Framing and Being Framed by Art: Theatricality and Voyeurism in Balthus

Author(s): Alice N. Benston

Source: Style , Summer 1988, Vol. 22, No. 2, Visual Poetics (Summer 1988), pp. 341-360
Published by: Penn State University Press

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 Alice N. Benston

Framing and Being Framed by Art:

Theatricality and Voyeurism in Balthus

In 1984 a large retrospective of the works of the French contemporary

artist Balthus was mounted in Paris by the Musée National d'Art Moderne,
the Centre Georges Pompidou, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York. Philippe de Montebello, the Metropolitan's director, sets the stage for
public reaction in his introduction to the museum's catalogue, written by Sa-
bine Rewald. "The paintings of Balthus abound in paradoxes," he writes in
the first sentence of his introduction, "and are likely to challenge any effort to
situate his style and interpret his work." These paradoxes, he goes on to say,
"are an integral part of the artist's expressive, often disquieting power" (7).
The reviews that followed validated his remarks, as the critics sought to make
sense of the work of an artist who obdurately rejected the major trends of the
contemporary art world, harkening back to traditional techniques and styles.
As the critics attempted to meet the challenge of situating and interpreting
Balthus's work, an unusual number of references to personal reactions were
recorded. The emotional response evoked by Balthus's work in the arena of
the retrospective created an awareness of audience: observers observed other
observers. This suggested to me that the use of dramatic poetics in analyzing
Balthus's work would be effective.
I first consider two reviews which, while they do not employ theater terms,
serve to describe the complex audience reaction elicited by the retrospective.
I then review an essay by Ronald Paulson that confronts the interpretive
problems of Balthus's work. Since Paulson takes an interdisciplinary approach,
correlating Balthus's thematic concerns with those of literary contemporaries,
his findings are a valuable preliminary to my inquiry. However, my own in-
vestigation is based on the exploration of theatrical, rather than narrative,
devices. The convention of the modern realistic stage are shown to account
for the intensity and diversity of personal involvement between these canvases
and individual viewers, justifying my proposition that Balthus purposely em-
ployed theatrical means to engage an "audience."

1. Defining the Audience: Viewer Response to the Retrospective

Sanford Schwartz, in his review for The New Yorker of the Balthu
rospective, opens with an unusual report of a watcher watching:

Style: Volume 22, No. 2, Summer 1988 341

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 342 Alice N. Benston

I saw a young man walking

looking at the pictures care
letting the atmosphere swir
as in the exhibition, which
The young man may have b
or by the painter's many i
reverie. My hunch, though, w
but isn't made compellin

Of all the reviews, this

similar experience. My y
Schwartz's choice among
pelling in Balthus's wor
Cathy," expresses his ow
work and concentrates
romantic isolation," whi
identification with Bronte's hero.
Schwartz is only indirectly concerned with the question of audience re-
sponse as such, and therefore he does not link his analysis with his initial
surmise as to his fellow observer's reactions. It is only by implication that we
can deduce why the young man was supposedly not responding to formal
beauty or by what means he came to be attracted to Balthus's romantic quest.
Most interestingly, Schwartz gives the second possibility he lists, the appeal
of "images of girls shown daydreaming in moments of sexual reverie," hardly
any attention. He merely notes, glancingly, that Balthus is "popularly known
for bringing risky subject matter into high art" (132) but never identifies the
source of the risk, perhaps because he does not find the paintings very pro-
vocative. Schwartz writes that the portraits of dreaming girls "have surprisingly
little inner light, and their dingy gunmetal-green tonalities and the airless im-
personality of their surfaces keep you at a distance. These works ought to be
poetic, suggestive, even disturbing- and perhaps for many, on a first viewing,
they are. But they don't take on a second, longer life, in your mind, as paint-
ings" (126). Again we find Schwartz sensitively recording the possibility of
other viewers' responses, and again he records his own reaction as one that
responds to formal, aesthetic qualities.
Another critic, Kay Larson (writing in New York Magazine), serves per-
fectly as that "other viewer." Larson definitely finds Balthus's work suggestive
and disturbing, if not poetic. Her reaction is linked to the obvious sexuality
of the paintings. With refreshing candor, Larson confronts the question of
reaction in gender terms.

