NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com VOL. 16 NO. 2 New York GALLERYSTUDIO At The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Balthus in the Age of Political Correctness pg. 2 Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001) The Golden Days 1944-1946 Oil on canvas 58 1/4 x 78 3/8 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966 ©Balthus A Prototypical Punk Prodigy’s Progress an excerpt from Ed McCormack’s HOODLUM HEART pg. 12 Ed Brodkin WINTER AT PAINTINGS, COLLAGES AND MUSINGS AGORA GALLERY “As high as Olympus. .As deep as Hades” 37"x49" Collage and Acrylic on Fiberboard Nov. 26 through Dec. 21, 2013 Receptions: Saturday, November 30, 3 - 6pm Thursday, December 5, 5 - 8pm 530 W. 25th St., #405, New York, N.Y. 10001 Hrs. Tues.-Sat. 11am-6pm Or by app’t 646 230 0056 www.pleiadesgallery.com Brodkin Studio: 551-804-1833 • [email protected] www.gallerynow/brodkin • edbrodkin.newyorkartists.net *036%.%'3&732 1)(-8%8-:)8,39+,87 'SPPEKIWERH4EMRXMRKW %0-'),%-6 7IGSRH%ZI2I[=SVO2= 530 West 25th Street, New York 8IP Tel: 212-226-4151 3TIRMRK7EX3GXTQ www.Agora-Gallery.com )\LMFMXI\XIRHWXLVSYKL2SZIQFIV [email protected] GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GS Highlights On the Cover: Depending on where you stand, Balthus is either art’s answer to Humbert Humbert or one of our greatest modern painters. A show at the Met makes a good case for the latter. –Page 2 Also: Ed McCormack project hallway doo-wop punk in the new excerpt from Hoodlum Heart. –Page 12 Daniel C. Boyer, pg. 28 Sheila Finnigan, pg. 23 Peggy Zehring and group, pg. 6 Michèle Vincent, pg. 22 Bob Cenedella, Silvia Soares Boyer, pg. 28 María de Echevarría, pg. 26 pg. 4 Subscribe to GALLERYSTUDIO GALLERYSTUDIO An International Art Journal $25 Subscription $20 for additional Gift Subscription PUBLISHED BY $47 International $5 Back Issues ©EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2013 Mail check or Money Order to: ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDw GALLERYSTUDIO 217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 217 East 85th St., PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 Phone: 212-861-6814 (212) 861-6814 E-mail: [email protected] Name EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Jeannie McCormack MANAGING EDITOR Ed McCormack Address SPECIAL EDITORIAL ADVISOR Margot Palmer-Poroner DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Karen Mullen City CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Maureen Flynn www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com State/Zip Balthus in the Age of Political Correctness at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Ed McCormack he cheapest shot among the advance institutional jitters. Robert Hughes Tpublicity for the Balthus exhibition Yet, although it is reproduced in the hailed “The at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was catalogue for historical reasons, not even Guitar Lesson” an anonymous blurb on the “Fall Picks” the qualifying noun added to the end of the as “one of the page of the once-hip Village Voice, which show’s subtitle allowed for the inclusion of few masterpieces began: “Balthus (ne Balthasar Klossowski, “The Guitar Lesson,” which Rewald refers to among erotic 1908––2001) takes the prize for the perviest as “the artist’s most notorious picture.” paintings by European painter of the 20th century....” This large 1934 oil depicts a seated female Western artists in Then as soon as the show opened, musical instructor (curiously modeled on the last fifty years.” there was Roberta Smith sniffing from the Balthus’ mother, Elizabeth, a seductive The accuracy make-it-or-break-it bully pulpit of The New painter manqué better known in Parisian of his assessment Balthus (Balthasar York Times that many of the paintings were bohemian circles as Baladine) with a wispy makes the picture Klossowski) (French, “interesting in one way or another but not young girl sprawled limply across her lap. all the more 1908–2001) The King especially original or even very convincing as From the waist up, the student is modestly disturbingly of Cats 1935 Oil on canvas 30 11/16 x 16 totalities” before concluding “The show is, garbed in a red cardigan sweater and a high fascinating. Which 5/16 in. Fondation Balthus, in some ways, a study in kinds and degrees of collared blouse. But with her dark skirt was obviously Switzerland ©Balthus failure.” bundled above her waist, she is naked from the effect the She could not have been more wrong. her navel down to her white knee-socks. With Balthus intended when, according to Rewald, Balthus’s paintings of pubescent girls –– one hand, the teacher restrains the student he wrote to a friend that he hoped his first whether with feline companions, like most by her long brown hair, adorned with a large exhibition would “ shake up and disturb in this show, or without –– provide an easy pink bow to crown her innocence. With her [the] viewer’s