Guy Davenport's Balthus Note #27

Note 27 in Guy Davenport's A Balthus Notebook (1989) runs as follows:

A work of art, like a foreign language, is closed to us until we learn how to read it. Meaning is
latent, seemingly hidden. There is also the illusion that the meaning is concealed. A work of art is
a structure of signs, each meaningful. It follows that a work of art has one meaning only. For an
explicator to blur an artist’s meaning, or to be blind to his achievement, is a kind of treason, a
betrayal. The arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means is a mistake
that closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery.
Broken down into its seven sentences, the note becomes more like a series of Tractatus style
propositions:

1. A work of art, like a foreign language, is closed to us until we learn how to read it.

2.Meaning is latent, seemingly hidden.

3.There is also the illusion that the meaning is concealed.

4.A work of art is a structure of signs, each meaningful.

5.It follows that a work of art has one meaning only.

6.For an explicator to blur an artist’s meaning, or to be blind to his achievement, is a kind of

treason, a betrayal.

7.The arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means is a mistake that
closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery.

Davenport's train of thought was never intended to be laid out like this, probably. But each
sentence is a world of complexity. Even sentence 1, which at first seems pretty standard, contains
a certain ambiguity in its structure. And once ambiguities like these are teased out, the dam really
bursts. The paragraph seems to be giving so many answers, but what it's really doing is raising
almost too many questions.

At some point along the way it's also about Balthus, but we'll get there.
1. A work of art, like a foreign language, is closed to us until we learn how to read it.

This could mean ‘a’ work, we learn how to read ‘a’ work which is a language almost in itself, which
we have to learn every time we encounter a work of art. Or it could mean that we learn how to
read ‘a’ work of art by first learning how to read works of art. We learn how to read the work by
learning to read the form, the exception by the rule. We learn the basic verbs and grammar then
apply them accordingly. The communicative barrier presented by the individual work in the this
case is more like that of a dialect than a foreign language, and the interpretive process would
seem to be a lot less exhausting than starting each time from scratch. But I think Davenport
means both these things. And I think he wants interpretation to be as difficult and exhausting as it
is easy and pleasurable.

These parallel meanings are important. They suggest that deep immersion and initiation in the art
form, and due and precise attentiveness to the singular work, are equally vital in determining
meaning. How the work relates to or deviates from the general grammar of the art form is an
essential aspect of its meaning, even before we get into its specifics of form and content. And
while we might get caught up in how the work relates to or distances itself from certain
conventions of the form, we should be wary of neglecting the work’s specifics on its own terms.
Put simply, there's an ambiguity here, at sentence number one, over meaning as it resides in and
is findable in a work, and meaning as we collectively agree to play along with it. Or more simply
again, there's no clarity of where exactly meaning resides. At least, not as it might reside in any
one place.
Like a foreign language. Davenport was a gifted linguist who studied under Tolkien. It’s a
metaphor which makes a lot of sense, especially for him. But I wonder if it also over-plays the
‘foreign-ness’, the obscurity of works of art. We have to be very attentive to the thousands of small
cues and tells we take in at the famous first glance, which we shouldn't necessarily discount.
There's a large shot of information already processed in the first go. We're told not to judge a book
by its cover. But in painting the cover remains stubbornly in place the whole time. The first
impression is always available, retrievable. In fact, it's almost a strategy. How many reviews start,
'at first...'? The first glance is a painting trope in itself. A painting tool. Something it uses. It's
something the painting wants you to remember after you've learned how to read it.
You may find yourself back at square one. Before a work of art, we’re like the unfit companion of
an able scrambler, already hallway up the first hill. To interpret is to play catch-up, indefinitely.

Whether these initial cues and tells are actually misleading only becomes apparent after learning
to read though. You might have certain ideas about how French sounds, and you might even
catch the odd word or phrase, but that’s not going to help you with the latest Hachette Madame
Bovary unless you can actually read French, any more than Painting with Bob Ross is going to
help you crack Poussin. But then it would also be a shame to lose the sense of aural beauty in
French while it was still a mystery to you. It might also be wise to hold onto the look and feel of art
before you were immersed in it, because I think artists often do. Daumier said he couldn’t really
get along with how Manet painted, but that he found a wonderful quality in his pictures that took
him back to the figures on playing cards. I don’t know what he meant. I think this is what he meant.
Partly. It’s also to do with Daumier's predisposition towards the archetype/type, the visual allegory,
the strong image, a fascination for the characters who inhabit the 'realm' of pictures. But I said I
don’t know what he meant and I don’t. I do know that Manet's Tama, the Japanese Dog (1875) is
a faintly absurd picture that trades in its own absurdity, and that this absurdity is inseparable from
its visual recollection of the bull-ring in Mademoiselle V. . . in the Costume of an Espada (1862)
and the foreshortened corpse of The Dead Man (1865). The little pug-faced dog leads these other
pictures into the realm of the absurd, if they weren't there already.
Another thing– how do we learn how to read it? The wider terms and conditions of the art form
help. But Davenport is also suggesting that the work itself is something we learn to read: as if the
individual work comes with its own syllabus. A syllabus which we also have to partly come up with
ourselves. Does the work carry its own set of instructions? Or is the work its own instruction for
use? Is the work the work, or is the work an indication toward a program of thought, experience,
unfolding attention? The learning to read would then seem to be a major part of the work, the work
in some way creating its own reason for being: its reason for being the unique learning to read it
presents, and the learning to read necessitated by its presentation in the first place. This is a
straightforward loop which you can make as complex as you like. It's the simple loop which
asserts itself when a work of art meets a public of strangers.
2. Meaning is latent, seemingly hidden.

