s gardens, which had once belonged to Lucullus, and I stared at the trees until lunchtime, when Balthus joined us at an antique table that gave off a scent of beeswax. It was just us three. I made an effort to take small bites, and to say something in between them.
Balthus was avian in physique though feline in temperament, and his totem animal was the cat. He made his début, at the age of eleven, with a series of forty drawings, in pen and ink, that told the story of a stray cat that he had adopted around Christmastime, in 1919. When she ran away, he was heartbroken, and he turned to art for consolation. Rainer Maria Rilke, a family friend (he was having an affair with Balthus’s mother, Baladine), was so impressed by the boy’s gifts that he arranged for the drawings to be published as a little book, “Mitsou,” (the cat’s name), and supplied a preface.
The original drawings for “Mitsou,” along with that featureless chubby nude I like to think of as my likeness at fifteen—in another life—are part of a new show, “Cats and Girls,” which opens at the Metropolitan Museum this week. The portraits on display are masterpieces of troubling beauty painted in a style that Balthus called “timeless realism.” Both timelessness and realism have long been out of fashion, and were so even when Balthus embarked on his adult career. His first show, in Paris, in 1934, outraged critics both for its content—the precocious eroticism of pubescent girls posed voyeuristically—and its technical “crudity.” The young artist became so depressed by this failure that he attempted suicide and stopped painting for a while. He also waited more than a decade to show his work in Paris again.
The charge of crudity is hard to imagine. Few artists of the past century were more painterly than Balthus, whose masters were Courbet and della Francesca, and who worked so slowly, and with such perfectionism, that he sometimes produced only two or three pictures a year. You can stare for a long time at the shadows on a wall in one of his interiors, rapt at their depth of nuance. Perhaps “crudity” was a typo—or a Freudian slip—on the part of a writer who meant to say “cruelty.” There is a subtext of violation to these images, and the viewer becomes complicit with it. Take the high ground if you prefer, though none of the models, or their parents, ever accused Balthus of impropriety. The impropriety—timeless and realistic—was in his imagination. But you owe it to the art to examine the nuances of your discomfort. That’s where his genius lies.
Above: “Nude Before a Mirror,” 1955. Balthus, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Robert Lehman Foundation.
