Thérèse rêvant by Balthus

Until the end of this year the Fondation Beyeler  in Basel is showing Balthus.

Balthus is viewed as one of the great masters of twentieth-century art, and is certainly one of the truly singular painters of his time. In his complex and multifaceted oeuvre, admired by some and spurned by others, he pursued an artistic approach that embodied an alternative, and a challenge, to modern avant-gardes.

Despite the variety of his oeuvre, Balthus is generally  associated with images of girls and young women. His fascination with this subject lay not least with the self-absorption and aloofness that he saw as characteristic of adolescents. Typically, his pictures of girls on the cusp of adulthood oscillate between the nonchalance of a child and the seductive erotic appeal

of a grown woman. Thérèse rêvant is among the first and finest examples. The sitter’s confident pose, and the pensive yet relaxed expression on her averted face, lend her a self-assured and sensual aura. Thérèse apparently believes herself unobserved, detached from time and space—or is she in fact deliberately exerting her seductive power over the viewer?

This painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,New York, recently caused a great stir. An online petition demanded that it be removed from view or placed in a broader explanatory context. This prompted widespread public discussion of the freedoms and boundaries of art, as well as the responsibility that museums have toward visitors and artists. The Fondation Beyeler’s special

program of events accompanying this exhibition offers an opportunity to continue this debate.

Very interesting are several  contributions on their website, amongst them by filmdirector Wim Wenders and art critic Daniel Kramer on works by Balthus.  

                                                                         

Controversies about the painter Balthus, who painted young girls in sexualized poses, have existed for a long time. An exhibition in Essen was cancelled in 2014. In 2017, the New York Metropolitan Museum was confronted with an online petition demanding the removal of the painting "Thérèse, dreaming". How does a museum deal with it?

This is the introduction to an interview with the curator of the exhibition Raphaël Bouvier.

"Die Sensibilität ist heute eine andere". Text Jens Hinrichsen. Monopol, October 4, 2018.  

JH : The retrospective catalogue quotes a conversation between the painter and Costanzo Costantini. Balthus says that art is "an autonomous, specific language that does not need any other language to explain itself and be understood. Do you think this statement is still tenable today? If you take Balthus literally, you can save yourself all the comments!

RB : Balthus upholds the autonomy of the visual arts. He believes that a picture does not need language to be understood. The artist rightly says that a work of art does not need linguistic legitimation in order to be shown. As a museum, we want and have to do mediation work. This task is even enshrined in the purposes of the Fondation Beyeler. But art is autonomous, so I see no contradiction between Balthus' credo and our work.

JH : Do you see the freedom of art in danger today? Hanno Rauterberg suggests this with his new book "How free is art? The removal of Dana Schutz's painting "Open Casket" from the Whitney Biennial is cited as an example, as was the accusation of cultural appropriation, and also the signature campaign against "Thérèse rêvant" in the Metropolitan.

RB : I don't think that artistic freedom is fundamentally at risk, and I think it's an exaggeration to say so. In certain cases, however, we may have to talk about art in a somewhat different and more differentiated way today. Anyone who expresses a problem with a work should not simply be answered in general terms that it is art and that the subject is thus declared closed. You also have to consider the respective context of the discussion. We have a different situation in Europe than in America. As to  "Open Casket" or "Thérèse rêvant"  they were protest actions in the USA, where the perspective is different. Topics such as racism are more explosive because they are strongly linked to the history of the country. Art exhibitions enable reflection and discussion on norms, conventions and values. We regard this as an important challenge and opportunity.

JH : The Fondation Beyeler is showing 40 Balthus paintings. How many controversial paintings are there? 

RB :What does controversial mean? Thérèse rêvant" is, if you like, the most controversial picture. But the exhibition is also about showing the great diversity of content in Balthus' work, beyond his depictions of young women and girls. All in all, the pictures of girls make up only a small part of the exhibition. Portraits, landscapes and interiors are also part of Balthus' versatile oeuvre and are shown here. The girl's motif is only one of many.

