Is Balthus the "Crazy Cat Lady" of Modern Art?

When London’s Tate Gallery asked the French painter Balthus for some personal details to include in a 1968 retrospective exhibition, Balthus replied via telegram: “No biographical details. Begin: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. Now let us look at the pictures. Regards. B.” But how do you look at an exhibition such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations and not ask who this man and artist was? Cats may slink around the paintings, but the real provocation in the show’s title comes from Balthus’ long-controversial portraits of young, pre-teen girls, who pose with a mixture of feline grace and tweenage awkwardness that results in, if not child pornography, at least erotic unease for the viewer. Often cats appear as the only on-canvas observers of these models—wide-eyed voyeurs that might serve as stand-ins for the artist himself, whose life-long fascination with cats remains the one personal detail he freely shared. Is Bathus modern art’s “crazy cat lady”—the eccentric whose harmless obsessions taken to the extreme reveal a darker, psychological truth? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Is Balthus the 'Crazy Cat Lady' of Modern Art?"

Foreign Report: A New, Italian Take on Edward Hopper

Leave it to an Italian art publisher to do an American artist right. Skira’s Edward Hopper, distributed in the United States by Rizzoli, may be the finest single volume visually and critically on the elusive yet irresistible 20^th century artist. The familiar paintings are all there, but explorations into Hopper’s drawings, his subtle eroticism, his European influences, and even his influence on filmmaking add a whole new dimension, giving us the fullest picture of Hopper possible, all in one of the most beautiful publishing packages imaginable. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Foreign Report."

[Many thanks to Rizzoli USA for providing me with a review copy of Edward Hopper.]

Sad Times

Art critic Roberta Smith of The New York Times takes notice of the PMA’s Antonio Mancini exhibition in today’s edition. On one hand, it’s nice to see this sleeper of an exhibition get greater press, especially someplace as visible as the Times. However, the one thing that I loved the most about the catalogue to the exhibition (which I reviewed here) was that it totally resisted making the "Van Gogh angle" of the "crazy painter" the main focus. Smith makes some interesting comments, drawing parallels between Mancini and Balthus, Frank Stella, and Cy Twombly, but falls right into the same, tired storyline of the mad painter. “Yes, I am a little bit nuts,” she imagines one of his paintings saying. Perhaps Smith takes that tack to pander to popular taste, which thinks that all artists are a bit daft, but you’d hope for something a little better from the alleged paper of record. Yes, Mancini had severe emotional and mental problems. Yes, he lived a strange, tragic existence. But to insinuate, as the mad painter storyline always does, that the art is a pure, unconscious manifestation of that madness rather than a talent developed by effort expressing a particular inner life does injustice to the artist and perpetuates prejudice against the mentally ill. (Smith also veers off into a critique of some of Mancini's paintings of children, likening them to Calvin Klein ads and thus skirting the periphery of a pedophilia accusation, maybe as another component of his "madness." Personally, I believe that Mancini's depictions of children are his most striking works in their honesty and intensity. They are truly cases of an "inner child" being let out, in this case on canvas.) When Annie, Alex, and I toured the Mancini exhibition after visiting the Renoir Landscapes recently, I was simply blown away, even after being somewhat prepared by seeing the works in reproduction first. Annie couldn’t believe how someone that good could remain unknown. The PMA’s exhibition hopes to create an atmosphere in which Mancini the artist can be rediscovered by a modern audience. Roberta Smith’s piece on Mancini the madman simply covers him up again.

For Adults Only

Lucian Freud, perhaps the greatest living European painter , was born on December 8, 1922. Grandson of Sigmund Freud, Lucian fled to England from his native Berlin with his family in 1933 to escape the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis. After gaining British citizenship in 1939, Freud studied painting in earnest, developing an early Surrealist style that he continued to use through the early 1950s. Interior at Paddington (above, from 1951) shows the tail end of Freud’s Surrealist years. The yucca plant appears menacingly alive next to the man standing in the room beside it. Freud loved to juxtapose people, animals, and household items such as plants in unusual ways to generate the unsettling, dreamlike quality of his surrealist works. Maybe he got some of that from his grandfather.

Another aspect of his art that might be a family trait is Freud’s preoccupation with human sexuality and the nude. Sometime during the 1950s, Freud moved away from the smooth Surrealist canvases of his youth to a more athletic, impasto-heavy style, such as in his 1985 self-portrait titled Reflection (above). Freud lathers on the paint so heavily he almost sculpts the human figure. Many of these nudes disturb with their power to express psychological states of unrest. Like so many artists before him, Freud relies on mirrors to paint his self-portraits, but unlike other artists, he often appears nude in these reflections or from odd perspectives, such as one reflected self-portrait painted from a mirror placed on the floor. In that portrait, Freud looms above, looking down on the viewer. Whether painting himself or others, Freud often unsettles the viewer.

Aside from his nudes, Freud’s greatest works are his portraits. Freud’s 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II brought much condemnation down on his head thanks to his heavy-handed style turning the royal visage into something resembling a mountain range. His 1952 portrait of his friend and fellow artist Francis Bacon (above) captures Bacon in all his bloated sensuality and voracious appetites. Unfortunately, Freud’s work suffers the fate of many other great artists of the late twentieth century—Bacon, Odd Nerdrum, Balthus–whose work examines human sexuality too deeply and too disturbingly for the general public. You’ll never see a Freud calendar for sale, at least not in the United States. Writing this appreciation of Freud required combing through a lot of images to find a few suitable for a family blog. Freud is definitely for adults only, but more adults should take a long, hard look at this hugely important artist.