



Balthus never again did anything that looks like those paintings of Thérèse from the late 1930s. And it is not easy to generalize about the direction—or rather, the directions—his work took in the 1940s. Rewald’s biographical approach to the paintings, which emphasizes a succession of young women as models (and perhaps muses) for particular works, cannot account for the larger thematic currents that link paintings that Balthus created over periods of decades. The unity of Balthus’s achievement is embodied in the series of signs and symbols that take on a mystical import as they reappear: the table, the chair, the window, the tree, the mirror, the cat, the card game, the closed eyes, the spread legs, the arched back, the confrontation between a boy and a girl, the figure turned away, the figure walking away. In his beautiful book, A Balthus Notebook, Guy Davenport reproduces The Blanchard Children opposite The Painter and His Model, completed more than forty years later, and one immediately realizes that the paintings contain a nearly identical table and chair, the chair having only somewhat shifted its position in relation to the table in all that time. What do the table and chair symbolize? Considering that Balthus once spoke of himself as a carpenter hammering on the same nail, perhaps they symbolize the power of pictorial structure, the essential sturdiness of the art of painting, which is only slightly altered from year to year. It is in the nature of such mystical symbols that their meanings remain simultaneously resonant and obscure, something we grasp only through the act of looking.

Let me suggest a few themes that link works from the 1930s and early 1940s to works done as much as half a century later. In the two versions of The Salon (1941–1943), where one girl is asleep on the couch and the other is reading on the floor, Balthus’s sharp-edged chiaroscuro is already being transformed into something more hieratic and formal. The girl on the floor is no ordinary girl. She is seen in profile, in a pose that brings to mind Ancient Egyptian wall painting and Archaic Greek bas-relief. The girl in The Salon announces a motif, the female figure almost crawling across the floor, which more than a quarter-century later culminates in two of Balthus’s most austere works, Japanese Girl with Black Mirror and Japanese Girl with Red Table (both completed in 1976). But this motif of the figure on the floor can be understood only dialectically, an emblem to be counterposed with another emblem in Balthus’s mystical universe, namely the motif of the table and chair. For if the table and chair—essential elements in paintings of solitary figures playing cards including The Game of Patience (1943) and The Fortune Teller (1956)—suggest homo ludens and civilized play, surely the crawling figures from The Salon to Japanese Girl with Black Mirror suggest not so much culture as nature, the figure as magnificently animal, a triumph of feline grace. There is a cat in the second version of The Salon, sitting up on its haunches, arguably less catlike than the girl. Balthus is attentive to shifting identities, the human as animal and vice versa. Which brings us to Balthus’s later explorations of the theme of the girl and the cat, where the two of them face off, both comfortably ensconced on a chaise or a couch, with the mirror between them raising the question of who resembles whom. Is the girl like a cat? Or is the cat almost human?

Rewald has some useful things to say about the iconography of the cat. As a child Balthus created an extraordinarily precocious series of forty ink drawings, the story of a friendship between a boy and a cat named Mitsou, who eventually vanishes, leaving the boy alone with his tears. Published in 1921 when Balthus was thirteen—with an introduction by none other than Rilke, who was a close friend of Balthus’s mother—Mitsou has long been admired by students of the livre d’artiste. Rewald has discovered the original drawings, until now believed lost, and they are exhibited in public here for the first time. She also includes an early self-portrait in which Balthus appears as a slim dandy with a gigantic tabby snuggling his leg; beside him is a portfolio inscribed “A Portrait of H. M. the King of Cats,” the title derived from a nineteenth-century English fairy tale. Although Rewald points out that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits of children, cats can suggest “potential evil” and “latent female sexuality,” she seems reluctant to pursue the theme’s larger metaphysical implications. Rewald the rationalist would probably recoil from the grandiosity of Alain Vircondelet, who interviewed Balthus in his later years and argues in a new book, Balthus and Cats, that a cat’s “gaze contains a profound knowledge gleaned from the depths of time, possessing at once the humility and pride to acknowledge by a look alone that it is unique and singular.” These admittedly extravagant claims are very much to the point. Balthus’s cats are descendants of the sacred felines of ancient Egypt—which brings us back to the girl on the floor in The Salon and her ancient Egyptian pose.

The final room in the Metropolitan exhibition provides at least a few glimpses of the glories of Balthus’s later decades. Works such as The Moth and The Cup of Coffee are nowadays often dismissed as overly decorative, as if the dark power of Thérèse Dreaming were the only power that counted. It is a criticism that years ago was often lodged against the work of Matisse and Bonnard. I wonder if the death in 1947 of Bonnard, who had been something of a mentor to Balthus when he was young, might have precipitated this fresh stylistic turn in Balthus’s work in the 1950s, when he lived in a château in the Morvan, a region in central France. Imagine the supple nocturnal chiaroscuro of Georges de La Tour united with the prismatic Cubist surface play of Georges Braque, and you begin to have some sense of the unearthly achievement that is The Moth, in which a naked woman stands in a bedroom, the only illumination an oil lamp. As for The Cup of Coffee, while some might accuse Balthus of reducing the young woman to an element in the décor, I would say that what happens is precisely the reverse. The woman’s head is the still center of the painting, with the patterns of rugs, upholstery, tablecloth, and paneled wall creating a fireworks of tessellating arabesques that represent nothing less than the glorious play of this beautiful woman’s imagination.