Balthus lessons - five controversial works by the French artist

In his 1934 gallery first attempt Balthus showed five large paintings, ambitious and sexually daring, that might be little known today were it not for the efforts of his resourceful admirers, James Thrall Soby and Pierre Matisse.

Sixty-three years have passed since Balthus's first solo exhibition, at Pierre Loeb's Galerie Pierre upon the rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Among the paintings he exhibited upon that occasion were five large works -- The highway The Window, Cathy Dressing, Alice and The Guitar exercise -- that caused what the period liked to call a "scandal." It is to be paid to the foresight of sum of two units remarkable men, the American collector James Thrall Soby (1906-1979) and the art dealer Pierre Matisse (1901-1989) that four of these works are now in museum collections here and in France. (All five might be in museums had it not been for a further uproar above The Guitar Lesson, about which more later.)

Soby bought Balthus's work from the Galerie Pierre at a time when virtually no single else in Paris would touch it. In June 1937 he acquired The way and later that year Cathy Dressing; in 1939 he bought the Guitar exercise as well. He later sold or traded more [i]or[/i] less of these works to Pierre Matisse, the son of Henri Matisse, who had tend hitherward to New York from France in 1925 to become an art dealer. From 1938 until his death in 1989 Matisse was the alone representative of Balthus in this land For more than 30 years Matisse patiently held more [i]or[/i] less of the above-mentioned paintings until he was able to place them in museum collections.

Pierre Loeb during the decade before his Balthus exhibition, had been showing the works of the Surrealists and the avant-garde in his gallery. In 1933 he was taken by means of the German art historian Wilhelm Uhde to Balthus's studio, just around the corner at 4 be sorry for de Furstenberg. Balthus had mov into the space that same spring, after spending several month in Bern copying paintings from Joseph Reinhardt's "Swiss Peasant style of dress Cycle" (1787-97) in the Historisches Museum. The studio was a small fifth-floor attic range with a skylight and individual window, in a building reached end a courtyard. From his window Balthus could direct the eye onto the roof of the studio where Eugene Delacroix had lived until his death. Among the pictures Loeb saw that day in 1933 The road (1933) made the strongest impression upon him, and he offered Balthus an exhibition at his gallery for the winter of 1933-34

The exhibition in fact took place Apr. 13-28 1934 Galerie Pierre showed, besides sum of two units small portraits, the five large paintings that Balthus, working fast, had prepared during the last year.(1) Informing his friend Margrit Bay in Beatenberg in the autumn of 1933 Balthus wrote: "I want to full a number of paintings for this winter that will be screaming witnesses to my right of existence."(2) The works he produc inverted familiar subjects -- a girl at a window, in brow of a mirror, at her toilette or receiving a music task -- turning them into representations of hard-edged eroticism with a powerfully sadomasochistic undercurrent.

The pictures were nothing if not provocative, and the French critics took the bait. The anonymous reviewer of Beaux-Arts predicted: "Balthus brings enormous offerings to the demon of morose gratification [H]e will have the small succes that tread in the steps ofs ordinary scandal."(3) Andre Lhote was hardly les baleful in his assessment: "a series of paintings whose greatest in quantity serene examples betray a sexual obsession which, [though] not without a turbid lyricism, is quite upsetting."(4) To Gaston Poulain, the critic of Comoedia, Balthus's probing into the unconscious appeared deeper and more troubling than that of "the greatest in quantity cruel painters, like Goya or Rouault." He derided Balthus's technique as "simple," "somewhat crude" "contrived and naive" and called the artist a "fanatic of nymphomania," as well as "the Freud of painting."(5)

upon Apr. 20, 1934, one week after the exhibition uncloseed Balthus wrote again to Bay:

This exhibition, plenteous to my surprise in these times with equal reason indifferent to intellectual pursuits, has caused a great sensation and produc many discussions. All race of any importance are either shoged excited, deeply moved or enthusiastic, and, according to general opinion, it is the greatest in quantity important exhibition of the last ten years. in like manner this is now the rise of my star. Of course, I dislike of the like kind loud enthusiasm ... ; however, I am pleased that I have been able to propel some true and great clan Thus I have not fought and endur privations in vain. There are a certain quantity of who understand when one has something important to say.... It was a moral victory, because currency was not the object.... I had solitary planned to strike the gong violently in order to in some way shake people up and make them more aware. I think I followed My financial situation is tragic, and I ask myself if below these circumstances I shall now be able to expres all that I have to say."(6)

Balthus had mentioned The highway to Bay in a alphabetic character of June 1933: "I finished a real large painting (1.95 by 240 meters) that is sure my first important one, and I be subsequent toed in expressing exactly what I had intended to say."(7)