Where is the meaning located then? What I’ve said so far indicates that it can partly be found at
the crossroads of all the – similar – works the work isn’t, the work itself, and, on the third fork, its
rendezvous with a/the viewer.

Latent suggests it’s something inactive, dormant. Like a wasp’s nest in winter. What reactivates it?
Not just the being looked at, though that stirs something, inevitably. Revelation of meaning
requires attentive attention. Ordinary attention wont quite cut it.
But then there’s another junction at our crossroads, several more. There’s the road where the
work meets the artist’s other works, for one. Then there’s the little station house where exhibitions
are held, accommodating temporary congregations of certain of the artist's works; function rooms
hosting panels and conferences between various other artists, either more or less lively. All these
other routes and rooms are marked and numbered by signs and plaques, more or less worn by
time, which lead or divert the work toward a certain meaning. Surely they’re meant to? Chardin
was a big fan of pendants: two paintings intended, or seemingly intended, to be hung together,
multiplying or dividing their meaning/s. Often this was an interchangeable setup down the line, with
pictures mixed and matched and then further shuffled by collectors, engravers and public
museums. Meaning and meanings, this would suggest, can be added or subtracted by proximity to
others.

If meaning is what we so often seem to be looking for in a work, why then should it be practically
hidden? Why do we object when it is annoyingly clear and straightforwardly findable? And why do
we wish works to mean in the first place? Why should we enjoy frustratingly unclear or ambiguous
or unwieldy expressions of meaning? How is this different from a cryptic crossword puzzle, say? If
art’s merely a game, there are far better ones. Duchamp went for chess. Games, or rather
individual gameplay, can be difficult and not mean. Art can be difficult and mean. Why do we play
difficult games that can mean? Put another way, why do we play difficult games with meaning?

And again, where does meaning reside? Is it in the form, the content? Between the form and
content? The work and the viewer? In the making or the viewing? De Kooning said it’s a very tiny
thing, very tiny content. Susan Sontag quotes him saying that in Against Interpretation. In Against
Interpretation, Sontag argues that we've become far too caught up in this whole meaning racket.
She says that instead of a hermeneutics of art we need an 'erotics of art'. That we should be far
more concerned with form and feeling than content and meaning. Which is to say, form and feeling
cannot be the meaning I guess? (Or, if you're Duchamp, that 'meaning' cannot in itself be erotic?).
Is the feel the same as the meaning? Is it just another form meaning takes? Davenport died the
same week as Sontag. Does that mean something?
Then again, artists also like to upset the meaning cart. I think of Louise Hopkins' painted-over
maps, catalogues and comics. Painting can be an act of subtraction in the mathematics of
meaning. But you'll notice the subtraction quickly becomes its own kind of additive alteration.
Meaning, like energy, can't be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed. Perhaps.

3.There is also the illusion that the meaning is concealed.

So seemingly hidden, the meaning is not actually concealed, but likes to act as though it were. It’s
staring us in the face, hidden in plain sight.

Is part of a work’s meaning also somehow this concealment, or the illusion of this concealment?
Before getting into specifics, is part of a work’s inherent meaning something about meaning?
About the lack of it, the look for it, the inevitability or impossibility of it? Are all artworks then just
expressions of our difficult relationship with ‘meaning’? Can they only mean to mean? Can they
help but mean? Is 'meaning' actually the active action of a work? (Meaning: the verb to mean?)

Meaning to mean, like poetry about poetry or painting about painting, is perhaps not much fun if
that's all that's going on. Yes, the work reflects on the form. But surely it also has to be about more
than that. There’s a world of stuff that it can be about, a world of experience it can reflect.

Then again, there are great works, a hell of a lot of great works, that can’t help but seem to be in
part or in whole about the state and status of meaning. The quality and character of meaning.
Uccello’s Hunt in the Ashmolean for one. ‘Meaning’ is a bit like the stag or whatever game it is
they’re hunting through the dark wood. There is no game in the picture, we can’t see the stag or
the snark they’re after. The picture occurs around its absence, frames it. Is an occasion put on to
capture it.
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap

-Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

 4.A work of art is a structure of signs, each meaningful.

Too little credence is generally given to the material qualities and characteristics of a work. And far
less than that to their role in generating an overall meaning. Each meaningful. Everything counts.
Every square inch of a work plays a part. Leading and supporting, speaking and non-speaking.
Background and chorus line. The little bow at the end which is the signature. And the little bow,
formal but affective, reminds us that all we’ve seen is make-believe, put-on and put-together; floats
the idea of all conflicts reconciled or reconcilable. That all the parts we saw in harmony and
discord were acting out a sequence of directions toward a whole. Either more or less consciously
instructed, either more or less improvisatory, but all condoned by the author. This is what was
presented. This and nothing or something else.

