“What is before us is indeed reality, the most familiar sort of reality. But we learn through Balthus that until now we did not know how to see it, that our homes, our friends, our streets concealed disturbing aspects to which we closed our eyes. We learn, above all, that the most ordinary reality can assume that unfamiliar, remote air, the soft resonance, the muffled mystery of a lost paradise. And therein lies Balthus' essential talent; from a dying day he can recreate that perpetual daylight of which he seeks to say, in his own way, that it is the only true light, that paradise of childhood.”
La Patience is a much-celebrated masterpiece by Balthus that for many years has formed part of the Joseph Winterbotham collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Begun in 1943, this famous picture is a poetic and masterful evocation of a strange, timeless world, full of melancholy and hope, that takes the form of a domestic interior in which a lone girl, absorbed in a world of her own, is seen playing of a game of patience (solitaire). Like all the finest of Balthus’s works, La Patience is a picture where time, magically, appears to stand still. It was painted in Balthus’s apartment in Fribourg, Switzerland, during the Second World War and is one of the best-known of a famous series of ‘interiors’ from the late 1930s and early ‘40s that showcase the artist’s uncanny ability to generate a haunting and mesmeric sense of what critics have often described as “time suspended.”
This apparent “suspension” of time was Balthus’s unique ability to transform familiar-looking images—often in the form of adolescent women, seen alone in a room, lost in thought—in which the appearance of the reality we know, in all its apparent normality and ordinariness, is revealed also to be mysterious, magical, unsettling and strange. Evoking qualities that appealed to both Surrealists and Existentialists alike, it was precisely the unusual and even disquieting quality of pictures such as La Patience that prompted great literary figures of the period, such as Antonin Artaud, Albert Camus and artists like Pablo Picasso to openly praise and champion Balthus’s work. Indeed, not only did Picasso acclaim Balthus’s ability to conjure unique moods of intimacy and mystery in this series of ‘interiors’ but in 1941, he also took the rare step of purchasing one of these works: Les Enfants Blanchard of 1937. Of the other paintings from this great series begun in the late-1930s, the vast majority now belong to major North American museums: Jeune fille au chat of 1937 is also owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, for instance. Thérèse and Thérèse rêvant of 1938 belong to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Le Salon I of 1941-43 is in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Le Salon II is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Les Beaux Jours of 1943-46 is in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
Balthus's Masterworks in Museum Collections
These are all paintings whose enigmatic and disquieting atmosphere of “time-suspended” continues to resonate and prompt a wide variety of interpretation. Antonin Artaud, for example, saw a hidden violence and “great brooding dramas” lying behind the strange silence and stillness of Balthus’s domestic scenes. Albert Camus, by contrast, saw in their revelations the “muffled mystery of a lost paradise.” “I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things,” Balthus once said, “to suggest, not to impose [and] to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings” (Balthus quoted in R. Merritt, ed., Shared Space: The Joseph M. Cohen Collection, Bologna, 2010, p. 109). Much has, and continues to be written about these powerful, but always ultimately enigmatic and mysterious works. La Patience is no exception.
“The painting Patience seemed to me the masterpiece of this exhibition of 1943… There is such great style in this work, such discreet depth, that we can dare to describe what is in it as a formidable, veiled language.”
La Patience is, in fact, a particularly enigmatic picture and the first of what would prove to be a major series of oils invoking the mysterious, revelatory ritual of the card game in Balthus’s oeuvre. It was first exhibited at a landmark exhibition of Balthus work held at the Galerie Moos in Geneva in 1943. One of its earliest interpreters was Balthus’s close friend, the writer, Pierre-Jean Jouve, who saw in the picture a timely prophecy of hope. “The painting Patience seemed to me the masterpiece of this exhibition of 1943,” Jouve wrote. Drawing, as many commentators were later to do, upon Balthus’s masterful command of light and shadow and in particular upon the stark contrast between the order and regularity of the girl’s surroundings and the angular awkwardness and apparent disorder of both her pose and her previous activity—having opened boxes, scattered books, and perhaps pushed the carpet askew—Jouve saw in such contrasts a metaphor for the chaos and turbulence of the times in which the picture had been painted. Yet, despite all this, Jouve noted that, ultimately, “behind [the girl], in the moiré wallpaper, a sort of illumination is produced, an ambiguous dawn, an appearance of light. Patience produces clarity, victory, or at least the promise of victory over present pain. The deep enigma of the painting—interpretable on many levels—little by little becomes the clear expression of our expectation and corresponds secretly to the march of hope, just as the girl, little by little, also becomes her suffering homeland. There is such great style in this work, such discreet depth, that we can dare to describe what is in it as a formidable, veiled language” (Pierre-Jean Jouve, “Review of the Galerie Moos Exhibition,” November 1943, in Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre Pompidou, Balthus, 1993-4, p. 59).
