ESSAY: Of Gazes and Spaces: Balthus and "Young Girl Asleep (Frédérique)"
(Author's Note: This essay was my final paper for my art history class in Spring 2014. I also wrote a Close Visual Analysis of Bathus' Young Girl Asleep (Frédérique) here. Enjoy!)
A
girl is asleep. Located in a loosely
articulated interior space, she rests on one arm on a table in front of her,
her free arm dangling. The composition
has a rhythmic quality enhanced by the echoing curving patterns created by the
line of the girl’s back and the arch of the tablecloth pattern; the painting
has a slightly unreal, dreamlike quality emphasized by the way the girl seems to float on and off her
chair. The space on the right of the
girl’s head, as well as the top fourth of the painting, is left nearly
untouched, the canvas seeming raw and unpainted, suggesting the blankness of
the mind that occurs during a dream.
Young Girl Asleep (Frédérique) [figure 1],
painted by Balthus in 1955, is a curious painting for the contexts in which I
aim to situate it. What is Frédérique
dreaming about, and how can we use the tradition of the image of the woman
asleep as well as Balthus’s own history with similar subject matter to decipher
the meaning of this work?
Figure 1. Balthus, Young Girl Asleep, 1955.
In this essay I situate Young Girl Asleep within interpretations
of how the woman asleep has been read[1]
and discuss the implications of the male gaze as it relates to this archetype
of women’s dreams and women’s sexuality.
I then trace the controversy surrounding Balthus’s portrayals of young
women and girls, and attempt to place Young
Girl Asleep within Balthus’s paintings of this subject.
Motifs that accompany the
sleeping woman have been interpreted as being an extension of the subject
matter of the sleeping figure’s dreams. I
use the example demonstrated by Vermeer’s 1656-7 A Maid Asleep [figure 2] to argue that Balthus uses the blank space
around his female figure in Young Girl
Asleep in a similarly symbolic way. Balthus
was, and is, a highly controversial artist due to the perceived sexuality and
exploitation of the young girls he made his subjects.
Figure 2. Vermeer, A Maid Asleep, 1656-7.
In this essay, I argue that
Balthus’s use of black space to complement his female figure is his attempt to
play a joke on the critics who have seen his work as pedophilic—that he aims to
turn the responsibility of the male gaze, and the sexual reading of Young Girl Asleep, back onto the viewer
and critic.
Analyzing
Young Girl Asleep: A First Glance
Young Girl Asleep addresses the relationship between adolescence and dreams through its
use of rhythm and pattern, its contrasting degrees of finish, its use of color,
and its compositional elements that include the viewer in the world of the
painting. In this work, Balthus blurs
the lines between the world of adolescence and the world of dreams using a
divergent technique from his usual style.
The lack of finish of the painting itself, as well as
the repeated rhythm of circular forms throughout the work, produces a portrait
of a young girl caught in a dream, in a state of in-between-ness. The contrast among the various degrees of
finish in the painting also suggests being in a stage between childhood and
adulthood. The former is represented by
the simpler colorings and renderings, while the more detailed elements
demonstrate maturity. These elements
combine to create a picture of a young girl caught in a dream, completely
overtaken by deep slumber, as she dreams the space around her, symbolized by
the contrast between the rendered setting and the empty, blank canvas at the
edges of the painting. The empty
whiteness symbolizes the haze of the dream and of adolescence; this young girl
is not only caught in a dream, but she is caught in adolescence, in a place
between childhood and adulthood. His
approach to this work in particular, in contrast with his other works that
appear more finished, lends itself thematically to this in-between-ness.
In this work, the viewer is
a voyeur of her dream and of the girl herself, and our mere presence in the
room with this vulnerable girl, our gaze onto her body, creates a decidedly
sinister air. The way the edge of the
table appears to jut past the boundary of the painting into the viewers’ space
is a sign of our inclusion in this scene.
It is particularly
instructive to compare this work to Thérèse
Dreaming (1938) [figure 3], a painting
more typical of Balthus’s style of a similar subject matter. His work is usually characterized by a high
degree of stillness, quietude and finish, and Thérèse Dreaming, unlike Young
Girl Asleep, exemplifies his usual style.
