Balthus: A Biography.

Nicholas Fox Weber Balthus: A Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 644 pages, $40

Nicholas Fox Weber adopts an interesting biographical technique for his hefty book on Balthus. He does not offer straight, researched reconstructions of the events, social circles, and physical environments of the painter's life. Nor does he try to evoke for us a linear narrative of his subject's developing character, domestic circumstances, or spiritual progress. Rather what we get is, so to speak, a report on "How I Wrote a Book about Balthus." We hear about Weber's early admiration for and first approaches to the painter, about his subsequent meetings and interviews, about his stays as a houseguest at the artist's chalet in the Alps, about his encounters with Balthus's surviving friends and with those who modelled for figure compositions or sat for portraits. We have accounts of Webers trips to see certain Balthus paintings in public collections around the world or in the mansions and penthouses of tycoons. Much of the book is thus in the present tense--a prolonged rumination in which Weber takes us through his own adventure in "figuring out" Balthus's elusiveness, his wily intrigues, his self-absorption, his picaresque social climbing.

All this is punctuated with readings of, and responses to, individual paintings. Their spellbinding power Weber accounts for by the way they invite yet resist erotic projection; provoke yet do not satisfy narrative curiosity; and transform the painter's own experience and the masterpieces of past art that influence him. Balthus's desire to manipulate and control, to elude responsibility, evade comprehension, possess and dominate the objects of his fascination--these traits are seen as inhering in both the man and his art.

By continually pairing themes in Balthus's life and work, Weber manages to cover a good deal of factual material without resorting to a straight chronological narrative. He structures his book thematically, with sections on recurrent motifs or key paintings in Balthus's art (The Window, The Cat at the Mirror, The Street, The Guitar Lesson), on key figures in Balthus's life (Derain, Miro), and on his influences (Piero, Courbet). Only a few chapters hang on specific periods or episodes from his career, such as his time as director and restorer of the French Academy's villa in Rome, or his years at the ramshackle chateau of Chassy, living on proceeds from a small syndicate of collectors. The reader picks up, piecemeal, a quantity of information about Balthus's associations with writers such as Jouve and Artaud, his gradually growing stature among critics, his progress with dealers, collectors, and curators from Pierre Loeb in Paris to Pierre Matisse, James Thrall Soby, and Alfred Barr in America. Friendships with Malraux, Camus, and Bataille are also touched upon. These secondary characters do not especially come to life in Webers retelling, and the book does not bespeak huge intimacy with the interwar European art world (as demonstrated, perhaps, by misspellings here of the names of the German sculptor Arno Breker and the French writer Jean Paulhan).

Nevertheless there are useful considerations of where Balthus stands in relation to Surrealism, to counter-avant-gardism in French painting (Derain is defended against charges of merely reactionary conservatism), to contemporaries such as Morandi (whom Balthus admires), Picasso (who owned an important work by him), and Giacometti. His deep intimacy with the latter cooled after the 1930s, we learn, but after the sculptor's death Balthus chose to forget the later estrangement. His (and Giacometti's) admiration for Derain as an artist--an admiration Weber shares--is discussed especially carefully, with Balthus's reluctance to fully affirm, nowadays, the older artist's greatness being astutely noted as indicating a continued competitiveness. On this topic, as elsewhere, the book draws on opinions that the painter Leland Bell (on whom Weber has written a monograph) strenuously asserted in his lifetime--that Derain, Giacometti, and Balthus became a "triumvirate" in the 1930s, the three musketeers of high humanist figuration. Balthus's emulation, shared with Derain, of old masters such as Piero, Caravaggio, or Poussin is depicted as a brave resistance to the obsession with innovation in much modernism; but the case may be being overstated as traditionalist strains were of course pervasive through European twentieth-century art.

Balthus, meanwhile, has always been scornful of "biographical heresy." According to him, knowledge of, or speculation on, his own life is irrelevant to the proper appreciation of his paintings. This applies both to his social and domestic "outer" life and to his inner psychological life. Psycho-analytical criticism of his work is especially anathematized. Yet, Weber demonstrates, he is always using the raw materials of his life for his work. He paints the people he knows, the artists he relates to, the women and lovers who mesmerize him and whom he seeks to subjugate in return. Psycho-analysis, the absurdity and irrelevance of which is so over-protested by the artist, is shown to have been surely a conscious preoccupation, especially in the 1930s, when Freud was a major interest for Balthus's brother Pierre Klossowski and their mutual circles. Perverse eroticism, also vetoed by the painter in any discussion of his work, is similarly demonstrated to have been a major concern and creative source for him and his associates such as the Sade enthusiast (and descendant) Marie de Noailles. One of Weber's interpretative coups is to posit the dominatrix in the famously erotic Guitar Lesson (1934) as a transsexualized depiction of Balthus himself.

Early on, Weber describes Balthus warning him not to be over-biographical or psychoanalytical in his book. By not producing a conventional cradle-to-grave portrait of the artist, Weber is perhaps seeming to comply with the artist's wish. But he in fact does exactly what Balthus most feared, implying that the life and the art are windows onto, or mirrors of, each other. Thus he connects, say, the sadomasochistic traits in the paintings partly to Balthus's conflicted feelings for his mother when young, when he was devoted to her, but also no doubt jealous at her passion for the poet Rilke. (Rilke nevertheless doted on the child prodigy and became a mentor and friend to him.)

