This article is taken from the April 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

In December 2017, two months after the first flurry of sexual abuse allegations were levelled at Harvey Weinstein, the Metropolitan Museum in New York received a petition with more than 8,000 signatories. It requested that the museum remove Thérèse Dreaming, a painting of 1938 by Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, the Franco-Polish artist better known as Balthus.

The picture (right), which had been hanging in the Met since 1998, portrays a pubescent girl, eyes closed in reverie, with one leg propped up so that her skirt and slip fall back exposing her underwear and Mia Merrill, the originator of the petition, wrote that: “it can be strongly argued that this painting romanticises the sexualisation of a child” and that “the Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children”.

Merrill and her peers were far from the first viewers to be scandalised by Balthus’s subject matter. At his first exhibition, at Galerie Pierre in Paris, in 1934, the audience was similarly outraged, and his charged pictures of young girls in domestic settings have been controversial ever since. In 2014, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, cancelled an exhibition of his Polaroids amidst claims that they represented “paedophile greed”.

Nevertheless, paintings are less literal than photographs and Thérèse Dreaming has a long and unruffled exhibition history, from the Museum of Modern Art in Washington in 1939, to the Tate (1968) and Royal Academy (1990) in London, the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1984), Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2014) and numerous American galleries in between. None attracted petitions demanding its removal.

The disturbing sexuality prevalent in one strand of Balthus’s art is, however, undeniable

Meanwhile, in the summer of 2017, the Geneva branch of the Gagosian Gallery held, without incident, an exhibition containing several of Balthus’s drawings and paintings of young girls. Despite the febrile atmosphere, the Met decided to face down the fuss. “Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation,” said a spokesman, noting that art was a way of “encouraging the continuing evolution of existing culture through informed discussion and respect for creative expression”. The painting stayed on the wall.

Balthus’s girls were just one aspect of his output; he also painted landscapes, street scenes, still lifes and portraits. In all of them he remained faithful to the figurative tradition and largely avoided the avant-garde movements prevalent in mid-twentieth-century Europe to pursue his own form of classicism, full of references to such figures as Piero della Francesca and Poussin.

He adopted too a consciously enigmatic and aloof persona, living not just in Paris but in Switzerland and Rome (as the director of the French Academy there), while his circle of friends encompassed everyone from Rilke, Gide and Cocteau to Picasso, Giacometti and Camus. By the time of his death in 2001, he was both David Bowie’s favourite painter and had been named as Hannibal Lecter’s putative cousin in Thomas Harris’s cannibal horror novels.

The disturbing sexuality prevalent in one strand of Balthus’s art is, however, undeniable — although he claimed such a reading was the fault of the viewer not the painter.

There are few men present in his paintings of pubescent girls nor any suggestion that Balthus himself acted on the desires some viewers assume they represent. The pictures nevertheless display an awareness of the observer and a knowingness in their poses that might be appropriate to the tradition of the adult nude in Western art but not to images of children.

The Met points out that Balthus was not the only artist to believe “the subject of the child to be a source of raw spirit, not yet moulded by societal expectations” and that adolescent sexuality was “a potent site of psychological vulnerability as well as lack of inhibition”, however “unsettling” some of his pictures are to contemporary eyes. disapproval at their treatment of women and girls has also swirled around both Gauguin and Picasso — a heady mix of colonialism, race, misogyny and sexual exploitation. But works by both artists are on the list of the ten most expensive paintings ever sold (for paintings that have complaisant women as their subject) and while their behaviour is now widely acknowledged, their reputations seem little affected.

To futureproof Picasso’s standing and appeal to younger and more censorious visitors, the Musée Picasso in Paris has just revamped its displays with the help of the British fashion designer, Paul Smith.

Balthus would seem to be more vulnerable than either of these figures — he is not as historically distant as Gauguin and is more sexually disquieting than Picasso. However, he too is weathering the fuss. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid held a major Balthus exhibition in 2019 (which included Thérèse Dreaming) while “Balthus: Under the Surface” is currently running at Luxembourg + Co in London.

A more sensitive bellwether is the market and that too is clear. In 2020 and 2021, the Parisian auction house Artcurial put some 300 of Balthus’s drawings and preparatory works from the collection of Frédérique Tison, his niece by marriage, up for sale; they all found buyers, for sums up to €169,000.

And in 2019, Thérèse sur une banquette, another painting of Thérèse, albeit a less provocative one, sold for $19 million at Christie’s New York, a record price for the artist until The Cat in the Mirror III (showing a girl, a mirror and a cat) fetched $26 million in Beijing in 2021. For all the commotion, Balthus simply refuses to be cancelled.