Balthus at the Met

Once again I was so annoyed by the wall labels of a Met show that I had trouble appreciating the art. This time the show, apparently conceived and titled for marketing purposes, was called “Balthus Cats and Girls” – thus, appealing to the Met’s two main audiences: men and women.
The first shortcoming of the labels was their brevity and narrow focus. Many were no more than two or three sentences, and one of those sentences was invariably devoted to identifying the model’s identity and/or when and where the painting was made. Who cares? There was next to nothing about the why or how of the painting.
My biggest problem, however, came whenever the curator (catalogue author Sabine Rewald, I presume) attempted to describe what was happening in a painting. She regularly described as fact something that was unsupported by visual evidence or was nothing more than her conjecture. As tedious as it may be, I will give some examples:
Still Life With Figure, 1940. “The farmer’s 12-year-old daughter grimly faces a frugal repast of home-baked bread, local cider and the last apples of the season…” Why are these the “last apples of the season”? They appear ripe and luscious, except for one stunted outlier. If anything, they are oversize: the foremost apple is 3/4 the height of the girl’s face. Why mention that the cider is “local”? Cider is almost always local – and certainly always if you’re on an apple farm. Similarly, why “home-baked bread”? Isn’t that the best there is? This loaf look invitingly delicious. The label uses “last,” “local” and “home-baked” to support its conclusion that this is a “frugal repast,” which the girl is, therefore, “grimly” facing. Not mentioned is the fact that Balthus still lives always consist of a few isolated objects – a single candlestick, a solitary bowl of fruit. In fact, in the same gallery are Balthus’s Salon paintings featuring a very similar bowl of apples – and no sign of material deprivation. If this girl is in fact “grim” – and I submit it is a foolish endeavor to psychologically analyze his women based on always ambiguous facial expressions – it is surely not because she sees slim picking on the table she leans on.
Girl With Goldfish, 1948. “The cat smiles knowingly, anticipating the feast of the two fish…” If it is a mistake, as I maintain, to ascribe definite emotions or thoughts to women’s faces in Balthus paintings, it is even worse to ascribe them to a cat’s, but that is what the writer bases this entire label on. What is the evidence that the goldfish are about to become a feast for the cat? They are in a bowl on a table at which a girl is working. If we are to assume anything from this scene, it is more likely that the goldfish have been in this bowl on this table for weeks and that the girl’s two pets have peacefully cohabited for some time. She doesn’t seem worried that the cat has climbed onto a chair (necessary to the painting’s composition), the fish are not agitated, and the cat is not even looking at the fish, as any hungry cat would. Instead, we are supposed to believe that it is sharing a conspiratorial wink with us, the viewer. C’mon! In another sin – curatorial laziness – she uses practically the same caption for a related painting, in which Balthus substituted one goldfish in the bowl for two, although in this example it is debatable whether the cat is smiling, no matter how anthropomorphically you look at it. (At least she didn’t tell us that there is now only one fish in the painting because the cat has eaten the other one.)
I will briefly allude to other examples: In King of Cats, the label says the subject’s “imperious and haughty demeanor reveals that the 27-year-old artist had recovered from the upheavals of the previous year.” Really? In Girl at Window, 1955, the label says “Balthus adoped the 19th century motif of a figure at a window without the Romantic connotation of yearning or longing for the faraway.” Forget the so-what nature of this comment. Yearning or longing is exactly what I do see here. The girl’s pose invokes daydreaming: her knee is resting on a chair and she leans on the windowsill – i.e., she’s not looking at or for something in particular. The pose is totally Romantic.
In The Moth, according to the label, “the erotic content becomes less ambiguous…” Why is this classic nude less ambiguously erotic? In general, and certainly in Balthus’s brush, a partially clothed writhing adolescent is more erotic than a statuesque nude. Speaking of the former, let’s go back to the key painting in the opening gallery, Therese Dreaming. The label ascribes “a touch of suggestiveness” to one of the more erotic, if not perverted, images in Western art. The cat lapping milk from a bowl directly below Therese’s exposed panties would have been a subject at least worthy of such an exhibition.
Lest there be any argument with my raising the possibility of perversion in connection with Balthus, I would refer to the show of photographs by Balthus running concurrently at the Gagosian gallery on Madison Avenue. They all feature his last adolescent model, Anna, who came to Balthus’s studio after school every Wednesday afternoon for eight years, from age 8 to 16. Every afternoon, if the photos are to be believed, she would remove her shirt, sprawl supine on a divan, and adjust her position according to Balthus’s instruction. While the gallery described this process as Balthus painstakingly pursuing his art, the only change I detected over the course of his photographic odyssey was in the size of Anna’s breasts. I left the show wondering just how this exhibit stacked up against any relevant child pornography laws.
Besides ducking any serious discussion of Balthus’s oeuvre and substituting conjecture for close observation, my criticism of the Balthus exhibit at the Met would be based on its over-inclusiveness. The curator seems to have welcomed every painting she could obtain for the relevant years – e.g., of the ten paintings Balthus made of Therese, seven are here. By showing the many mediocre works alongside a few very good ones, she has devalued Balthus in my estimation, and made for a much less enjoyable museum visit.
P.S. Lest I be accused of being overly or too consistently unhappy with Met labels, let me note how much I enjoyed and appreciated the write-ups of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs. Granted, there are numerous biographies and primary sources to draw from, but the curator in this case has presented interesting and varied information – about the photographer, the subjects and the process – with a knowing sense of humor that made me feel I was spoken to, by a topnotch docent in the gallery. (By contrast, I can’t imagine anyone actually speaking the Balthus labels.) To wit: “Tennyson thought Cameron’s portraits made him look like he had bags under his eyes (correctly, it would seem)…” “Cameron’s friendship and determination knew no bounds – indeed, her kindness could be overbearing (as when she presented Tennyson with 30 rolls of wallpaper to replace the wallpaper she didn’t like in his house).” “Of her 1867 portrait of Herschel she wrote…sounding a bit as though she were working on a divine commission rather than a personal, spiritual, artistic quest – with, it must be said, some incidental hope of financial profit.” Or this succinct guide to her technique: “She conveyed a sense of life and breath and of honest emotion through careful lighting, her model’s slight movement during long exposures, a shallow depth of field, and softness of focus.” Moreover, but maybe abetted by my pleasure at the labels, my favorite artwork of the day at the Met was Cameron’s photograph of her father as “King Lear Allotting His Kingdom to His Three Daughters.”