Balthus is inclined to build his enigmas around double messages. People who secretly admire
one-half of the message (the sexual) can speak endlessly, and without offense, about the
other half (the formal). As a woman, I have a different relationship to the sexual part of
the message. Balthus may not always be what he seems, but what he appears to be disturbs
me. (98)

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Framing and Being Framed by Art 343

Referring to Stanislas Klossowski's (the painter's son

tures of young girls have "nothing whatsoever to
except perhaps in the eye of the beholder," she trenc
disavowal

flies in the face of this beholder, who must then choose between Balthus's eyes and her
own. Mine insist that his nudes are the most forceful expression in twentieth-century art
of states of desire. To separate style and desire is as absurd as to separate the man from
the painter. And how do I, a woman, feel about Balthus's desire? That it is a deliberate,
calculated affront- an anthropological curiosity to which I claim no connection. (98-99)

This strong disavowal is followed by a paragraph that reflects her anger

at the acceptance of Balthus's work by the predominantly male world of cu-
rators and critics. "This show presents a particularly subtle case of the tendency
to universalize the male experience." Larson wonders whether a woman's work
depicting female "attraction-repulsion toward men" would be similarly re-
ceived (99). She then proposes to do what she asserts most critics will do-
take refuge in a discussion of style. "Once the radical amputation is completed,
you can admire the stump of his work with perfect and undivided attention."
But she is true to her first proposition as she observes that

[h]is work is a seamless synthesis of half-acknowledged visual references, but it's a synthesis
in which the binding force- again- is the painter's desire. You never have the sense, as you
do with lesser artists, that these exotic admixtures are pasted together out of remnants of
a reference book. Balthus's desire is existential- it pervades his very being. (99)

What is particularly pernicious, it would seem, is not that Balthus has

been promoted by a male establishment, but that his male perspective is served
by a desire so strong and talent great enough to raise it above "the soft-core
pornography [it] resemble[s]." We need to enquire further into the nature of
Balthus's "desire" and ask why and how it seems to evoke such strong and
obviously varied reactions: smiles, laughter, critical acclaim, and anger. Can
we say that those who speak of the formal properties of the work are disguising
sexual pleasure? Why does Larson entitle her piece "Balthus the Baffler"? What
constitutes the enigma, and how did Balthus fashion it to shape our response?
Both the sense of mystery and the intense hold the work takes on us are signs
of the dramatic poetics employed. The particular techniques of staging are
explored below, but first, the nature of the "enigmatic" content will be dis-
cussed by exploring Balthus's relationship to themes current in the avant-garde
literature of the period.

2. Balthus and Literature

In "Balthus and the Ritualizing of Desire," Ronald Paulson explo

very center of the question of desire, locating its source and purpos

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 344 Alice N. Benston

tually between Balthus

plores the way Balthus'
dominant schools, cubi
are Balthus's continuat
tuality of his work as
uniform surfaces with
attention to the painter
Paulson cogently acco
that is Balthus's persona
and in its formal appea
tween admiration and
painter, Paulson specul
against the discourse of
or a myth; indeed, if hi
it is metaphorical rath
(3).
It is in the works of Atonin Artaud and George Bataille that Paulson
finds the literary discourse which discloses the mythic intent, if not the content,
of Balthus's obsessive myth:

Balthus's official commentators (his friends and son) connect his juvenile world with the
golden age; but less purity than free play of instinct is to be seen in Balthus's images. His
children only make sense in the context of Artaud's "theater of cruelty," and also in the
context of Balthus's own set of illustrations for Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. ... In
this series, which is in fact the nucleus of his later work, Balthus makes Heathcliff a self-
portrait. (9)

Paulson, then
reads it very
mantic, brood
primary evil.
a child's revol
nections between Artaud's obsession with the sexual taboos of Jacobean drama
and similar themes in Bataille's work, where eroticism is connected to the
forbidden, the sinful, particularly to incest. He then shows how the love be-
tween Heathcliff and Cathy is but a thinly disguised incestual attraction. What
connects all these surrealist artists, then, is the conviction that the erotic is
found at the point of transgression, where danger and even death inform the
drama. It is the eroticism of sadism, where sex and sacrifice meet. Hence, as
Paulson observes, Balthus's La Victime is explicit in this doubleness, for the
figure lying on a couch can be equally seen as a woman awaiting her lover or,
when our eye catches the knife on the floor, as a woman about to be murdered.
The adolescent girl, as incipient sexuality, as possibility on the margin between
being and becoming, is the hieroglyph for the yearning for the "ideal."

