Bob Westley
  • Blog
  • Preoccupations
  • Stockroom
  • Untitled

A right to the light...............

10/4/2017

0 Comments

 
Intermittent internet, intermittent life, hopefully back on track. Paris calls, specifically the Musee D'art Moderne, the wonderful Palais de Tokyo. The show is Une Amitie Artistique, Derain, Balthus and Giacometti. The main man of the day for me is Balthus. I can't recall the last time I stood in front of a Balthus, and you need to do that, you need to appreciate the paint. Balthus is so much reproduced and in reproduction the imagery suffocates the artistry. Understandable, the images do disturb. In our over sexualised web world you might have expected them to acquire a quaint naughtiness, they haven't and they still set all the bells ringing.
Picture
Balthus died in 2001 and shortly after his death the Gagosian Museum in New York held an exhibition, not the show every one was expecting. The exhibition consisted of nearly 2000 Polaroids of a young girl called Anna Wahli, the youngest daughter of Balthus's doctor.The pictures were taken during the last ten years of Balthus's life, they were made as aids to the painting, Balthus had found drawing increasingly difficult in his later years. The exhibition did Balthus no favours, the world had come to admire his highly charged artwork but dragging a vast cache of photographs out into the daylight seemed unnecessarily provocative. Anna Wahli produced a short memoir to accompany the show and that for me justified the whole business. Describing her time with Balthus. Anna opened a channel into his creative world. Between the ages of 8 and 16, every Wednesday afternoon she would pose for him, and afterwards they would watch television together. Anna describes how painstaking Balthus was when arranging the poses, endlessly and minutely adjusting, and this is the key to understanding the sexuality in the art. It is compulsive, obsessive, disordered sexuality.
We are at our ease with the sex in our art, the blinds are up and the windows are wide open, the slick porn images of Jeff Koons, the tatty frayed bits of Lucian Freud, the wonderfully gaudy cocks of Celia Hempton, it's a vast and entertaining spectrum, but Balthus remains apart, he displays little and exposes everything, he has more in common with Marcel than Egon.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    BOB WESTLEY
    Picture
    ​AGED AND AWKWARD
    [email protected]

    Archives

    September 2023
    May 2023
    January 2023
    June 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    August 2021
    June 2021
    March 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Blog
  • Preoccupations
  • Stockroom
  • Untitled