What is certainly introduced in La Patience is a sense of prophecy and the promise of impending revelation. Both are implicit to the nature of card games as Balthus was well aware, but are especially relevant to the game of patience, which is often used as a means of fortune-telling. Here, however, the painting’s strong sense of impending disclosure is achieved mainly through its dramatic use of the contrast between light and shadow. Balthus’s model, a local Fribourg girl named Jeannette Aldry, is playing her last card. But this she holds back. Her face and her body are enclosed in shadow while the mysterious, contemplative expression on her face reveals her thoughts to be miles away from the game and the room in which she is playing. It is this expression that lends her actions a broader sense of significance, one that another critic, Jean Starobinski, also picked up on in 1943. “Balthus’s ‘most astonishing creations [are those] that seek ‘revelation’”, Starobinski wrote. “I am thinking especially of Patience [where] a young girl leaning on the game table [is] questioning the future in the cards. Is it not also our future that this 'success' will discover, and does not the ray which crosses the scene of this painting announce this dawn of hope for which we have long awaited?” (Jean Starobinski, “Des peintures de Balthus à la Galerie Moos à Genève,” Curieux, 13 November 1943).
Anticipating later Balthus paintings such as La Chambre of 1952-54 where a curtain is dramatically drawn back to flood the room with light and reveal the surprise of a girl’s nakedness, here too, in a manner more reminiscent of Dutch masters like Johannes Vermeer, an illustrious green curtain also appears to have been pulled back to reveal the private moment of a girl indulging in the secret act of diving the future. With long afternoon shadows beginning to stretch across the floor in a way that echoes both the melancholic enigma of Giorgio de Chirico’s Turin plazas and generates a kind of organic opposite to the strict order of the bar-like grid of this room’s wallpaper, the feeling of tension, stillness and suspense is augmented by such dramatic contrasts.
Right: Giorgio de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914. Private Collection
In purely formal terms La Patience is a masterly exercise in the juxtaposition of just such contrasts and, in this regard, it represents the culmination of a sequence of important pictures by Balthus that he had begun as early as 1933. This was with an illustration for Wuthering Heights that Balthus entitled ‘Because Cathy taught him what she learnt’ and continued in his painting of the Blanchard Children (now in the Musée Picasso, Paris) and then with the little girl reading of his painting Salon 1, 1941-43 (Minneapolis Institute of Art) before becoming finally resolved in the solitary figure of Jeannette Aldry in this painting. Here, in La Patience, Balthus has had Jeannette hold a pose that embodies both the figures of Heathcliff and Cathy, or of the similarly posed two Blanchard children, all within one figure. Jeannette leans over the Louis XV table like the figure of Cathy, but perches with one leg resting on the chair and the other pushing out against the misaligned carpet like Heathcliff. A number of sketches made in preparation for La Patience reveal the extreme care with which both the awkwardness of this pose and the misalignment of the furniture were carefully taken into consideration so that they eloquently established another formal balancing of opposites. It was, no doubt, for a similar reason that, between 1946 and 1948, Balthus returned to the painting to further emphasize the innate sense of contrast between the sprawling irregularity of Jeannette’s pose and the strict order of the background by adding a vertical column to the right-hand edge of the painting. This addition had the effect of compressing the composition into a coherent, self-contained space and thereby re-emphasizing the painting’s innate sense of depicting a startling moment of ‘coniuncto oppositorum’—a moment in which a uniquely harmonious balancing of equal opposites is achieved.
Right: Balthus, Les Enfants Blanchard, 1937. Musée Picasso, Paris. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
“I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things, to suggest, not to impose [and] to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.”