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 Framing and Being Framed by Art 345

Paulson then argues that the image of the sun, a

Bataille and Balthus, is another binding image for th
by these surrealists. And the "sacred-secret" mystery,
tified as sacrifice, constitutes the appeal of the Aztec
artists explicitly refer. For Balthus the reference is e
mation of the girls, by his calculated play of lights
heliotropes that are "stretching and opening like . .
of the sun" (12). Paulson suggests that the force of B
as that of other surrealists who would transform pr
icons to capture an intensity of experience missing f
ern world. But it is Balthus's connection with literary
an oblique connotation for the overtly realistic, form
readable, denotative, allusions to the artistic traditio
But does Paulson's analysis erase the viewer's di
Balthus's girls? Not quite, not even for him. To his co
hieroglyph is to be read as heliotrope, he adds that "t
inclining as if on broken necks, bodies bending like
the presence of the old crone, keep this otherwise p
in check" (12). If the mythic moment is both "positi
be and is held in check, Paulson adds, it is becaus
expression of desire but, rather, at the depiction of d
cludes that the discrepancies between form and conte
styles at variance, is calculated to represent that p
contained moment.

The Balthus doctrine, which may have begun as surrealist incongruity, can be seen as the
situating of erotic energy ( dépense ) within various sedate orders which restrain or withhold
desire: . . . above all, the elaborate formal pattern of the composition (some paintings can
be said to be as much about the Golden Section as about the girl). . . . The withholding or
restraining of desire, the sense of representing the moment just before or at violence ("jusque
dans la mort")- this Balthus embodies in these tensions of classical form, autonomous
paint, and provocative image. (21)

3. Dramatic Tension: Mythic Representation Versus Irony

Paulson's location of the tension between the erotic and the formal ac-
cords with the reaction of most observers. It also describes the locus of alter-
native responses. If the paintings may as "well be about" the Golden Section,
the viewer may very well avoid the erotic and "contemplate" the formal.
Conversely, a viewer can be discomforted by the unresolved tension and re-
spond to the part that is the erotic force. Further, if the erotic and the formal,
both as contents, are unresolved, the viewer may seek his or her own resolution.
A puzzle needs to be solved. Paulson is such a viewer and following "clues"

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346 Alice N. Benston

in Klossowski's discussion
girls are "emblematic arch
desire) finds the source of
sadistic erotic doctrines o
myth does not achieve re
statement, purposeful am
which is only felt as desi
Paulson means by "The
The term "ritual" sugge
myth is truncated, it is s
repetitiously, in order to
itself. But if this is so, i
beholder as witness or pa
by Paulson's title, that I
I believe that Paulson is
urative painting is the m
seek a "meaning" and tha
absence of universally hel
But there is, specific to B
is working at the time w
he does not ignore but ra
purposes, we are aware of
other words, his eclectici
patches of painterly area
is a gesture well known t
Bryson's analysis of the c
his Studio for a thorough
creates discomfiture in th
the relation between the
viewer can see that a par
area, he is not told the pr
impossible" (116). Verme
the impossibility of the il
In this painting, Vermeer
disappearance of which is
In Balthus's work, the h
irony, since it comes to p
realism to abstractionism
can then read his delight
quoted remark that he is
than a craving for privacy
mystery instead of infor
participating in the ideali

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Framing and Being Framed by Art 347

pedantically echoed in his son's admonitions. Som

also present in Paulson's analysis, as he traces Balth
mythology and Platonic imagery. But if the paintin
are self-referential, by implication the body of the p
has been inserted, creating an ironic tension.
Bryson supplies additional terms {gaze and glanc
the quality of Balthus's theatricality and its ambiguit
a viewing that is "prolonged, contemplative, yet re
with a certain aloofness and disengagement, across
glance suggests "a furtive or sideways look which
existence, and which is capable of carrying unoffic
hostility, collision, rebellion and lust" (94). The glan
the reactions of Schwartz's viewer, who was wander
musing rather than gazing, and my viewer with his g
emotion, as well as Larson's hostility. Schwartz, him
the traditional, "objective" stance of the critic, ach
gaze. The tension in Balthus's work results from th
multaneous possibility of opposite responses: the gaz
with the glance.1 The often noted theatricality of B
cisely in this conflict. Why- for what purposes and t
this conflict is perhaps best approached by treating
so, we have to go beyond Paulson's identification of
with the "Theater of Cruelty" and observe the thea
manipulate our responses.