conscience.” target for both the ideological descendants other hand, the molester –– one of whose * * * of those moral police who tried to snuff Born in Paris, into an artistic and Nobokov’s great novel “Lolita” in the intellectual milieu, to a German Jewish Eisenhower era; as well as their opposites: refugee painter and art historian named those hipper-than-thou art wordlings who Erich Klossowski and Baladine, the talent applaud novelty for its own sake and shrug of Balthasar Klossowski (1908-2001) was off as “unoriginal” paintings that, like the recognized early. At age eleven, he created a best ones in this show, eschew trends and sequence of 40 poignant India ink drawings “isms” for “Timeless Realism,” as the painter narrating the heartbreaking loss of a beloved himself defined his style, with its echoes of stray cat he had adopted and named Piero della Francesca, Courbet, and above all “Mitzou,” which foreshadowed his lifelong Poussin, whom he admired above all for his love of felines. classical purity. Once thought to be lost but recently As for the content of his work, it is difficult recovered and included in the show at the to know if Balthus was being disingenuous Met, these drawings, with their bold outlines in 1996, when the then eighty-eight year and impressive graphic dynamism, are clearly old artist told a reporter, “I really don’t influenced by the wordless woodcut “novels” understand why people see the paintings of Franz Masereel. Yet they surpass juvenilia of girls as Lolitas .... You know why I paint and impressed Rainier Maria sufficiently for little girls? Because women, even my own the poet to declare the boy “a near genius” daughter, already belong to this present Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, and “already a great artist.” world, to fashion. Little girls are the only 1908–2001) Thérèse Dreaming 1938 Oil on A family friend, Rilke became Baladine’s creatures today who can be little Poussins.” canvas 59 x 51 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, lover after she and her husband, the painter By the same token, Balthus did not Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 ©Balthus and art historian Erich Klossowski separated, go out of his way to discourage salacious as well as a surrogate father to Balthasar and interpretations of his subject matter, in full womanly breasts is bared by the helpless his brother Pierre, three years older. It was compositions such as the 1938 oil “Thérèse child’s hand, as it grasps in ineffectual self- he who arranged for the publication of the Dreaming.” Yet this exquisitely limned defense at the bodice of her aggressor’s gray drawings in a book, titled “Mitsou,” after the study of adolescent insolence offers persons dress –– fondles the girl’s pale, slender upper lost pet. He also wrote a preface for the book of sensibility far subtler delectation than a thigh almost to her hairless pubes, as one and suggested that, rather than the child’s forbidden glimpse of white cotton panties might strum a guitar, while an actual guitar given name, his nickname, “Baltusz,” appear under a bunched-up schoolgirl skirt, or the lies nearby on the floor. on its cover. not-so-subtle erotic symbolism of the cat After being unveiled in Balthus’s first “Then I did not dare to contradict the lapping milk from a saucer near the hassock solo exhibition in 1934 at Galerie Pierre in great poet,” Balthus confessed years later, and upon which one of the girl’s bare, carelessly Paris, and causing a small scandal, it had one continued to sign this name to all his future akimbo legs is propped. The controversy such more showing at Pierre Matisse Gallery in work (with only a slight change in spelling pictures are apt to invite is anticipated in the New York in 1977. When the dealer tried over the years). exhibition’s defensive title “Balthus: Cats and to donate the painting to the Museum of After such a promising start, it had to be Girls –– Paintings and Provocations.” Modern Art, it was returned with a polite disheartening for Balthus to find himself, “Originally I was just going to call it “thanks but no thanks.” And it hasn’t been several years later in his late twenties, still ‘Cats and Girls,’’ Sabine Rewald, the show’s seen in public since. In 1977, after viewing it poor and obscure, with all of the glow curator, remarked at the press preview in New York, the noted art Australian critic of the one-time prodigy gone. Not only with a wry little shrug of acquiescence to and “Shock of the New” TV commentator had his first one-man exhibition been 2 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 trounced by the French critics as “morbid,” epiphany for the painter, transporting him “crude,” “contrived and naive.” He was also back to “the golden days” (to appropriate a recovering from a nervous breakdown and a phrase he used to title one of his paintings) suicide attempt brought on by a failed love when his mother, in one of her many letters affair.