In Thérèse Dreaming, Balthus’s
painting technique is cool and polished.
The young girl sits upright in an articulated interior space, cast in
strong contrasting light and shadow. Where
Young Girl Asleep is characterized by
curved shapes, Thérèse sits upright and tense, as if troubled by the presence
of the viewer even in her slumber. In contrast to Young Girl Asleep, where the young girl is given more articulation
and finish than the hazy, unfinished other compositional elements of the work, the
subject of Thérèse Dreaming is given
the same treatment, and the same degree of polish and finish, as the other
compositional elements of the painting, thus positioning her as the equivalent
of a mere object to be viewed.
Figure 3. Balthus, Thérèse Dreaming, 1938.
Young Girl Asleep stands in additional contrast to other works of young girls by Balthus due
to the lack of explicit or implicit exploitation of the subject’s form. The
girl is not posed for our benefit, and she is fully clothed. In contrast to Thérèse Dreaming, who has been read as an eroticized figure, with
her underwear revealed to the viewer and the cat lapping from a saucer beside
her, kept at a distance from the viewer, there is a strong feeling of intimacy,
of closeness, and protectiveness, perhaps stemming from the relationship
between artist and muse in Young Girl
Asleep.
When I first approached the work, I was able to draw
the conclusion that Balthus’s Young Girl
Asleep uses sleep and the idea of dreams as a metaphor for adolescence. While it differs in style from his other
works, it must be stated that this work plays into conceptions of the gaze,
using the viewer as proxy for the male gaze.
However, after researching Balthus and his oeuvre further, the
connection I am making between dreams, adolescence and sexuality has taken a
different turn: namely, that the unfinished quality of this painting and its of
blank space creates a dialogue between past works and between the viewer and
the work. Young Girl Asleep, and its
lack of finish, can be read as a challenge to his critics who had decried his
work as explicit and troublingly sexualized.
The
Woman Asleep in Art
For an analysis of the
meanings and readings of this archetypal image, that of the woman asleep, I
first must briefly present the theory of the male gaze. First described by Lara Mulvey in her article
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”:
In
a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between
active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy
on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional
exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their
appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said
to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif
of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby
Berkeley, she olds the look, plays to and signifies male desire […] there are
three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records
the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and
that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion.[2]
Essentially, this theory
posits that in works of art or film created by men, the depiction of women is
sexualized, presented as an object for the consumption of the male viewer with
whom the creator is synonymous. In this
reading, the way a heterosexual male viewer sees a woman is presented as the
standard and as the lens through which the audience sees her as well; Margaret
Olin discusses how this theory, first posited toward the discipline of film,
can also apply to visual arts; again, the male artist creates a direct line
with the ostensibly male viewer by presenting the female body the way a
heterosexual male viewer would see such a body: as an object made for desire
and control. “The woman is taken as an object, subjected to a controlling and
curious gaze of the man”.[3]
Udo Kultermann’s “Woman
Asleep and the Artist” discusses the relationship between the male gaze and the
woman asleep in great historical and thematic detail. The essay shows that this
subject has been a predominantly male-dominated field; the image of the woman
asleep in art is traditionally created by a male artist, and thus this image
has often been interpreted as being particularly subject to the male gaze.[4] As Kultermann writes, readings of this
archetype (the woman asleep) highlight several key points: namely, that the
female who is asleep is passive, unable to control who is gazing upon her; she
is being presented for male consumption, often by a male artist; and, most
contentiously, the composition surrounding this image will often allude to the
woman’s inherent desirability, suggesting that it is the desirable body of the
woman causes the male onlooker to forget his bearings and gaze upon her.
Additionally, as suggested
by Madlyn Miller Kahr in her essay “Vermeer’s ‘Girl Asleep’: A Moral Emblem,”
what the artist chooses to include in the composition of the woman asleep often
imbues the work with another layer of meaning.
For example, consider the English painting Summer Slumber [figure 4], by J.D. Miller after Lord Leighton (c.
1898). This work depicts a young woman
asleep by a fountain, with a small dog curled up asleep at her feet. The icon of the dog has been read as
symbolizing marital fidelity, when taken in conjunction with the female figure.[5]
Figure 4. J.D. Miller after Lord Leighton, Summer Slumber, 1898.
This
symbol of the dog symbolizing marital fidelity has also be elaborated on in
works as early as Titian’s Venus of
Urbino (1538), thus making it a potent and useful symbol for reading
meaning into Summer Slumber[6]
Thus, taking the image of the woman itself and what we can interpret as the
iconographic symbol of the dog, and we could argue, that Miller’s woman in Summer Slumber is dreaming about
marriage or marital fidelity.
This
principle of the power of the objects accompanying the sleeping woman is
explicitly articulated in Madlyn Miller Kahr’s anaylsis of A Maid Asleep, which I will then use to provide an interpretation
of Balthus’s Young Girl Asleep as it
concerns the dreams of the girl depicted and how she can be understood and
interpreted by the viewer.
As I turn to Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, I find that one of the
most convincing interpretations of this painting is that of a “moral emblem”
(Kahr, 115). As Kahr writes of A
Maid Asleep, “the young woman personifies Sloth, the vice that opens the
gate to all the other vices, symbols of which surround her.” This interpretation is supported by the
objects Vermeer chose to paint in the composition, which include wine, a symbol
of “lechery”[7] as
well as the apples and fruits on the table, which “attributes of Aphrodite,
goddess of love, as are the pearl earrings the girl wears. The apples refer
also to the Fall of Man and Original Sin”.[8]
Kahr’s last point, about how
this seemingly simple image of a young girl asleep can have implications all
the way back to the greatest sin, Original Sin, and the fall of man, ties into
a deeper reading of this image. Because,
as Kahr writes, Sloth and Lust are closely related, it is possible to interpret
A Maid Asleep as a condemnation of
sexual desire and lust in women. While
this woman sleeps, she cannot be industrious or contribute her work to the
running of the household. The symbols
accompanying this woman: the wine, fruit and pearl earring, serve a double
purpose: not only can they provide a clue as to what the young girl is dreaming
of––lechery, or lustful thoughts––but serve as the explanation of the work, as
how the viewer should view this sleeping woman.
Thus Kahr’s interpretation of the painting as a “moral emblem” is
particularly salient: this painting is being used to condemn female sexual
desire as contrary to the governing Dutch Protestant values of hard work and
productivity.
But if the woman of this
image is asleep, how can she possess sexual desire? Herein lies the next turn of this analysis:
this projection and subsequent condemnation of sexual desire in the sleeping
woman can be read as an extension of the male gaze and control of the female
image as he tries to control the woman even while she sleeps. This assertion is grounded by Kahr’s analysis
of the Vermeer A Maid Asleep.
Tying this expression back
to Kultermann, it presents a dichotomy of how male lust and female lust have
been read and presented. The male lust
Kultermann writes of, while connected with negativity, has been presented and
read as positive, creative, and artistic in his article, with the sleeping
woman serving as a muse to the male artist.
For example, Dionysus’ observing of Ariadne sleeping portends his love
for her and their eventual matrimony; Kultermann cites this archetype in his
analysis of Giorgione’s 1510 Sleeping
Venus [figure 5]. Kultermann also
references Kahr’s description of a sleeping Ariadne with similarities to the
Giorgione painting, which has been interpreted as inviting male lust and
desire:
She
lay on her right side, her right arm bent, with hand under cheek to support her
head. Her other arm was stretched out on her leg to the middle of her plump
thigh. From the virginal nipples of her breast flowed water, a stream of cold
water from the right, hot water from the left. The right breast was placed at
such height that the thirsty could suck and drink from it.[9]
Figure 5. Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, 1510.
In this instance, the male
lust is presented as not only positive, but understandable within the context
of the myth, and leads to a happy conclusion for both Dionysus and his
bride. In a similar vein, Kultermann
also cites Picasso’s 1931 painting of his mistress Marie-Thèrese sleeping, Woman with Yellow Hair [figure 6], as an example of the male gaze and
male lust as not sinful or exploitative, but benevolent: “In most of Picasso's
works in which one partner watches the other, the watcher is never seen as an
intruder, but rather as a guardian of the sleeping partner.”[10]
Figure 6. Picasso, Woman with Yellow Hair, 1931.
Kahr, conversely, reads the
Vermeer as a condemnation of female lust as unproductive and even harmful. A certain
kind of unconscious sexuality is being projected onto her without her knowledge
and without her consent, and she is meant to be judged by the painting’s
educated intended audience for this imagined lust.
When we take the contexts
the Young Girl Asleep is situated in,
regarding not only the sexualized nature of Balthus’s typical compositions of
young women and girls, but the potent image of the woman asleep which has taken
on sexual readings, a new potential interpretation of Young Girl Asleep arises.
While Vermeer’s similar A Maid
Asleep uses symbolic objects, allowing the viewer to read meaning and
insight into the nature of the subject’s dreams, Balthus’s composition is void
of objects, focusing solely on the subject and the blank space above and around
her head. This blank space is incredibly
important, and provides the turn of my analysis of what Balthus meant to
accomplish with this painting.
Balthus
and His Context
As
far as images of women and girls, either asleep or awake, go, there are few
artists that have attracted as much recent controversy and scrutiny as
Balthus. In many of Balthus’ paintings
of adolescent girls, the girl sits alone in a dimly lit room, leaning at an
odd, awkward angle and spreading her legs apart, allowing her skirt to hike up
her legs. Balthus also often portrayed
his young female subjects engaged in the company of cats, providing a rather
unsubtle joke using the vernacular of both felines and female genitalia. As Sabine Rewald notes, “In Thérèse Dreaming, young Thérèse, lost in
reverie with her hands folded above her head, a rapt expression on her face,
and her legs uncovered, becomes the epitome of dormant adolescent sexuality.
With the gray cat lapping milk from a saucer Balthus adds yet another erotic
metaphor. The picture presents a haunting description of that stage in life
that veers between lassitude and exuberance, innocence and sexual fantasies,
reality and dream.” His 1934 Guitar
Lesson [figure 7], which depicts a heavily stylized sexual assault during a
music lesson, has been cited as Balthus at his most exploitative.
Figure 7. Balthus, The Guitar Lesson, 1934.
Today,
any exhibit of Balthus’ works of young girls is met with some degree of heated
discussion and controversy. His work has
been called “pedophilia”;[11] in
1980, Timothy Hyman wrote of Balthus’ canon: “The problem with Balthus’
children hinges on our own response. Are
we to be titillated and shocked? Is it an amusing or charming piece of
erotica? Or else the confessions of a
Bluebeard?”[12]
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibit, Balthus: Cats and Girls:
Paintings and Provocations, inspired a series of reviews and think pieces
calling into question how we should consider Balthus’ work with a contemporary
lens, while an exhibit of Balthus’ polaroid photographs of his young female
subjects, scheduled for the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, was canceled,
“spurred by public insinuations in Germany that the work is pedophilic; a
December article in the major newspaper Die
Zeit called the images, which depict a model named Anna from ages eight to
16, ‘documents of pedophile greed.’”[13]
In
response to these allegations, Balthus, for the most part, attempted to turn the
tables on those asking him these sorts of questions and inquire after their own
predilictions and motivations. “[He]
felt compelled to feign surprise and astonishment when asked about their erotic
charge. Not only did he refuse to
acknowledge any eroticism and insist he only cared about formal structure, he
implied it was the viewers who were the ‘impure’ ones.”[14]
Yet
conceptions of his work were far from easily convinced by his protestations;
indeed his 1937 Girl with a Cat [figure
8] was used to illustrate an edition of Nabokov’s Lolita, giving the association between Bathus and his depictions of
girls as erotic Lolitas a more concrete context. In his eighties, he later
elaborated in response:
I really don’t understand why people see the
paintings of girls as Lolitas… You know why I paint little girls? Because women, even my own daughter, already
belong to this present world, to fashion.
Little girls are the only creatures today who can be little
Poussins. My little model is absolutely
untouchable to me… Some American journalist said he found my work pornographic. What does he mean? Everything now is pornographic. Advertising is pornographic. You see a young woman putting on some beauty
product who looks like she’s having an orgasm.
I have never made anything pornographic… Except perhaps ‘The Guitar
Lesson.’[15]
Figure 8. Balthus, Girl with a Cat, 1937.
While
this quotation post-dates the creation of Young
Girl Asleep, it also post-dates the painting of Thérèse Dreaming and other works considered to be highly
problematic. In this quotation, Balthus
provides an interpretation of his works and attempts to justify his own
depictions of girls. He argues that his
paintings of little girls belong to the realm art, rather than something as
base as fashion or advertising, and that the way he paints them are thus intended
to be wholly different from the hypersexualized “pornographic” qualities of the
latter media. These iterations of sexuality for women and girls already exists
in society, he seems to argue, and so the way he paints young girls, polished,
frozen in time, is not inherently sexual.
Balthus
seems to claim that the sexual readings of his works come from critics used to
seeing sexuality and pornography in fashion and advertising, from eyes drowned
in explicit imagery where nothing is innocent.
While he truly believed was he was saying regarding the highly potent
images he was creating is another matter entirely. Perhaps
Balthus could have referenced Young Girl
Asleep, considering its wholly different execution and atmosphere from
works such as Thérèse Dreaming, in
his own defense in statements like this one.
What is also important to
note is that depending on what the viewer knows of Balthus’s own personal and
professional history with these types of paintings, the meaning we derive from Young Girl Asleep can vary vastly. When I first observed the work, I was
familiar with neither Balthus’s typical oeuvre nor the sorts of implications
scholars and critics have found in his work, and I was able to come away with
an interpretation born solely of the work itself: that this work was merely an
exploration of the similarities between dreaming and adolescence. Yet after researching Balthus and readings of
the image of the woman asleep, the interpretation I now come away with is quite
different because I am placing it within both of its historical contexts. Can this painting still be read for its own
merits?
I argue that with this blank
space, Balthus can be interpreted as responding to the critics who have called
his work pedophilic and exploitative in a way reminiscent of his own statements
on the matter. When confronted with accusations of pornography, Balthus was
known to respond that any impropriety was on the part of the viewer projecting
sexuality onto the painting. Therefore,
I argue that the blank space can be interpreted as a little joke towards those
who condemned his work: the blank space invites interpretation, and thus any
sexual reading of this particular painting, Balthus seems to say, comes from
the viewer’s own imagination and from nothing that is actually explicitly
painted. While the Vermeer painting uses
the objects depicted with the female subject to provide a jumping-off point
which to interpret the work, Balthus’s painting leaves any interpretation of
the subject’s dreams up to the viewer; if the viewer sees the image as
sexualized, Balthus then reserves the right to place the blame back onto the
viewer and away from himself, as he was wont to do when discussing his works.
Conclusion
Balthus’s Young Girl Asleep sits at the crossroads
of two traditions in art —a grander archetype, spanning continents and
centuries, of the woman asleep, and the personal oeuvre of one artist’s
depiction of women. The subject of this
painting is lost in sleep, her dreams completely subject to our
interpretation. In earlier paintings
depicting a woman sleeping, there is often a clue to what the subject is
dreaming of, leading to a clear moral message or reading of the painting. For example, Summer Slumber’s use of a dog has been read as symbolizing the
desire of the subject for marriage and fidelity, while A Maid Asleep’s use of a pearl earring, wine and fruit hint at a
certain lust of the sleeping woman, projected onto the woman by the male artist
and by the viewer.
Yet the Balthus painting
manages to keep us guessing through the use of blank space as Balthus coyly
challenges his reputation as a pedophilic painter of young girls’ sexuality. If we see any sexuality in Young Girl Asleep, he seems to say, it
is entirely our doing as the viewers, not his, as the artist.
Whether this perceived
intention is successful remains to be seen; this work lacks the controversy
surrounding his more provocative pieces, and the artist’s history of painting
similar subject matter makes it difficult to approach this painting with an
unbiased eye. Balthus attempts to displace the male gaze from his creation of
the image onto the viewer perceiving and evaluating the image. Having considered both the context of what the
icon of the sleeping girl has meant in the past, and this particular girl’s
place within Balthus’s repertory, I am inclined to interpret this image as the
artist attempting to play a joke on his critics and his denouncers, who
proclaim innocence when discussing the perceived smut of Balthus’s oeuvre. Whether this act of cheekiness is successful
remains to be seen—this painting has been little discussed, and popular opinion
of Balthus’s works has only shifted towards a more condemning consensus in
recent years[16].
Works
Cited
Hall,
James. Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art. New York: Harper &
Row, 1974.
Heddaya,
Mostafa. “Balthus Exhibition Canceled
Amid Accusations of Pedophilia.” Hyperallergic.
February 6, 2014.
Jacobsson,
Eva-Maria. “A Female Gaze?” Royal
Institute of Technology. May, 1999.
5-27.
Kahr, Madlyn
Millner, “Vermeer’s ‘Girl Asleep’: A Moral Emblem,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, Vol. 6 (1972): 115-132.
Kultermann, Udo,
“Woman Asleep and the Artist,” Artibus et
Historiae, Vol. 11, No. 22 (1990): 129-161.
Olin, Margaret,
“Gaze,” in Nelson, Robert S., and Shiff, Richard, Critical Terms for Art History.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003: 208-218.
Mulvey, Laura.
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film
Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall
Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44.
Rewald, Sabine,
“Balthus’s Thérèses,” Metropolitan
Museum Journal, Vol. 33 (1998): 305-314.
Rewald, Sabine, Cats and Girls. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Rewald, Sabine,
“Some Notes on Balthus’s Nonmusical ‘Guitar Lesson’”, Source Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 11, No. 3/4, Essays in Honor of Gert Schiff
(Spring/Summer 1992): 59-64.
Soby, James
Thrall, “Balthus,” The Bulletin of the
Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 24, No. 3, 3-36 (selected pages).
Uffizi Gallery,
Florence, “Venus of Urbino by Titian.”
[1] For an excellent survey of this topic, see
Kultermann’s “The Woman Asleep in Art.”
[2] Lara Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema.” 4-5, 9.
[3] Eva-Maria Jacobsson, “A Female Gaze?” 8.
[4] Kultermann also writes about female artists
reclaiming this archetype in the 20th and 21st centuries
through video and performance art. Since
female artists have generally been prevented from reaching the same success and
recognition as their male peers, they do not feature prominently in discussions
of this subject matter prior to the 20th century.
[5] The icon of the dog is explained in James
Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols
in Art.
[6] This idea is touched upon by the Uffizi Gallery’s
discussion of the painting.
[7] Madlyn Millner Kahr, ““Vermeer’s ‘Girl Asleep’: A
Moral Emblem,” 128.
[8] Kahr, 127.
[9] Kahr in Udo Kultermann, “Woman Asleep and the
Artist,” 138.
[10] Kultermann, 145.
[11] Schjedahl, 1984 in Sabine Rewald, Cats and
Girls,
2013, 34.
[12] Hyman in Rewald, 35.
[13] Heddaya, in Hyperallergic.
[14] Rewald, 35.
[15]
Balthus in
Rewald, 37-39.
[16] See reviews in The Guardian, The Village
Voice and Hyperallergic: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/21/balthus-cats-girls-paintings-provocations-metropolitan-review;
http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-10-16/art/the-discomforts-of-balthus/full/;
http://hyperallergic.com/107509/balthus-exhibition-canceled-amid-accusations-of-pedophilia/;
http://hyperallergic.com/90195/the-cultured-and-the-creepy-balthuss-parting-shots/
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