4. Character and Set

As in all theatrical work, Balthus presents us with characters invo

actions in specified worlds (the set). His figures become characters thr
repetition of figures and because they are placed in readable, specifi
sets. These characters begin life in narrative art. Balthus's career beg
illustrated story telling, a tale of a boy searching for a lost cat, Mitsou
have noted that this theme of loss and quest, as well as the image of
are continuing thematic and iconographical items in his work. His ob
with Bronte's novel, which began with a set of illustrations, is another
source of characters. From these illustrations of narratives, Balthus ca
his painting an element of caricature: for example, sharply caught, tr
faces.
A recognizable cast of characters pervades Balthus's work. In a
to the young girl, who changes only slightly as his models change, t
young boy or young man and a crone, who is sometimes depicted as
topped dwarf. There is also the recurring cat. Although each canvas

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 348 Alice N. Benston

its own "play," the repet

brought home by the r
to them as characters
Matisse also painted a l
woman in a room. But
that, a figure, one amo
light, color, volume, a
settings.
The set is also repetitive, typically a room with old-fashioned furniture,
chairs, lounges, frequently a fireplace, and heavy drapes. The latter are of
singular importance, as we shall see. But even when the scene is out-of-doors,
as it is in two important paintings, The Street and The Mountain, the figures
dominate and the titles call attention to locus, rather than subject. In all cases
they remain scenes in the dramatic sense, the place where something happens.
They can function in this way because of the realistic substantiality of objects.
The theater analogy is to its dominant form, modern realism. The rooms
depicted in his paintings could house Zola, early Strindberg, or Ibsen. These
works require the audience to believe that they are viewing a world the same
as the one they move in, both in terms of concrete materiality and spatial
perspective. This naturalistic "illusion of reality" is essential for Balthus's
theater, and for this reason he eschews the unreality of surrealism and stub-
bornly continues the figurative tradition.
Hence Balthus's perspectives and viewer manipulation come as much
from their use in the theater as from their elaboration in the history of painting
and from the masters Balthus copied and imitated. Indeed, his collaboration
with Artaud came about because of work he had previously done in the theater.
Artaud admired the sets Balthus did for Victor Barnowski's 1934 production
of As You Like It. The following year Artaud engaged him for his famous
production of The Cenci.
Balthus's work in the theater is not limited to this collaboration. Long
after his association with Artaud, he did sets for three plays, a ballet, and an
opera. The subjects and styles of these pieces range from another Shakespeare,
Julius Ceasar, through Cosi fan tutti to Camus's L'état de siège. Thus his
interest in the theater obviously is of a larger range and a greater duration
than his association with Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. Of interest here, with
respect to Artaud, is what the dramaturge admired in the painter. Artaud
praised the As You Like It set for its poetry and theatricality. This man of the
theater not only saw the drama in Balthus's work, but admired him, as he did
not the surrealists, for "[reconstructing the world from reality" (Rewald 33).
In particular, Artaud observed that Balthus's figures looked as if they were
subjects of "smoldering dramas, surprised in a moment of daily routine" (Re-
wald 33).

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Framing and Being Framed by Art 349

The "surprise" that Artaud notes in the paintings

ranged by the realistic dramatist, who poses the ord
the extraordinary. One recalls Strindberg on this
preface to Miss Julie that real pots and pans and d
exits are necessary for his play. It is among these
passion can be revealed and made to explode. Further
objects, which are signs of the environment that im
that such explosions will take place. Balthus's rooms f
Thus the characters are not only defined by the sub
they are placed, but frequently are at odds with it o
taposition.
There is another feature of theatrical realism necessary to the creation
of the illusion of reality, one that Balthus employs effectively and with im-
portant consequences. The so-called fourth wall convention not only defines
a specific kind of theater space, the proscenium stage, but it also requires a
specific stance on the part of the actors. Unlike other, more rhetorical theaters,
it requires the actors to assume the privacy and inviolability of the stage space.
The fourth wall must not be pierced by the actors' glances. They must conduct
themselves as though we do not exist. Direct address is banished, and soliloquy
must be manipulated "realistically" to represent inner thought. This is the way
Balthus's characters behave. Many observers have noted, and found disturbing,
the fact that his figures, particularly the young girls, are totally absorbed by
their own thoughts, and we can never engage their eyes. It is for this reason
that Paulson claims that all of Balthus's young girls are descended from Manet's
Olympia, with her "[u]nselfconscious indifference to the viewer" (7). Certainly
the pictorial heritage is clear in the way both painters outrage the viewer by
recalling tradition as they break with it. But if we focus on the dramatic sit-
uation, we are aware of the differences. Manet's figure may be indifferent, even
defiantly so. She almost seems to be daring an observer to comment. Balthus's
figures are not "indifferent." They are, like characters caught in their own
drama, unaware of our existence. This is also true of the figures in the un-
realistic, fantasy world of The Street, who (as has often been observed) seem
to be somnambulists. This is a crucial difference in governing our responses.
We are not invited to participate; rather, we "overhear," as privileged observers
peeping through the "fourth wall." In Strindberg's terms, the modern audience
wants to "open the box," examine the strings, to know how things work. The
theater's purpose is to go beyond the journalistic headline, "Miss Julie kills
self, motive unknown," and discover the complexities that led to the action
(63).
The set, then, must be framed so that we are positioned in relation to
and are aware of the fact that we are looking in. Strindberg, in articulating the
requirements of this theater, begs the stage designer to learn from the visual
artists to employ perspective in order to create this illusion of reality (71).

