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| Balthus - The Street - 1933 |
Balthusian
James Hart
“Balthus is a
painter of whom nothing is known.
Now let us look at
the pictures. Regards. B.”
Somehow
the man resides inside his art,
his
face framed like a guileless child’s in mirrors,
his
finger poised on the same splendors his mute
angels
touch in their dreams of smoke and music,
night
wind breathing mist of dark guitars.
He’d
have us believe amnesia frees him from
the
portrait’s frame; that only strangers pose behind
those
piercing eyes—his locked in Time’s hermetic stare.
Perhaps
his laughing cat, a grinning clown in harlequin
hair,
hides the true Balthusian ruse? That art
is
of its making, not the maker nor his motive?
Beauty
his votive offering to obstinate gods?
What
if he’d sparked his own austere madness
with
one diviner sense? Wouldn’t he ask of us
to
love such innocence we cannot name?
Like
fetish whispers umbered onto canvas,
or
the artist’s finger touching rouge to blush of flesh,
Balthus
disabuses us of any mystery here: see
how
we’re
repelled yet gravely drawn to his rumpled nymphs,
lissome
Lolitas, slender stigmas after their petals fall.
October 13, 2004; March 17, 2005
Note regarding quotation:
Telegram sent by Balthus to English
art critic John Russell after he
pressed Balthus for biographical
details to include in the 1968 Balthus
retrospective
at the Tate Gallery in London
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