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The Blanchard Children (1937) www.wikiart.org/en/balthus/children-1937 They are still children, blanched in earth shades. Outsized, they shroud the table, floor. Dour walls enclose stiff forms. Little light, no shared glances. Thérèse, hard at work above the composition book--her face, the pages, blank. Body rigid, stretched canvas. Something doesn’t fit the boundary, escapes-- barely, a girl’s foot. Hubert’s eye closed--or is it wide open beneath the smudge? In the dark the eye unfastens, seeing and unseeing, both, dreams that coarse, crumpled sack behind the scene. ** Still Life (1937) https://www.wikiart.org/en/balthus/still-life-1937 One evening’s simple meal refracted into reds and blues and greens, strange geometries of what we think and what we think we see. Unremarkable potato, bread, and water on a desk meant for writing. Repast of an artist, circles, rectangles, triangulated hues assembled like schoolgirls, mannerly for the moment, the chair, the crockery, cloth draped the Dutch way--but poor, coarse canvas. Composed feints: dull skin prodded by a fork, a side of boiled potato vanishes behind the carafe--or here, the execution of glass decanter shattered at the neck. Be it disobedient materials or something more out of hand, the artist’s ire draws vessel to joiner’s hammer, makes a feast of tears. The cloth, the wall, the table limned in red-- thrust of knife-point into bread. And hammer, lying like an untoward comment made by one friend to another, a little funny, and a little mean. Is the subject overpainted? Anyway one wants to look, unobtrusive glass untouched, still pristine. ** Thérèse Sur une Banquette (1939) https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-balthus-therese-sur-une-banquette-6202444/?from=salesummary&intobjectid=6202444&lid=1 Thérèse on the bench seat tilts, one hand lifting, pulls from her black plaid skirt centimetre by centimetre, frees a single, slender thread. Shadow behind her--depth’s silent accomplice. Rapt in Peter Pan collar and white knee-highs, Thérèse on the bench seat illuminates the ochre-dark. In perfect captivity of the moment, one could almost forget war is coming, then marriage at nineteen, and illness, and.... But no! Her red sweater says, “Attendez!” The canvas hangs on her slipping- down socks, crumpled collar, slipping-up skirt, her every fiber, caught. Alarming to see that unrelenting tug at a fragile strand, a little criminal to want to pull. Only eleven years remain. Inside the frame, she lies beyond here, now, drawing the thread endlessly, endlessly bright wisp of thread tenuous, against the dark, unfinished-- ** La Victime (1938-1946) https://www.wikiart.org/en/balthus/the-victim My artist enters through the broken door. Hands tremble, touching brushes, rags. (But never me. No.) Still cigarette-long, thin, a voice like ash--when he bothers to speak. He sets the pitcher on the table, drops the cloth. The palette is prepared. We’ll be here for ages. But who would sit for this? Some unclothed woman propped up headless, gray, askew as if discarded? Or lost? Not me. I never sat for him like that. Those arms, those legs--something isn’t right. Body pitched, rough at the edges, bare sheet fraying…? My artist turns pale, grips his stomach, bends. See, he is not well. He carried men across the line at Maginot --well, what was left of men. Every night the dead returned, mute, gaping. Every night he screamed awake, a mess of tears and sweat, till one day he, too, stepped wrong: Click, he stopped-- slag blasted guts, another caught the brunt. Moaning on the field, “Oh, my angel--” Angel! He thought his vision was of me! “My little angel,” was what he’d said—me, who twisted Hubert’s arm until welted, red, his face like crumpled paper--“O! O!” --I never said that I was sorry. Oh, my brother, I was, I am. An angel, Hubert--he’ll stay beside me to the end. “The past remains within us, an affliction”; my artist says this now. An affliction. Is this what I’ve become? He sees himself in everything. My little artist, victim of a force that’s broken us to pieces-- Blow men and violins to bits, but leave the trees, the country in its silence, green and golden, velvet stillness of the hills. A life I never knew. And what of this body, blush abandoning its soft, sweet hull, breasts and thighs mottling under loamy browns and grays? My artist draws the knife upon the floor, extends the handle past the frame--me, you accuses? Her arms stretch up, unresisting. She does not touch me, no. What, that morbid tangle--? Nothing like my body! And yet that face--gray, like a sickness in his brush emerging, heavy-lidded, blotched as if with filth and rain.… Don’t turn away, please, don’t go, forget this stiffening body, face an afterthought: Don’t let this be my own-- (Thérèse Blanchard, 1925-1950) ** Thérèse (1938) https://www.wikiart.org/en/balthus/th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se-1938 She’s composed now, just manipulations of light and shadow, and colour, convincing the mind you can touch The girl in the adult chair, sunk in the room, her face a sallow window on a closed interior. Her gaze brushes past you, and me, Self forgotten as a dream. Electric illusion of slight hand resting lightly on the knee--ah, Glossy pink remnant of brush stroke at her cheek. But the canvas is really board-- Turning green and sour, acidic in disrepair. Still, life might be captured In a chair, viewed and viewer, rapt in time, its clicking, mindless chambers. Lenore Myers A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Lenore Myers' award-winning poems and essays have appeared in LIT, Southern Indiana Review, One, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. My limited-edition chapbook, Regards to Balthus, is forthcoming this summer from Seven Kitchens Press. She teaches English to recent immigrants in Northern California.
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