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350 Alice N. Benston

Balthus brings that trad

rooms its purposeful c
sets for two such diffe
1) are similar in the wa
also to curtail it so that
In each case he has place
verticals of the perimet
the space depicted is ou
for a similar effect. F
Francesca's The Inventio
illustrates his interest
the downplaying of the
to the town on the hill
Piero's walled city to a
blocks. In The Street, t

Fig. 1. Balthus. Set for

Mariguy, 1948. Collection
Paris.

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Framing and Being Framed by Art 351

egress, which viewers have called eery but which st

the space. Similarly, in The Room , the buildings be
close her in rather than open a space into which sh
result is that we are aware that the threat is within the room and that she is
trapped. Nor can we, as audience, take refuge from the disturbing sight by
allowing our attention to wander "back stage."
The typical set for Balthus, then, is the room, constructed to focus our
attention on the figures, with interiors controlled by the absence of visual
egress. The smooth surface and somber palette create a sense of dense interiors
at the same time as they define a poetic mystery. The Room , which by its very
title suggests itself as archetypal of Balthus's world, can serve as primary ex-
ample. Dark and high ceilinged, the room is forbidding not only because of
the color (dark browns, dark green, grey, ochre with touches of red highlights
on the girl's body), but because it is an enclosure. The screen on the left and
the wall on the right sharply define the sides of the "box." Although the gnome-
like figure is drawing a drape from the window, we cannot look out, since there
is nothing there. In fact the drape, here as elsewhere, is a highly theatrical item,
marking the moment and place of viewing. Further, the gnome takes on the
character of a procuress, because she is acting as stage manager. In opening
the drape she is making our watching possible, for, in admitting the light, she
exposes the main character and "action." Hence, although there is nothing to
look out to, it is from the window, as entrance, that a principal actor, light,
enters. For the direction our sight takes in looking at Balthus's work is a typical
viewer's response to a canvas. We chart the course of the light, and Balthus
uses traditional, seemingly rational lighting to bring up patches of flesh from
the gloom. Sometimes it is a leg, frequently a breast, or, as in the Tate Mu-
seum's Girl Sleeping , merely a half exposed nipple. Here, in this most theatrical
piece, even the cat turns its head to signify that the light has just appeared. If
light signifies the source and objective of desire, as Paulson suggests, it does
so actively because Balthus uses light as in the theater to spotlight central
action and force our attention.
One other feature of Balthus's paintings creates the distance necessary
for his particular theater. Just as we cannot wander beyond the characters, so
we cannot enter their space. A notable lack of foreground in his paintings
prevents the illusion of participation. There is an important distinction to be
made between Balthus's theatrical paintings and other overtly dramatic can-
vases. The point can be made succinctly by citing E. M. Gombrich's discussion
of Raphael's Saint Paul Preaching at Athens (192). Empty steps occupy about
a fourth of the foreground; the middle ground of the canvas is crowded with
figures while the background houses architectural forms that function, much
as Balthus's, to cut off the spectator's view. Gombrich notes that "the artist
turns us into participants of the momentous scene when the apostle addresses
the elite of the pagan philosophers. We must envision ourselves sitting on the

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 352 Alice N. Benston

invisible steps outside

rational and mathemati
type of theater possible
we were first given the
pation by failing to giv
contemporary realistic
space, so that we remai