JH : Erotic poses, panties that look out: Balthus knew exactly what he was doing, didn't he?

RB : He knew exactly what he was doing, that's what I think - and he also knew what he was painting. "For example, "La Rue" from MoMA and the much-discussed "La Leçon de guitare", which cannot be seen in our exhibition, were shown in 1934 in Balthus' first exhibition at Galerie Pierre in Paris, with which Balthus deliberately wanted to create a scandal. He was a young, penniless artist who wanted to be in the limelight and successful, which he finally succeeded in doing. Provocation is an important strategy in the avant-garde. 

JH : Did a pedophile paint the pictures?

RB : There is no known legal case of child abuse, there have never been any accusations or accusations against Balthus. The suspicions go back strongly to the pictorial world of Balthus. And this does not coincide with the person of Balthus. An artist can also express problematic themes, show abysses, which does not mean that he also embodies these abysses. Example: violence and death. If artists were always criminals, if they depicted torture scenes or murders, then every second artist would probably be a criminal. Modern avant-garde art, in particular, often claims to point out taboos and break with them, to thematize things that have rather been repressed in a bourgeois context. I would also extend this to older art - it is an important dimension of art in itself that it thematizes not only the beautiful and the good, but also the ugly and the abysmal.

                                                                           

JH : How important does it seem to you at all to show the pictures of girls as part of a Balthus exhibition and not to exclude them?

RB : They are central, they are among his strongest pictures. "In my opinion, "Thérèse rêvant" is one of his best paintings, a major work of 20th century figurative art. It is an accomplished work of art with an extremely strong staging. We are very proud to have received both Thérèse paintings from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, paintings that are not allowed to travel often. At the same time, however, our exhibition is not primarily concerned with Balthus' pictures of girls. The starting point for the show is the large-format painting "Le Passage du Commerce-Saint-André", which has been on permanent loan for many years from a private collection at the Fondation Beyeler. It is very much about time and space, a complex of themes that was just as important to us as the figure in Balthus' work. It is precisely from the perspective of the temporal and spatial dimension that the girls, who take up such strangely petrified poses, can be viewed anew. One also has the feeling in these pictures that time has stood still. In addition, not only the figure is highly interesting, but also the space, the interior.

JH : Could it be that Balthus will one day be devalued in terms of art history? Depending on the public's attitude to him as a person?

RB : I don't think there can be a devaluation. You have to say that Balthus has always been a controversial figure. That's also what makes him an artist. He was already the subject of heated debate decades ago. Through the reflection that we want to inspire, the image of Balthus can certainly change and open up a bit further. But I can't imagine that his artistic rank will suffer in the future.

On the recent petition to convince New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to either remove Balthus’s painting Thérèse rêvant  from gallery 907, or provide ‘more context.’

The issue puts those of us who love the painting in a bit of an ethical quandary. I’d honestly never thought of it in the light of sexual abuse before; but looking at it again, I could see what bothered Merrill. We can see Thérèse’s knickers, and a bit of her groin. She is 12 or 13. There have been other cases this year – an exhibition of the work of Eric Gill (the British artist, who died in 1940, sexually abused two of his teenage daughters) at the UK’s Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in April comes to mind, to say nothing of the renewed post-Weinstein debate around the films of Woody Allen or Roman Polanski – where we’ve had to parse out how much the artist’s abuse of young girls affects the way we look at their art. The political context is a killer, too: how to justify Balthus’s painting without defending recent Alabama senate nominee Roy Moore? I felt myself pulled, as a feminist, towards supporting Merrill’s position.

But the language of the petition, the terms of the debate, still rankled. The notion that it is not seeking real censorship, but is merely making a reasonable demand, deflects and thwarts real engagement; it certainly runs counter to everything that makes art art. Words like ‘conscientious’ and ‘contextualize’ are designed to sound reasonable, but they pack a moral threat: disagree with me and you’re part of the problem. One of the signatories, Jean C. in New York, commented on the petition page: ‘By presenting a sexualized image of an adolescent girl, it normalizes the notion that even young girls are sex objects. This is something we already see too much of in this culture.’ It’s true that young girls are sexualized to an alarming degree in our culture. But what I’m curious about is the passive voice in that construction – as if there were only one way to look at the painting, and that is as a representation of a girl to whom something has been done.