Weber sees the paintings, too, as a grand attempt to overcome the artist's own profound sense of insecurity and loss. There was the loss of Rilke, whom he and his mother so adored, dying when Balthus was eighteen. There was even the disappearance of the beloved cat Mitsou, when Balthus was just twelve, which resulted in the series of drawings that effectively launched his career. (Rilke had them published and Bonnard acclaimed them.) This, for Weber, is the first manifestation of a preoccupation in Balthus's work with the elusiveness of that which is desired--be it youth, rapture, inspiration, contentment, sexual or spiritual realization, or the exulted presentness to a full experience of the world. The characters in his figure compositions are caught within such dramas of desire and nostalgia, Weber suggests, while their creator has learned to find a defense against the sense of helplessness by achieving mastery, self-possession, absolute independence. Balthus's willful pursuit of sexual partners, his cruel replacement of one for another in his affections, his demands that they tolerate his infidelities, his desire for eternal renewal in his choice of a sequence of young lovers, his occasional sadism--all this is presented as relevant to the paintings' meanings. Even his suicide attempt over a love affair in 1934 is suggested as having its place in his creative life, to have been a choreographed artifice: the scene composed like a picture, designed for Antonin Artaud to discover just in time to save the prone painter from a carefully judged laudanum overdose.

Such is the almost inevitable premise of the book: that the paintings are illuminated by the life, and the life is of interest because from it have issued important works of art. They articulate realities which we all feel, even if we do not have unusual lives ourselves, and Balthus is thus an exemplary human being, for all his mendacity, callousness, and self-obsession, because he has turned his life into art with fierce and brilliant honesty. All the artist's denials of autobiography in the paintings (and his idealization of Piero della Francesca as the perfect genius of whom no historical facts are known) emerge, then, as a ruse adopted precisely because Balthus is so entirely living his art. Indeed, his desire to cultivate enigma, his notorious clouding of his own personal history, denial of his partial Jewishness, and extravagant claims to nobility or to descendency from famous writers--these themselves become a main subject of Webers analysis. Balthus's is surely a classic enough case of Freudian "Family Romance" (and surely also consciously cultivated in the knowledge that at some level the conceit is transparent), but Weber treats it endlessly. He sees it again as reflected in the work, especially in the many crypto-self-portraits, usually turned away from the viewer. Balthus's elaborate self-defense mechanisms originate partly, Weber seems to feel, in the urge to rise out of poverty and to occlude the unthinkable possibility of victimization during the Nazi period. Balthus sought to reinvent the self as secure, to be not just socially assimilated but super-assimilated--discovered, as in a fairy-tale, to be true nobility.

In many ways, however, the paradoxes and ambiguities of Balthus's life/work relationship are those that pertain for any artist, and the lengthy obsessing on them in this book borders on the wearying. (In a different sort of study, the question of Balthus's phony nobility would be dealt with in a paragraph.) Altogether, there remains something uneasy in the effect of this book's treatment of the facts and the fictions of Balthus's living and limning. Weber presents himself as the honest researcher, devoted to the artist's vision, seeking to understand it better, beguiled by Balthus's personality also, but determined not to be manipulated as so many others have been--whether friends of the man or critics of his art. We watch Weber winning the trust of Balthus and his family, letting them believe he will perpetrate the artist's own authorized version, and correct existing accounts of his career of which Balthus disapproves. All the while Weber is tipping us the wink, letting us know that we can rely on him for a disabused view, uncorrupted by the heady drug of intimacy with this mythical genius. (Balthus, perhaps growing wary of his guest, reminds him of an anecdote from the English thinker Francis Bacon, about an incident seen in the street through a window: Bacon watched the passersby each interpreting the scene from their individual points of view--none had definitive comprehension.)

It is not that one doubts Webers picture of Balthus's less attractive traits in this book, or of the slight vanity into which he and his family seem to have slipped. But is it any of our business? That the paintings invite some speculation about their creator does not in the end justify the degree of attention here. The only thing that would justify it would be, perhaps, the construction of a more conventionally thoroughgoing biographical story, from a specific point of view inevitably, but fashioned as an artifact with its own organic and moral coherence. Few art biographies today attempt such unde-constructed, integrated cohesion; they often remain in a hinterland between art criticism, art history, and society-page reporting.

Weber is at his best when he turns to the paintings and tries to account for their force, less in terms of those themes of self and other, reality and imagination, inner and outer worlds, than of the specific expressive character of individual canvases. He examines the strange distortions of bodies, now elongated, now curiously inflated, often disproportionate, that create much of the atmosphere in Balthus's work. Sometimes the otherworldliness comes partly from the figures' almost extraterrestrial appearance. Weber discusses the luminosity of the surfaces, too, their crusty beauty, and the sombre geometry of the compositions. He is admirably clear about the late decline of the work into more superficial stylistic and decorative formulae, with just occasional revivals of genius. He hints at more developed readings of paintings also, and one is left hungry for further critical analysis of the pictures reproduced here. What demands more attention, among other things, is exactly how the painter makes tenable the density and fullness of illusion, formal resolution, associative meaning and traditional reference, all of which seemed like so much excess baggage to so many modern painters.

A Balthus catalogue raisonne is due out shortly, which will by its nature do what the artist is always insisting upon--draw attention to the paintings on their own terms. Webers life will remain a stimulating meditation on themes and issues in the work and their relation to some (at least, at last reliable) facts about the man.

Merlin James is a painter and an associate editor of the Burlington Magazine.