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PROPERTY FROM A NEW YORK PRIVATE COLLECTION BALTHUS (BALTHAZAR KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA) 1908-2001 ÉTUDE POUR "LE SALON"

Painted in 1941.

Oil on panel

PROVENANCE

Marguerite Caetani, Duchess of Sermoneta (acquired from the artist)
Sale: Christie's, London, December 5, 1983, lot 34
Private Collection
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich
Vivian Horan Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Sabine Rewald, Balthus, New York, 1984, fig. 112, illustrated p. 102
Jean Clair and Virginie Monnier, Balthus, Catalogue Raisonné of the Complete Works, Paris, 1999, no. P 132, illustrated p. 140
CATALOGUE NOTE

This picture is a study for two monumental oils of the same subject, both titled Le Salon. One of them (see fig. 1), now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, was executed between 1941 and 1943, whilst the other (see fig. 2), at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was completed in 1942. Balthus painted this picture on the Champrovent farm in Haute-Savoie, where he stayed from 1940 until the beginning of 1942. He had already stayed at Champrovent, at the farm of his friend Pierre Leyris and his family, in the late 1930s. This time he took refuge there with his wife Antoinette, having been demobilized from the army in December of 1939. While staying at Champrovent, Balthus executed several drawings on this subject, as well as another smaller oil study, the composition of which is closest to that of the present work, that he gave as a present to his hosts when leaving the farm in 1942.

It was the farmhouse parlor at Champrovent that provided the setting for the present scene. According to Sabine Rewald, Georgette, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the farmer who worked at Champrovent, served as the model for both figures in this painting. Seen sleeping on the sofa, she is the image of fantasy and carefree abandon. The figure on the floor, reading a book, echoes the pose of Thérèse Blanchard in an earlier painting, Les Enfants (see fig. 3). Several decades later, Georgette recalled posing for this series of works: "Balthus had me kneel on the floor reading a book. But I did not care for books. And when I rested on the sofa, I would go to sleep" (quoted in Sabine Rewald, Balthus, New York, 1984, p. 102).

Combining the images of a sleeping and a reading girl, Le Salon distills two themes that dominate Balthus's universe. A focal point of his art, children are often depicted sleeping or day dreaming, enveloped in their own world and completely unaware of being observed. With her one leg resting on the couch and the other one on the floor, her head tilted in her sleep, the girl on the sofa heralds the image of a sleeping girl in the series of paintings titled Le Rêve that Balthus executed between 1955 and 1957, as well as a number of adolescent girls adopting the same pose in the nude. The girl kneeling on the floor, reading a book, is equally removed from the reality around her, she is entranced by her book as much as the other girl is entranced by her dreams. The children in Balthus' works are never preoccupied by the light-hearted games suitable for their age, and they almost always exist in their own universe, uninterrupted by adults. Despite seeming highly self-absorbed, their often alluring poses and the arrangement of their clothes suggest that the children are aware of the observer, the presumed innocence of their activities drawing even more attention to their dormant sexuality.

Discussing the artist's treatment of children in his work, Sabine Rewald has observed: "Balthus never casts his children as pretty objects, depicted with bowls of fruit, mantel clocks, and patterned table covers in an overstuffed Victorian interior, as did the American painter John Carlin in his Forbidden Fruit. Instead, set against a harsh background, they appear all-important, as they would to someone their own age. The Balthusian children, when awake, rarely smile. They remain remote, pensive, lost in daydreams. These dreams sometimes produce languid abandon, at other times they induce the gangling postures that convey the sexual ambiguities that are part of puberty" (ibid., pp. 40-41). The series of Le Salon pictures, however, represents a departure from the usual setting described by Rewald, insofar as the figures are placed in a petit-bourgeois interior (see fig. 4), to which the artist paid as much attention as he did to his characters. Describing this particular setting, Rewald identifies it as the farmhouse parlor, used only on holidays. Since the painter's stay at Champrovent, few people have used the upholstered Napoleon III canapé or played on the piano visible to the right of the composition, and the entire setting was therefore preserved for many decades after this scene was painted.

Fig. 1, Balthus, Le Salon (I), 1941-43, oil on canvas, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis

Fig. 2, Balthus, Le Salon (II), 1942, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fig. 3, Balthus, Les Enfants, 1937, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Fig. 4, "Le Salon" at Champrovent. Photograph by Sabine Rewald, 1981