Merrill has a point; this aspect of the painting is troubling. But still I find myself wanting to defend it. There is a way to look at Thérèse that doesn’t make us complicit in the abusive sexualization of children. Yes, Balthus is a perv. But look again at the painting: Thérèse is as pervy as the artist. Look at her enraptured face, her closed eyes; you can almost feel the quickening of her breath. What do the signatories think she's dreaming about? If we only see abuse when we look at the painting, then, somehow, the abusers have won; the men have won; art history is His Story, same as it ever was.

I’m sorry, but that is not what I see, when I look at Thérèse Dreaming.

I’ve always loved this painting. It makes me feel sexy; but in an adolescent way; it restores to me, retroactively, the diffuse desire I felt at 12 or 13. I didn’t know who or what I desired, if it was sex or something more nebulous; just like boys, young girls that age are desiring machines. And as I spoke to female friends, and read what women have written about the painting, I found I wasn't alone.

In her article ‘#MeToo vs. the Museum,’ Alice B. Lloyd writes: ‘I see Thérèse's poses and remember my grandmother instructing me always to cross my legs when I wore a skirt; I never asked why because, on another unspoken level, beyond my understanding, I already knew. Art’s purpose is, at some unspoken level, always to provoke within us that which cannot be confined by manners or contemporary expectations.’

Jen George, writing in the Paris Review last year, said she obsessively identified with Thérèse, and would spend hours in the gallery looking at her. ‘I liked that she was both in this room and not; she was dreaming, but I couldn’t see where she’d gone.’

The writer Stephanie LaCava told me that ‘what’s best about [Thérèse] and most art I love is that she is knowing. That doesn’t always mean a literal take, it can be a kind of wry acknowledgement of the world at a moment of being provocative to existing codes, of being aware of the power of the work, as if she’s hovering above the whole thing. To me, it’s not only that she’s complicit and empowered, but that she realizes her role at large as a woman, even a mythical one – like Peitho, Pandora, Calypso even – she is not relegated to some domestic bullshit or second tier intellect. She’s greater and able. This is what frightens people more.’

LaCava is right: it’s Thérèse herself that’s unsettling. Our culture is terrified of sexually-awakened young girls. Our rush to ‘protect’ them is sometimes just a bid to protect ourselves from their monstrous nubile desire. By trying to control the way people look at this young girl, we rob her of an interior life. Female sexuality cannot be forever cloistered and footnoted and appended: sometimes we have to just let it stand (or sit, awkwardly), no matter how troubling.

The debate brought me back to Jeanette Winterson’s wonderful 1995 ‘Art Objects,’ an essay whose title you can brush back and forth in opposite ways: we objectify art but the art resists, the art fights back. ‘Art cannot be tamed,’ she writes, ‘although our responses to it can be’.

Showing Balthus at the Met Isn’t About Voyeurism, It’s About the Right to Unsettle. By Lauren Elkin. Frieze , December 19, 2017. 

A petition containing over 11,000 signatures has surfaced demanding that the Metropolitan Museum of Art remove a painting by the famous French artist known as Balthus from public display. The Met is standing by the painting. It should.

Made in 1938 and titled Thérèse Dreaming, the painting is creepy. A young woman lounges, leaning backward, one foot on the ground, another raised on a stool so as to hike her skirt high enough to glimpse her underwear. Nearby a cat laps a bowl of milk. Some have suggested the folds of fabric are labia. Others that a man should never make this kind of work, so sexually uncomfortable. The petition states “Given the current climate around sexual assault and allegations that become more public each day, in showcasing this work for the masses, The Met is romanticizing voyeurism and the objectification of children.” The petition’s author, Mia Merrill, goes on to propose that the work be replaced with another by a female artist of the same period.

