Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski de Rola)

Galerie Henriette Gomès, Paris (acquired from the artist)
André Gomès, Paris
Private Collection, France (acquired from the above in 1994)

Tokyo, Musée National; Kyoto, Musée Municipal, L'Exposition Art Français au Japon, 1962, no. 320
Strasbourg, Château des Rohan, La Grande Aventure de l'Art du XXe siècle, 1963, no. 182
Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Balthus, 1966, no. 31
Knokke-le-Zoute, Casino Communal, Balthus, 1966, no. 31
London, Tate Gallery, Balthus, 1968, no. 47
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, André Malraux, 1973, no. 787
Venice, XXXIX Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, Balthus, 1980
Paris, Galerie Henriette Gomès, Balthus, 1983-84
Kyoto, Musée de la Ville, Balthus, 1984, no. 20
Rome, Villa Médicis, Academie de France à Rome, 1990
Ornans, Musée Départemental du Doubs, Maison natale de Gustave Courbet, Balthus dans la maison de Gustave Courbet, 1992, no. 36
Antibes, Musée Picasso, Le regard d'Henriette, Collection Henriette et André Gomès, 1992, no. 5
Seville, Exposition Universelle, La France à Seville, 1992
Tokyo, Tokyo Station Gallery, Balthus, 1993-94, no. 19
Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Passions Privées, 1995-96, collection A7

Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Balthus: Paintings, London, 1983, illustrated pl. 53
Balthus (exhibition catalogue), Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1983-84, p. 369, no. 179, illustrated (as dating from 1956)
Claude Roy, Balthus, Boston, 1996, illustrated p. 181
Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Balthus, New York, 1996, illustrated pl. 65
Jean Clair and Virginie Monnier, Balthus, catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre complet, Paris, 1999, no. P 274, illustrated pp. 79 and 176

 

Some of Balthus’s most poetic pictures were painted at the Chateau de Chassy in the Morvan (Nièvre) where he lived from 1953 to 1961. Balthus was always extremely responsive to the environment in which he lived and painted. The austere architecture of his massive house, which dates from the fourteenth century and was remodeled in the seventeenth, provided the perfect setting for the reclusive life he had chosen to adopt. Golden Afternoon is one of several ambitious canvases from the middle of the decade that addressed the motif of the drowsy or sleeping girl, a theme that distilled some of his lifelong preoccupations. Until and during the World War II, there had frequently been a disturbing eroticism in many of his treatments of the theme, but deep in the countryside the element of perversity that many detected was largely sublimated.

 

The sequence that began with the small Dormeuse in 1954 culminated in four major compositions, Le Rêve I, 1954 (see fig. 1), Le Rêve II, 1956-1957 (see fig. 2) , Le Fruit d’or, 1956 (see fig. 3) and the present work. In each canvas, through the manipulation of pose, the handling of space and the use of accoutrements, Balthus achieved a remarkable range of effects. As described by Claude Roy : “When he wants to suggest the other side of the dream, or of the looking glass, what the closed eyes of the little girl see and the visitations of the dream, Balthus asks the symbol to be discreetly detached: he does not  'describe'  the sleeper’s dreams , but has the donor tiptoe elusively over the floor and leave the signature of her passage on the knees of the person she has visited: the poppy of The Dream I, 1955, the golden fruit of the picture of the same name (1956) or the yellow hollyhock of The Dream II (1957). 'I do not paint dreams,' he says, 'I paint dreamers.' In the three variations on the theme of the dream, Balthus asks us to remove ourselves from reality in the same way we remove ourselves from our usual surroundings when traveling, and for this he calls on technique and the palette used: muted colors, where only the sharp red of the poppy (The Dream I), the violet-colored jacket of the sleeper (The Golden Fruit) or the golden flower (The Dream II)  stand out. The paint is matte, not very thick, lightened by the addition of wax in order to obtain what Balthus calls 'a juicy matteness.' The scene is bathed in a light mist, as light as the visitor’s step. She is perhaps a lightly winged friend, a herald, or one of those angels beloved of Rilke and whose blessings he perhaps taught to the child Balthus” (Claude Roy, Balthus, New York, 1996, p.178).

 

In the present work, Balthus reworked his theme in a very different manner, eliminating the mysterious messenger and the deep recession into space of Le Rêve II and Le Fruit d’or and lightening his palette, bathing the entire composition in a clear even light that first began to appear in some of his numerous landscapes of the period and in interiors, such as Nu devant la cheminée.  Lost in reverie, the young girl rests lightly on a sofa covered in boldly patterned fabric that can be seen in many paintings of this period. In the profusion of patterns which range from the Oriental rug on the floor to the meandering design of the borders of the curtains, a window opens on to the courtyard, emphasizing the contrast between the richly decorated interior where the dream occurs and the world of nature outside.

 

Just at the moment when Balthus was beginning his career as an artist, Matisse painted Intérieur à Nice, la sieste, 1922 (see fig. 4), like Golden Afternoon a depiction of a young woman reclining in the heat of the afternoon, a boldly patterned carpet on the floor, a vase of flowers and a window opening onto the world outside. There the resemblance ends as, unlike Balthus, Matisse was not interested in the specificity of the objects in his composition.  Dominique Fourcade has referred to the “new unity of surface” in Matisse’s work of the Nice period in which “human beings and objects are not treated differently than floors or walls on the painting’s surface… " (Dominqiue Fourcade, “An Uninterrupted Story” in Henri Matisse The Early Years in Nice 1916-1930 (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1986-87, p. 55).  For Balthus, on the other hand, purely formal concerns were less important than the evocation of a mood through methods that maintained continuity with the past and were not closed to inspiration from literature.

 

The title of the present work – Golden Afternoon - is derived from the poem by Lewis Carroll, All in the Golden Afternoon:

 

                                                All in the golden afternoon,

                                                Full leisurely we glide;              

                                                For both our oars, with little skill,

                                                By little arms are plied,

                                                While little hands make vain pretence

                                                Our wanderings to guide.

 

The parallels between the work of Lewis Carroll and Balthus have often been referenced. John Russell pointed to the similarity in mood between the series of fourteen drawings planned as illustrations for Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights that Balthus made in 1933 and the forty-two illustrations done by Sir John Tenniel in 1865 for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. There is also a strong thematic resemblance between much of Balthus’s work executed after 1950 and the photographs of young girls taken by Lewis Carroll in the 1860s and 1870s (see fig. 5).  Whether or not there was ever any direct influence, in the present work Balthus paid homage to one of his many spiritual ancestors, allowing memories of the mysterious world of the great Englishman to permeate his own majestic canvas.

Fig. 1, Balthus, Le Rêve 1, 1955, oil on canvas, present location unknown
Fig. 2, Balthus, Le Rêve 11, 1956-57, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Fig. 3, Balthus, Le Fruit d’or, 1956, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Fig. 4, Henri Matisse, Interieur à Nice, la sieste, 1922, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Fig. 5, Lewis Carroll, Margaret Frances Langton Clarke, 1864, The Art Institute of Chicago