Like almost everything else in the painting, for example, the angular awkwardness of the Jeannette’s pose is a double-sided feature. The pose is both natural and yet also deliberately disruptive to the apparent order of the picture. Typical of the kind of poses that adolescents often take up with their developing bodies, it is indicative of both their in-between state of being and also of the in-between moment—frozen between anticipation and revelation – that this painting, with its theme of ‘patience’, seeks, as a whole, to articulate. As Balthus has said on this point, the poses of the girls he painted were always “carefree positions peculiar to childhood,” but also ones that were “dictated to me by the compositional necessities of my pictures.” His ultimate aim in his use of such poses, he said, was to create “a vertigo around” such figures, “to surround them with a halo of silence and depth” (Balthus quoted in Exh. Cat., Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Balthus, 2018, p. 118).
This halo effect is achieved in La Patience by Balthus’s masterful balancing of the light. The painting is, for example, almost exactly half light and half shadow and the precision of these proportions is repeated in detail throughout the composition. Not just in the bar-like division of the wallpaper running across the background but also in the distribution of light and dark across the pattern on the cushion for example, or the candlestick and the cup on the table and across Jeannette’s body itself which angles across the picture almost exactly half in darkness half in light. Even the clothes she wears are separated into two polarised opposites of red and green.
Indeed, this division of his central figure into a costume of half red and half green is a favourite and oft-repeated device of Balthus’s that had begun with his pictures of Thérèse Blanchard in 1938 and continued in this work and many subsequent ones—most notably perhaps in the painting Jeune fille en vert et rouge now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In this painting a young woman (modelled on Balthus’s Swiss wife Antoinette) sits facing the viewer with a cup and candlestick on the table before her in a manner apparently rife with symbolism and wearing a red and green costume reminiscent of the kind of clothes worn by characters from French seventeenth-century Tarot cards.
Right: Le Bateleur, Tarot of Marseilles, 17th century.
The divinatory nature of card games, first articulated in La Patience, was to prove an enduring theme in Balthus’s work which he would work on for over thirty years. Balthus’s subsequent painting of a card game (after La Patience) was his Card Players of 1948-50 now in The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Echoing earlier precedents set by artists like Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour, the poignant moment of withheld revelation, first conveyed by the solitary figure of Jeannette Aldry in La Patience, is here given a slight tension by being played out between a male and female figure. After working on a sequence of minor pictures on this theme in the early 1950s, Balthus returned to the subject of the lone girl playing patience in a second version of his 1943 picture in 1954. This work was however, executed using a vastly different painterly technique from the smooth-textured interiors of the late-1930s and early ’40s and this time included the figure of a cat chasing a ball under the table that he had first postulated but then rejected in his preparatory sketches for La Patience in 1943. Balthus’s second La Patience was followed by two further pictures depicting a girl, again dressed in red and green, and seen alone in a room divining the future from a set of cards in his 1956 pictures entitled Tireuse de cartes (Fortune Teller). The artist’s last picture on this subject was his The Card Players of 1966-73, now in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam in which, most mysteriously, he continued the double-sided theme of many of these works by bestowing both male and female participants in the game with those of his own features.
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LA PARTIE DE CARTESTHE MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA, MADRID
All Art © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
From the unexplained silver cup and candlestick standing on the table to the unsolved mystery of the precariously balanced open jewellery box at the left-hand edge of this painting, there are similar hints at an arcane symbolism also running through Balthus’s La Patience of 1943. Ultimately, however, it is not in such clumsy symbolism that the magic and enduring mystery of Balthus’s art is to be found. It is instead, in the painter’s magical ability to convey an enduring sense of the trapping of a telling moment in light and time. Painting too, as Balthus famously said, “is an art of patience, a long story with the canvas, an engagement with it…This is slow art, in which the work continues nonetheless” (Balthus quoted in Alain Vicondelet, Balthus Vanished Splendours: A Memoir, New York, 2002, p. 40). Painting, at its root, is an art of light and time and as Balthus’s La Patience so eloquently articulates, it is an art of suspending a moment in time to the point where the mystery of its innate relationship with light is made visible. Perhaps this point is best illustrated by the poet Octavio Paz who in a poem that he specifically dedicated to Balthus wrote that light is “time thinking about itself.” It is, Paz wrote: “a hand that invents itself, an eye that sees itself in its own inventions. Light is time reflecting on time.” (Octavio Paz, Sight and Touch, New York, 1994).
Robert Brown