THE VIEWER AS VOYEUR

BALTHUS, THERESE DREAMING, 1938

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Great art should disturb us. That is art’s most important function. More than providing an attractive image on which to rest our eyes or a pleasant landscape in which we might imaginatively wander, great art should show us things that upset our assumptions, force us to reconsider our opinions, unsettle our lives a little (or a lot). This is why Picasso was a great artist much of the time, while Matisse was for too many years a patron-pleasing decorator. Rembrandt, in his greatest portraits, disturbs us with a vision of human life as performance on the edge of the abyss. In a more extreme way, Goya forces us–like Alex in A Clockwork Orange–to stare unblinkingly at the horror of war. And Francis Bacon reflects the hellishness of our own time in a menagerie of humans and animals screaming, bleeding and dying. Yes, the greatest art should make us uncomfortable. At its best, art should shock us into truth.

These thoughts were running through my mind as I sat in the middle of a bland, nondescript gallery and stared at Thérèse Dreaming by Balthus. If Rubens is Western art’s most notorious chubby-chaser, then Balthus is its foremost pedophile raised-skirt fetishist. This painting, with its girl on the verge of womanhood sitting with her eyes closed, her face turned away from our gaze and one leg raised to reveal her strongly lighted white-pantied crotch, exerts an interesting push/pull force on the viewer. I am attracted by Balthus’s warm Old Master palette and inviting color harmonies and simultaneously taken aback by the image’s activation of the cultural taboo against pedophilia. This gallery is probably the only place in New York where an adult can stare up the skirt of a twelve year-old girl without risking arrest and imprisonment (or, at the very least, a severe beating). Balthus always belittled any suggestion of pedophilia in his works, preferring to discuss matters of form, color and texture and claiming that any perversion existed only in the viewer’s mind. Perhaps. But even if the perversity is my own, Balthus’s contrived image and highly artificial composition have activated it. The longer I look, the more I’m convinced that transgressive eroticism is the heart and power of this painting, and that without its invitation to tabooed voyeurism the work’s interest would be seriously, even fatally, diminished. If Thérèse were to put her leg down and press her thighs together, we would have an original, beautifully conceived and executed portrait, and that is all.

Is this, then, a work of pornography? Walter Kendrick, in his historical study The Secret Museum, tells us that the word ‘pornography’ entered the English language in 1850 in a translation of a German work on ancient art. The German author’s source was "a unique instance in Classical Greek of the word pornographoi (‘whore-painters’), tucked away deep in the Deipnosophistai (‘Learned Banquet’) by the second-century compiler Athenaeus."¹ From this very specific context in the discourse of ancient erotic art, the word rapidly migrated into popular usage as a derogatory term for anything objectionably sexual. And while we may laugh at Victorian prudishness, we must appreciate that the situation in the United States is in some ways little better today. Puritans of the religious right and feminist left casually throw the word around in their pro-censorship arguments while cynically refusing to define it. I use ‘pornography’ as a purely descriptive term, implying no moral judgment. It denotes a mode of artistic expression characterized by sexual themes and content. When faced with a sexually-themed work of art, our question should not be, "Is it pornographic?" Rather, we should ask: Does this pornographic work possess a high or low aesthetic value? Is it (aesthetically, not morally) good or bad art? Since some of the West’s highest art can be interpreted as pornographic–as Camille Paglia shows in her discussions of Donatello’s David and Michelangelo’s Giuliano de Medici in her Sexual Personae–we must cleanse the word of its residual Victorian moralism. I hope this makes perfectly clear what I mean when I say that Thérèse Dreaming is indeed a work of pornography–a great one.

Even the kind of interpretation Balthus preferred, a purely formalistic one that focuses on the work’s geometry and color harmonies, leads us ineluctably to Thérèse’s sexuality. Geometrically, Thérèse is all angles; she is as angular as the table, the chair or the faceted cloth. Her prominent arms define a large diamond shape, its two halves echoed by the triangles at her collar (which frame the white triangle of undergarment at her throat). The diamond of her arms is rhymed (with a 90^o rotation) in the fold of white petticoat to the right of her raised thigh. That thigh forms one side of the composition’s largest triangle, which frames her crotch. Thérèse’s panties are lighted almost as brightly as her face, and the sharp contrast between their whiteness and the nearby dark shadow on her thigh emphasizes the passage with a touch of Baroque-style drama. Walking up to the canvas, I notice a vertical slit on her panties that can be read as the material pulled tightly against her genitalia. Thérèse’s sexuality is hard-wired into the painting, implicit in the very geometry of her pose.

