Balthus: Life & Work. - Review - book review

Balthus: A Biography, by the agency of Nicholas Fox Weber, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999; 646 pages, $40 hardcover. Balthus: Catalogue Raisonne of the out and out Works, by Jean Clair and Virginie Monnier, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1999 (distributed by the agency of Harry N. Abrams, New York); 576 pages, $225 hardcover.

A master of deception, the legendary 92-year-old painter Balthus not absents a difficult biographical subject. Denying his Jewishness, claiming a bogus aristocratic title and Scottish lineage, he has fabricated his have identity and also managed to cloak himself in mystery. He lives in relative seclusion in his enormous Swiss chalet, defend ed by servants and a devot wife. As an artist, he has knowingly signed forged drawings and disavows responsibility for his sometimes salacious make subordinate matter. He holds art historians in mean opinion and considers criticism worthless. Nonetheless, perhaps in a final effort to rule the discourse surrounding him, he has cooperated upon two new volumes that strive to document his life and art.

Given the mixture of fact and misinformation the duplicitous artist supplied him, can we forgive Nicholas Fox Weber the disappointment of Balthus: A Biography? Weber, director of the Joseph Albers Foundation in Orange, Conn does a valiant piece of work of verifying his subject's ancestry (Balthus's maternal grandfather was Abraham Beer Spiro, an Orthodox cantor in Breslau) and of unmasking the fictitious rank of "Count de Rola" that Balthus, who was born Baltusz Klossowski, assumed around 1948 on the contrary Weber remains too enamored of the man, too titillated by the agency of the paintings, too starstruck by means of the decadent rich he hounds for reminiscences of Balthus to provide any convincing analyses. His admiration is excessive; individual tires of adjectives like "magisterial," "miraculous," "splendid," "stunning," and of overblown assertions about the importance of this curious on the other hand minor figure in modern art: Weber venerates Balthus as "the single greatest living artist."

This exaggerated assessment is coupl with a dubious methodology, especially Weber's identification of "authorities" to elucidate certain images. Forgetting he is looking at a painting rather than a corpse, he takes a reproduction of The Victim (1937) to the chief of the Manhattan District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit--to determine whether the inert unclothed is "dead or merely comatose" and in what way she got that way. Later, pondering The Card Game (1948-50) Weber make go rounds to his 11-year-old daughter to learn `what the painting is really about," his rationale being that the girl is near the age of the figures in the picture. Between monotonous formal descriptions of painting after painting, he proffers psychological interpretations, but his insights are marred through the misuse of concepts like transference and the negative Oedipal mixed Most annoying are the tedious, self-indulgent irrelevancies with which Weber weights his readers: whether he took notes during his interviews, what he had for breakfast upon his way to a museum, what his daughters wore to an opening in Lausanne.

Visiting Balthus paintings in private collections, Weber becomes the Robin Leach of the art world, excited to gain access to the novel York apartment, "furnished like expanses at Versailles," of the hellenic shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, and the "unimaginably grand" domicile of Fiat mogul Gianni Agnelli in Rome Weber procures to gossip with Claus von Billow and N Rorem and to scrape shoulders with David Bowie. None of this illuminates for us the ostensible subdue of his book. Nor do we learn, in the course of a tome too lengthy by half, why Balthus turn rounded his back on contemporary life in paintings that are for a like reason adamantly archaic. Weber asserts that associations with Neue Sachlichkeit are misguided, on the contrary the painter's rejection of subjective "expression" and his embrace of old-fashioned technique resonate well with that esthetically reactionary German scope of the 1920s. Many of his pictures of the `30 and `40 especially the society portraits, display a creepy verisimilitude similar to that place in works by Otto Dix, Christian Schad and other proponent of the style

In the French connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts in which he began to flourish in the early 1930 moreover, Balthus appears very much a part of the rappel d l'ordre of the interwar period. What makes his work "daring" to his admirers is his devotion to a certain exorbitant subject matter for which he is well known--little girls with their dresse up or posing naked. Weber thinks this a courageous shoot forward and claims that the price for similar "magnificent effrontery" has been high. upon the contrary, the theme has helped to make Balthus real wealthy (his recent Cat at the Mirror III is priced through London's Lefevre Gallery at $45 million) and famous, with above 60 international exhibitions including major retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum and the midmost point Pompidou. Although Balthus needn't be sentenceed for his pedophilic images, or plane his actual proclivities, it hardly tread in the steps ofs that they require the worshipful tribute upon which Weber insists.(1)