January 1, 2018 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl’s “Points of View,” in this week’s issue, has a great opening line:

I both like and dislike “Thérèse Dreaming” (1938), the Balthus painting that thousands of people have petitioned the Metropolitan Museum to remove from view because it brazens the artist’s letch for pubescent girls—which he always haughtily denied, but come on!

That vehement “but come on!” made me smile. Schjeldahl has long insisted on “Thérèse” ’s erotic charge. In his “Balthus” (The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991), he writes,

Seduced rather than seductive, few of them [Balthus’s paintings of young girls] would appeal to Lolita’s Humbert Humbert as precociously sluttish nymphets – one exception being the Thérèse of 1938, a hard case if ever there was one.

And in his “In the Head” (The New Yorker, October 2013), he says,

Then, in 1936, Balthus met Thérèse Blanchard, the eleven-year-old daughter of a restaurant worker. During the next three years, he made ten paintings of her, which are his finest work. They capture moods of adolescent girlhood—dreaming, restless, sulky—as only adolescent girls may authoritatively understand. (I’ve checked with veterans of the condition.) In two of the best, a short-skirted Thérèse raises her leg, exposing tight underpants. We needn’t reflect on the fact that an adult man directed the poses, any more than we must wonder about the empathic author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” But there it is. Balthus claimed a quality of sacredness for his “angels,” as he termed his models. That comes through. Yet, looking at the paintings, I kept thinking of a line by Oscar Wilde: “A bad man is the sort of man who admires innocence.”

In his latest piece, Schjeldahl argues for the Met’s continued display of “Thérèse” on the basis of “the work’s aesthetic excellence and historical importance.” I agree. But I find the case he makes for the painting in his first piece more compelling. In that essay (“Balthus”), he says, “It is precisely in his perversity that Balthus achieves artistic authenticity, and perhaps only there that he does.”