As for color, the work’s loveliest harmony is the red of Thérèse’s skirt, picked up by her matching shoes, the red label on the canister and the stripes on the brown wallpaper behind her. And even here, the color forces sexuality upon us. The skirt provides a softer, vaguely triangular frame for her pelvic region, and its hue, contrasted with the white petticoat, suggests a traditional image of menstruation or sexual initiation: red blood on white bedsheets.

It seems that every inch of this canvas is drenched in eroticism. The still life on the table can be understood sexually: the willowy transparent vase suggesting the girl Thérèse has ceased to be, the more solidly sensual dark vase symbolizing the woman she has not yet become. Both of these are opposed to the thick, cylindrical, phallic canister with (of course) a label the color of her skirt. The rumpled, faceted cloth (an obvious nod to Cézanne) unites the male canister and female vase, thus becoming a symbol of sexual union. The cloth’s internal angles rhyme with Thérèse’s geometry, just as its color harmonizes with her blouse.

And what about the cat? This is the painting’s most apparently arbitrary and puzzling element. Cats are a constant presence in Balthus’s works, from the beginning to the end of his long career, and the artist once painted himself in the guise of ‘The King of Cats,’ so it’s tempting to read this cat as a trademark, a counterpart to the artist’s signature (which appears at the same level on the other side of the canvas). Compositionally, the cat is a foreground balance for the background still life: an implied diagonal running from cat to tabletop passes through the painting’s center of interest at Thérèse’s crotch. More importantly, I think the cat serves an additional thematic purpose. It is an image of sensual abandon, of unthinking animal sensuality. Loosely painted, with its curling tail loosest of all, half-crouching as it eagerly laps at cream in a saucer (there’s an obvious reference to cunnilingus here), the cat is the most active figure in the entire painting, the only bit of motion in an otherwise frozen scene. The cat is a living, Dionysian balance for the hard, Apollonian still life, and Thérèse is appropriately positioned between the two. She is motionless and emotionally detached, but also very much alive, a jeune fille en fleur blooming into sexuality.

An Apollonian/Dionysian axis cuts horizontally across the painting at the level of the tabletop. Above this line, all is still, hard, bounded Apollonian form. The still life objects are arranged in a row that also includes the great closed form of Thérèse’s arms. Her head is depicted in strong profile, the most hieratic, Apollonian mode of portraiture, its lineage stretching from ancient Egyptian reliefs to Roman coinage to the Renaissance portraits of Balthus’s beloved Piero della Francesca. Employed here, it gives Thérèse’s head all the hardness and strength of an image stamped on a coin.

Below this horizontal axis, all is careless Dionysian abandon and dark, erotic life. Even the still life cloth, which crosses the line, becomes more heavily faceted and shadowy in its lower extremities. Thérèse’s bunched skirt hangs down droopily, a wilted rose, some of its loose folds lost in shadow. The cat, an essentially predatory, anti-social animal that always retains a streak of natural cruelty even under domestication, licks at its cream, oblivious to its surroundings, focused solely on sensual pleasure. A similar pleasure, of the erotic variety, is signaled by Thérèse’s spread thighs, open to the light.

Perhaps this Apollonian/Dionysian dualism in Thérèse’s own figure is a key to the attraction/repulsion effect of the painting as a whole. While her exposed, lighted crotch and panties invite our voyeurism, her turned head and closed eyes signal her lack of interest in anything her lower body might offer. Balthus also positions Thérèse so we do not view her crotch head-on but must peek under the angle of her leg–a leg which, we should note, partly conceals what it is raised to reveal. Thérèse’s skirt, not her angled leg, is the true lower counterpart of her sharply angled arms. While her skirt forms a loose, flaccid frame around the seat of her sexuality, her arms provide a sharp, bone-solid frame for the seat of her intellect. We can discern the shape of her pudendum through her panties, but no amount of study, however close, can guess the thoughts inside her head. This unsettling combination of exhibitionism and inwardness raises the painting out of the realm of crude titillation and into the arena of high art. If the image is nonetheless pornographic (a word I use, again, with no moral judgment implied), it is pornography of a very high order. Balthus puts Thérèse on sexual display, but in a blocked, conflicted, problematic way; and he simultaneously grants her an inner mystery, a profound inwardness, that we cannot begin to fathom.

This unknowableness is the painting’s deepest mystery, and it has little or nothing to do with genitalia. Thérèse will not reveal her secrets. She is essentially mysterious, self-sufficient, turned away from our gaze and enclosed in her own solipsistic arms. This is the only embrace she requires. Alone in herself, she combines Apollo and Dionysus, the hard intellectual certainties of the still life and the loose, livelier sensuality of the cat. Thérèse is Balthus’s Mona Lisa; more closed than open, she provokes and rebuffs us. Lewd and lovely, she sits illuminated in the warm glow of all that we will never understand.

NOTES

1. Kendrick, Secret Museum, 11.

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS