JED PERL
651
versy; Balthus makes art that stirs up controversy.
Curiously, some of the same people who praise Mapplethorpe have
condemned Balthus. A painter I know says of this situation: "What they can't
stand about Balthus is the fact that he constructs a painting." Apparendy the
art world finds pornographic imagery acceptable only to the extent that it
transgresses against the idea of the self-sufficient work of art. Balthus's
transgressions, which are also imaginative reconstructions, pose a threat all
right-but it is not the threat it is said to be. What is threatening about Balthus
is
the erotic conviction that the artist brings to an imagined world.
Balthus
is
the artist to look to right now. In a period of half-baked erotic
art his oeuvre is proof that erotic perversity can given new life to old forms.
At the same time, Balthus has never overplayed his hand. In certain in–
stances he has even practiced self-censorship. When James Thrall Soby
bought
The Street(l933)
a couple of years after it was painted he found, as
he explained in a letter published in Sabine Rewald's book on Balthus, that
the section in which the boy puts his hand under the girl's skirt created insur–
mountable difficulties:
I hung the picture in the living room in my house in... Farmington. I
finally had to put it in a vault because my son-then about nine-and his
friends would cluster around it and rush home and tell their mothers
about the naughty passage they'd seen. I had always wanted to give
the picture to the Museum of Modern Art, but I knew it couldn't be
hung in a public gallery, and I finally wrote Balthus in despair that this
was a very great picture doomed never to be seen. To my utter
astonishment, and I'd known Balthus personally for years-he wrote
back that if I would send him the picture he would be glad to try to
change the passage in question....He kept the painting for nearly two
years and in 1955 turned it over to me. He said, .. I used to want to
shock, but now it bores me."
It
is also probably not by accident that Balthus's most perverse painting
was long kept from public view.
The Rape,
in which a female music teacher
grabs at her girl student, exposing her pubis, was painted in 1934 and kept in
a back room, available only to selected viewers, during Balthus's first one–
man show at Galerie Pierre.
It
was not exhibited in public for over forty
years, until 1977, when it was part of Balthus's one-man show at the Pierre
Matisse Gallery. There is reason to believe that both its obscurity and its ul–
timate appearance at the gallery of Pierre Matisse, the artist's longtime friend
and dealer, were orchestrated by the artist himself.
As
for the artist's mo–
tives, they may well have gone like this. At the time
The Rape
was painted,