Of course, Balthus is not alone in this. Modigliani’s nudes were similarly singled out for protest in the teens; his only solo exhibition caused a scandal for its depiction of female pubic hair. The great outsider visionary Henry Darger has given us his world of Vivian Girls — many naked, most sporting penises. To say nothing of Picasso’s vivisections of female forms where anus, breast, eyes, mouth, vulva, and face is seen all at the same time, all on the same plane.

But Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming is somehow even more complicated — it places us at the nexus between banality, innocence, nascent sexuality, guttural taboo, flinching recognition, and something more than casual. We do live in a culture that sexualizes young women; a man did make this; and the work can be read as titillation. But so can many other similar images of young people, including many that we now view as so canonized they may even bore us. For centuries the explicitness pictured in Michelangelo’s tremendous Sistine Chapel was painted over and censors more than once tried to paint over it completely. Caravaggio’s naked young man Cupid looks directly at us with an invitation to pleasure. Bernini portrays rape and female masturbation; Degas gives us unprotected teenage ballerinas totally exposed, dressed so that the structures between their legs become the foci of paintings — to say nothing of his portrayals of young girls in bordellos. The most famous painting of the 20th century, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, portrays five naked prostitutes blatantly offering themselves.

It is true that all of these works were rendered by men — who until the last century were virtually the only ones allowed to practice art — and as such all may be called privileged, chauvinistic, and even one-sided. And protest of art should come as no surprise; in many ways it is a sign of art’s complexity that it generates a wide variety of responses. In fact, the disinclination, distrust, fear, offense, or even hatred of images, words, and ideas is as old as art itself. People have been burned at the stake for it. Botticelli paintings were deemed too pleasurable and went up in Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities in 1497. Countless naked statues have been smashed to smithereens over the centuries. Especially in the West, sex has been highly charged contested territory since the fourth century after Christ. (Although this is not to say that protest is always the bourgeois against the libertine — there have been protests against the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, rap, rock-and-roll, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Andres Serrano, or Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary.)

Balthus is a tricky artist. And in our particular time, more unsettling. But I don’t think that is enough. I’ve written that Balthus can be “obnoxious, cheesy, and stiff.” His surrealism implies sadomasochism and erotica. Personally, I don’t love Balthus’s work. But I grant that his art is Modern without being abstract and that it’s charged with some half-human hair-raising overweening need, rage, frustration, and restraint. What makes a work like Thérèse Dreaming worth defending is that every person brings something different to it at a different time and that there’s no one correct read of it, no matter “the current climate.” Like all good art, Thérèse Dreaming presents a paradox; it is about more than one thing at the same time. Even in our rush to protect the innocent, curtail creeps, and assume the moral high ground, art can never abandon paradox. Unlike pornography, which we know it when we see it, Balthus throws us into a nether region of being unsure of what we’re seeing at all. Even if it’s only coy, that’s still not all that it is.

11,000 People Have Demanded the Met Remove This Painting. They Aren’t Going To. Nor Should They. By Jerry Saltz. Vulture , December 15, 2017.

"A disagreement over one piece of culture points to where our discourse has arrived when it comes to talking about all culture — at a roiling impasse. The conversations are exasperated, the verdicts swift, conclusive and seemingly absolute. The goal is to protect and condemn work, not for its quality, per se, but for its values. Is this art or artist, this character, this joke bad for women, gays, trans people, nonwhites? Are the casts diverse enough? Is this museum show inclusive of enough different kinds of artists? Does the race of the curators correspond with the subject of the show or collection? Increasingly, these questions stand in for a discussion of the art itself."

Critic Wesley Morris, New York Times,  looks at the new moral imperatives governing culture today and finds that a “person who insults, harasses or much, much worse is ‘problematic,’ and certain ‘problematic’ people, and their work, gets ‘canceled.’” He sees the Dana Schutz controversy at the Whitney Museum as the prime example of this new critical movement’s chief goal: “to protect and condemn work, not for its quality, per se, but for its values.”

The morality wars. By Wesley Morris, New York Times , October 3, 2018.