5. Authorial Stance and Action

The particular way in which Balthus employs theatrical devices an

particular kind of theatricality chosen directs attention in the manner s
by Bryson's term, gaze. But we need to look again at his terms and ho
employs them to explain the seeming paradox that Balthus's strate
secure the gaze also release the glance. According to Bryson, the West
dition aims at the fiction of ideality by denying the body, both by supp
the traces of the artist's work itself and by denying the independent
pation of the viewer. Viewer and artist are meant to be linked in the
of presence, of shared epiphany (94). Synchrony is stressed and the dia
repressed. Not only does the artist disappear, but his subject, itself, is c
to seem timeless.
Bryson employs the linguistic term, deixis (speech that implies the present
and calls attention to the speaker), in contrasting the terms gaze and glance,
and deixis will help us see how Balthus manages to merge the two. According
to Bryson's terms, which are consistent with Paulson's analysis, Balthus would
seem to be striving for that eternal moment that is caught in ritual, the realm
of the gaze. But Bryson notes further that in the Western tradition the per-
forming arts alone contain deictic markers which create the opposite: the sense
of presence (both of the artist and for the viewer), that is, the realm of the
glance (92). He is correct in pointing to the existence and importance of the
deictic in the performing arts, but, I submit, not in the way he infers. Our
awareness of the artist as speaker and work-producer is only possible in those
performances where the author or composer is the performer. In fact, it is a
feature of drama that the authorial personal pronoun is nonexistent. Self-
referentiality, therefore, is a greater contrivance in the theater than it is in
narrative forms. It is for this very reason that the presence of a character is
felt, for the body of the playwright does not intrude on the actor as mediator.
Deixis is at work in drama in the area we call exposition, where place and
character are defined.3 For example, only a truly uninitiated viewer would hold
the actor who plays Othello responsible for Desdemona's death. But it is the
presence of a body, the actor's, that creates the material world of theater. Only
the truly naive, again, by screaming at the actor from the balcony, tries to

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Framing and Being Framed by Art 353

prevent Othello from strangling Desdemona. It is th

bleness of the theater that is so special. It is also wh
of the glance and the gaze possible.
Balthus produces a theatrically controlled material
a deictic purpose. So, too, does his reiteration of a cas
his self-referentiality is controlled much the same w
drama. Inferences can only be drawn across the cano
appears, he does so as a character. Again, biographica
to contribute to this authorial remove. Hence, we only
Or one may infer his presence in the directorial role o
the drama to us in The Room. Balthus's one painted
a full face sketch), is a highly posed character study
role. The title is H. M„ The King of Cats, as Painted
faces us in a highly theatrical pose reminiscent, as R
lacroix's self-portrait as Hamlet (70). But Balthus
else's character; rather he is his own created persona.
garb, one hand on a hip, the other on his jacket lapel,
and introspectively at the viewer. What is most pert
title is lettered on a canvas that is leaning on a stool
item, aside from the inscription, that indicates his o
whip lies on the stool, crossing an edge of the can
rubs his head on the painter's right leg. There is noth
to suggest an artist's studio. Rather we have charact
to the props, stance, and the whimsical inscription.
Painter and his Model, there is, again, nothing in
activity of painting. The model, a young girl, kneels a
resting her arms on the chair, reading a book that is p
The figure of the artist is upstage, once again opening
through which we can see nothing. No easels, brushes
The artist, whom we can only see from the back, m
gesture: he is lighting his scene. Thus his role of pai
portrayed. This is left for his picturing of others, as
in which, at least, a stack of canvases are prominentl
that Balthus, who is so very allusive, does not recall
meer in his portraits of the artist. (Vermeer's The Ar
be recalled, is the center of Bryson's contrast betwee
erly self-referentiality.)
Thus, even where the subject might have justifie
ness, we find Balthus creating and protecting a realis
sistent with the framing devices of modern realism is
of public action to the sphere of private lives. The i
not fortuitous; it is the site of happenings that are u
are no steps for our presumed presence because we d

