Hints and suggestions of a former self show through a sort of spiritual autobiography “of the legacy of a Don Juan permeated by the absolute and ideal”. He continues, “There’s nothing glaucous or pernicious in this ambiguity. Only shared amounts of desire and suffering. When I speak of angels and the troubling grace of some of my young girls, don’t forget that the most dazzlingly radiant and glorious fallen angel was Lucifer”.57 So Balthus may have felt like Satan, the angel who fell through pride to seduce Eve in the primal Garden. By this token the girl subjects are also fallen angels. His grandiose Count de Rola persona easily assimilates a Satanic identity, in turn suggesting the Dracula who demands blood sacrifices, or some similar pagan deity. Did pedophile tendencies result in actual seductions of young models? Was Balthus at one time painting his own pornographic scenarios, enigmatic images of desire, anxiety and avoidance put on canvas in order to come to terms with accessing repressed feeling, only to reject its obvious message? Despite the late-in-life claims to angelic being, the young girls in Balthus’s paintings are seldom idealized. Neither are they brutalized, only seen with a baleful eye that avoidantly positions them at a safe distance while retaining their presence. It is this tension that makes the images unforgettable.
The most evident avoidance is in putting models to sleep, as Picasso was also wont to do. Sleep allows control, visual dominance over the will and personhood of the model. Sleep gives the artist full visual access to the forms of womanhood that fascinate him, as appears in many drawings into the 1970s and 1980s by which time Balthus’s was using the language of spiritual transformation.58 The figures are often positioned with one leg up almost revealing the pubic area as in certain pictures already discussed. Softened though they may be, these are still images of desire—the “dizzying grace of my young female models, the texture of their skins and that of the fruits I enjoyed gathering”.59 Were these gathered fruits the delights of sexuality, or does Balthus mean the statement literally? He admits to nothing. Dreaming models are found from Young Woman Asleep (1943) through the 1950s and into the 1980s, as in Nu Couche (1983-6)—a fully exploited voyeuristic theme. However much he caressed them with his eyes, he may or may not have touched, much less exploited sleeping innocence.
A brief review of Balthus’s main models reveals the dynamic of adoration and dominance of each girl that, one by one, faded with time, rather than idealization and outright rejection seen in Picasso’s uses of women in his pictures and life. As we have seen, Balthus painted a series of pre-adolescent and slightly older girls, often in poses drawing attention to the pubic area but not fully exposing it. Girl with a Cat, Therese and Therese Dreaming are among his formal masterpieces revealing his most powerful, near-pedophilic, fantasy. They are not vulgarly erotic but catch the arousing mystery of be-ings-in-transition occasioned by hormonal changes. No other painter had accomplished such a thing, and comparison with Nabokov’s Lolita does not really help in classifying these images. Nabokov’s portrayal of Lolita is more film-like in motion than it is the portrait painter’s minute observation. Bal-thus’s formal sophistication prevents florid sexuality but the motive to control is powerful, in this case Therese Blanchard, who was his main model at the Cour de Rohan from 1936-1938. Just the right degree of avoidance holds temptation in check, giving his formal powers the chance to work their magic. Arrested approach is his “triumph over trauma”, admission that what he feels he wants he doesn’t really want and is renouncing out of avoidant anxiety. In place of unendurable anxiety, an admirable painting is created. Because it is unstable, this solution to sexual anxiety recurs and has to be enacted over and over, never with final resolution. Childhood anxiety condemns him to repeated futile testing of young females who arouse him and will not leave him at peace until they have been formally composed inside a frame. To manage obsessively circular emotions, the frame becomes a prison, with restraints needing to be imposed on whatever “angelic” female next comes in sight.
As Weber comments, “Based on the look I saw on Balthus’s face when he met my own young teenage daughters...attractive young women are his intoxicant”.60 Rather than “intoxicant”, obsessive anxiety is the more fundamental term, arising from fear of breaking taboos and also of being taken captive by a female he must break away from: Brother and Sister (1936), in which an older girl restrains a young boy eager to break away is indicative. Yet Balthus had no sister, and it is hard to place his paintings of brother-and-sister rivalry. Perhaps they have to do with his mother Baladine, Rilke, himself and his brother all being “playmates” together; we just don’t know. An exception to the characteristically avoidant mode of portrayal is the intensely frontal portrait of Laurence Bataille (1949), the young woman intellectual he had met in 1947 when she was seventeen, while Balthus was thirty-nine, and who lived with him until 1951. Her gaze is large-eyed and direct.61 (Her father was the writer Georges Bataille, who collaborated with Balthus’s brother Pierre, sharing interest in de Sade and Nietzsche. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan later married her mother.) The high-spirited Laurence—the escaping figure in Le chat de la Mediterranee)—does not seem to have prompted quite the same attraction-avoidance as younger girls, remaining his sexual partner until she broke away to join the theatre before studying medicine and becoming a La-canian analyst. Her role in his life has yet to be documented.
A summary of his amours shows Balthus in search of the perfect young female model who proved to be unattainable because no attraction could remove his wish to escape her confines. Emotional commitments therefore remained tentative and subject to change. Lena Leclerq, in her mid-twenties, moved with him in 1953 from Paris to Chassy, a house in the Morvan country. He painted her and dominated her life until the much younger Frederique Ti-son came on the scene; when Lena was displaced she attempted suicide. Bal-thus was reportedly unmoved, having been captivated by Frederique, the sixteen-year-old daughter of his brother’s wife by another marriage. As her “uncle”, Balthus had been pursuing Frederique since she was a schoolgirl of fourteen. He did not see that bringing her to Chassy at the same time as Lena was serving as his housekeeper, lover and model would cause such suffering. Or perhaps he enjoyed the occasional episode of female suffering.