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 354 Alice N. Benston

torments of Miss Julie

vulsion towards the m
scandal of her husban
relentless uncovering o
psychological reaction a
the scene and the obsc
not be shown" is implie
of the forbidden sexua
terial and in terms of
of modern drama were
door, contains scandals
embarrassing. And so, t
perpetrated on visual c
tained in order to reve
between form and cont
juxtaposition.
But Balthus goes a step beyond the exposé of traditional realism. It ihe
psychological drama of modern realism invited us behind the headlines to
participate in revelations and gossip, Balthus by the nature of his subject in-
volves us in a specified sexuality. His is a theater that solicits voyeurism. He
presents his figures in moments of self-absorption and bodily abandonment,
caught in private moments of sexual reverie, half dressed, legs and arms ak-
imbo, here a breast exposed, there a knee raised to expose a flash of white
underpants (see Figure 2). Isolated by the fourth wall, they do not invite us
to participate. We are intruders. Their desire solicits ours precisely because it
is a forbidden glance that Balthus arranges. Hence his son's remark, that the
paintings have "nothing to do with sexual obsession except perhaps in the eye
of the beholder," indeed provides clues, but according to a dramatic analysis,
ones very different from those pursued by Paulson.
Since what is represented in Balthus's work is moments of activity, not
sequential narrative, the hypostatization of the surrealist myth is not present
in the works, either singly or as a group. Although much has been said about
the narrative sources of Balthus's paintings, it is pertinent that he does not
retell these stories in the paintings. For example, although he did a large group
of sketches illustrating Wuthering Heights, only one is directly used as a basis
for a painting, Cathy Dressing. The sketch is faithful to the text; Heathcliff is
looking away from the clothed Cathy, and the work is captioned, "Why have
you that silk frock on?" This is a faithful rendition of the pivotal scene in the
novel. In the oil, the male figure looks away from the exposed nude body of
the female subject. The very absence of the dress, HeathclifFs clue to Cathy's
infidelity, obscures the reference to the narrative.
Finally, what is disconcerting about Balthus's work is that the characters
are not represented as desiring, but rather as enjoying a sexuality. Hence,

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 Framing and Being Framed by Art 355

Fig. 2. Balthus. Thérèse. 1938.

Oil on cardboard mounted on
wood. 39 1/2" X 32". All
rights reserved, The Metro-
politan Museum of Art. Be-
quest of Mr. and Mrs. Allan
D. Emil, in honor of William
S. Lieberman, 1987.

Klossowski is right: desire lies on our side of the frame, on the viewer's side
of the footlights. What is nonsense, of course, is the implication of his remark
that the viewer is responsible for the quality of the action. Balthus's achieve-
ment is that he has in his active way manipulated us to participate. The play
happens across the distance as we respond both to the painting and to the
emotions aroused in ourselves.

6. Conclusion

Balthus's whole theatrical apparatus is calculated to place us in the po-

sition of a distanced observer, so framing his art as to frame our response.
is because the emotion is held to the audience's side, rather than in exchan
with the characters in their drama, that the reviewers of the retrospecti
recorded both their personal responses and their awareness of those of oth
These can be accounted for by differing responses from, and to being positio
by, Balthus and by the differences among individuals towards the particu
sexuality aroused. For example, Larson refers to early admirers of Balthu
who would pass reproductions to one another, suggesting a shared pri
voyeurism consistent with my analysis. The subjects are arranged to arou

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 356 Alice N. Benston

just such a response, b

pornography. They are
their bodies to us. The
they are presented as
the strategies of dram
involved in their own a
women that we are loo
in their own dreams an
are not static. They are
painting, but for the v
floor will be used, but,
poses that Balthus freq
progress. The head flu
gestures create a sens
action.
It is, then, the entire
more complex and var
girls' own sexuality an
characters are always w
varying responses. Far
dramatist of the awak
can vary from surprise
or angry. While there
range can cross sexual
in the voyeur's positi
edgment in Balthus's w
male can delight in the
empathy of this drama
private feelings and fa
appeal to male anxiety
ance, even the lack of
another kind of charac
or Captain Alving in Ib
as cause of the action.
Thus Klossowski's statement, "just pay attention to the paintings," pro-
vides an ironic clue. We do not need biographical material flowing to construe
these works. Both as absent character and where present in the role of either
dramaturge or specified role, Balthus is apparent, but as distanced from the
sexuality that is central. In Cathy Dressing and in The Mountain, where he
represents himself in the Heathcliff role, he is seated and looks away from the
action. In The Golden Days, there is a figure of a male, stoking the fire, but
just as in The Artist and his Model, his back is towards us, and it is the young
girl in the typical pose, admiring herself in a hand mirror, who occupies the

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Framing and Being Framed by Art 357

whole of the central stage. Even those interpretation

bolically and, therefore, read the male as arousing d
the role of participant. Responding to the drama of
"[w]hat has happened or is about to happen?" and th
tion of the girl: "[t]he effacement of the man in the
of Echo in Poussin's Echo and Narcissus ... a pain
many years earlier, while the girl is as well defined
cissus himself' (110). This gender reversal is very
informs his drama.
Everywhere Balthus underscores the fact that the world of sensual plea-
sure and fulfilled or controlled sexuality belongs to the female. In a painting
called Rider and White Horse, a girl dressed somewhat like a circus rider with
tights and a tutu sits comfortably sidesaddle leading a prancing white horse
with but one hand on the reins. Her free hand points in the direction of the
horse's head. If we read this painting according to Freudian imagery in the
way Mieke Bal does in her analysis of a Rembrandt painting with a similar
subject, we can see that the ego (rider) and id (horse) are in a comfortable,
even easy relationship (329). Even more revealing is the one truly explicitly
erotic painting Balthus did, The Guitar Lesson. A young woman is sprawled
across the lap of an older woman who is stimulating her in the pubic region
while the girl is stimulating the woman's breast. Commentator's have noted
that the pose is a parody of a pietà, but surely the parody becomes travesty,
as in transvestite, where the older woman is "usurping" the masculine role.
The painting was done in 1934. Much later, in 1949, he repeats the theme,
substituting a male figure for the older woman but only in a sketch. Further-
more, the male in the sketch is grasping the girl, one hand holding her arm
and the other her knee, while her skirt is held up between his teeth. But he is
not sexually engaged with her; rather, he is fiercely peering down on her body.
Finally, in the one instance in which the male is seen sexually engaged
with a girl, the action is aggressive. In the large, important painting The Street
(Figure 3), the boy on the left is obviously involved in molestation since the
girl's gestures imply protest and an attempt to break loose. This painting is
frequently referred to as an evocation of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, the
two young boys recalling Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The two parts of the
action, then, are aggression and refusal to witness. Interestingly, to follow the
assumed reference, only the very young Alice as girl-child is uninvolved with
the masculine set; she is allowed her game world as she plays with a ball. The
canvas almost traces the stages of woman, and only the teen-aged "Alice" is
involved sexually and here as victim. The next female figure, moving right, is
seen only from the back, and although she is on the same plane as the youth
advancing towards us, they are not engaged, since her extended arm and bent
knee suggest her movement away from him. The older woman (hair up) is
holding a male child. She, too, is seen only from the rear. Whether she is to

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358 Alice N. Benston

Fig. 3. Balthus. The Stre

The Museum of Modern A

be read as mother or nu
the child pulls awkwar
his gaze does not engag
carpenter and baker, se
uninvolved in the dram
workaday occupations s
gether. But here the si
male and female depict
male sexuality, one tha
like quality of the pictur
Finally, then, we are
take him at his word a

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 Framing and Being Framed by Art 359

roles. Whether as aggressive dreamer, brooding bys

revealed interior dramas or absent figure, he is ther
the subjects, we feel the self-referentiality of his
marked with the full range of voyeuristic attitudes
as object through envy to aggressive, even sadistic r
of these attitudes, sometimes mixed, not only avoid
but (as Paulson observed) they constitute the tension
In the end, it is Balthus's own voyeurism that co
voyeurism he has stagemanaged for us. The complic
selves dealing with the emotion of this enactment
we divert our attention by seeking its source in th
parallels or whether we attempt to turn our eyes aw
limiting our experience of literary works to match
with their allusions to older masterpieces, we cannot
confronting our own "glance." The drama of this sex
must be confronted, for Balthus has caught us in t
eurism.

Notes

1 See Cyril Connolly's observation that the discrepancy between form and content
is an "almost deliberate opposition between choice of subject and treatment, a kind of
counterpoint between them" (qtd. in Rewald 41).
2 This work captured Rilke's attention, leading him to encourage and help the
young man on his way to a career as a painter.
3 See Kier Elam's The Semiotics of the Theater and Drama for a complete elab-
oration of the deictic in drama.

4 Interestingly, Strindberg is again helpful in terms of the dramatic parallel. In

explaining the procedures of the dramas he called dream-plays, he says that he tried
to capture the illogicality of sequence that is true of our dreams. What holds the plot
together, he states, is that each scene is a projection of a single dreamer, whose presence
throughout holds the fluid action together (Author's Note, A Dream Play 193).

Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. "Force and Meaning: The Interdisciplinary Struggle of Psychoanalysis,

Semiotics and Esthetics." Semiotica 63 (1987): 317-44.
Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Macmillan,
1983.

Elam, Kier. The Semiotics of Theater and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980.
Gombrich, E. H. "Standards of Truth. The Arresting Image and the Moving Eye." The
Languages of Images. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. 81-
217.

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 360 Alice N. Benston

Larson, Kay. "Balthus the

Paulson, Ronald. "Balthu
21.

Rewald, Sabine. Balthus. New York: Harry Abrams, 1984.

Schwartz, Sanford. "Heathcliff without Cathy." The New Yorker 30 Apr. 1984: 104-1 1.
Strindberg, August. Six Plays of Strindberg. Trans, and ed. Elizabeth Sprigge. Garden
City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1956.

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