So we could sit around analyzing every square inch of a painting. The colour, tone, facture, this
mark, that, endlessly across every micro-detail. We could do that, with our magnifying glasses and
raincoats, and still the meaning would elude us. Every meaningful sign, every clue, is nothing
without a gumshoe gut. Somehow we have to react to the overall accumulation of those signs. We
have to have a feeling. A hunch. That hunch, that feeling, is partly the meaning. Work backwards
from whatever's been committed. Use the clues to figure out where the hunch came from. Use the
details to explain the feeling.

In making our case we should use the best signs. Because the best evidence makes the best
case. What you’ll find in a good work is that most of the signs do confirm the theory: in the best
works, all the signs confirm the theory. In the best works, the signs are the theory, the feeling.
There’s no intermediary build up or accumulation. They just are what they are and they mean what
they are.

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found

Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Carroll reportedly woke up with the last line in his head. He had to work backwards to figure out
just how and why and in what way a Snark was a Boojum, you see.
In school we had a lesson called 'Oracy'. We'd listen to a tape about this or that subject, then
answer multiple choice questions. A voice from the hefty cassette machine would intone, Choose
the best answer. Remebemer: the best answer...

5.It follows that a work of art has one meaning only.

But this sounds pretty limiting, no? Aren’t they supposed to be rich with potential meanings and
open to interpretation? How can a great work especially be only about one thing? Does this mean
that works of art have only one meaning to the exclusion of all others? Or does it mean that they're
a pyramid of meanings, with the real McCoy sitting at the top?

It follows: does it? If each sign structured into the work is meaningful, does this have to result in a
single meaning? Is there an aggregate meaning, despite the push and tug of all the signs?

We'll return to this in sentence 7.

6.For an explicator to blur an artist’s meaning, or to be blind to his achievement, is a kind

of treason, a betrayal.

Often the worst people to write about paintings are novelists.

I get that all writing has to tell a story or something. But – snobbery about narrative in painting
aside – novelists are often just too quick to jump in, project a three act drama on the picture,
whipping up elements of the artist’s life and cultural milieu into a frothy souffle. I can see why it's
tempting. But it often distorts things. It’s more about the writer than the work. It makes the work
something to be played with rather than something that plays with us. They’re inattentive critics, I'd
argue. They get too excited too quickly by their own train of thought.

This ultimately damages our idea of paintings. At least, when presented as criticism and not as
fiction. It suggests we need skilled prose to explain pictures, activate them, diverts attention from
the material facts, distorts the painter’s achievement. It's a shame that novelists are often having a
limited experience of the picture while they think they’re having a great time. Its also bad for
painting’s PR while seeming good. It doesn’t make it easier to engage with painting. Just makes it
differently engaged-with. It equips the reader – of the London Review of Books, say – with the
ability towards a literary-imaginative engagement with paintings, not with the tools for imaginative
painterly engagement.

Often the writer is also too busy being clever to make any kind of evaluative judgement on the
picture. Many, many vacuous second or third rate paintings have been eagerly filled up or filled in
by imaginative writers. We have to trust that a good or a great work will need no filling in, will write
its own review. Perhaps critics should be less like writers and more like mediums.

There's a humility involved in really looking at paintings. You have to be a curious mixture of both
open and attentive in making yourself available to them. Vernon Lee, in what's today known as
The Psychology of an Art Writer (originally published in a French journal in 1903, published in
2018 along with Davenport's Balthus Notes as part of David Zwirner's Ekphrasis series) was
unprecedented in dealing with the problems of responding to works of art: mitigated as they are by
everything from what you had for lunch to your childhood to the weather. Not that she was
advocating the kind of gonzo criticism that's popular among many writers, who might begin their
review at the airport, check into the hotel, and ironically suss-out the gift shop before getting to the
exhibition.

We follow Lee as she tries to truly see the picture, to get beyond her tiredness, or the distracting
tune stuck in her head, or the other tourists. She's looking at the pictures and willing herself to see
them like someone might will themselves to see the spirits in a haunted house. But she's also a
skeptic, lugging in her scientific equipment just to make sure she's not seeing things. She was a
writer of supernatural fiction and essays on travel, aside from aesthetics. Crucially she placed a
fundamental distinction between literary fiction and criticism:

The writer will naturally seek out elements that lend themselves to literary transformation; he will
unconsciously be driven to give himself over more and more to associations tied to the painting's
subject (and by subject I mean everything one could learn from a catalogue), to the detriment of
the specific effect that a work's form can have on a viewer, an effect that differentiates each work
of art from every other representing the same thing.

Preach. She goes on to describe her deference to the specific emotion of each work, each work's
'affective halo'. Paradoxically, it was her almost scientific, formal-investigative approach to works
of art, looking with 'every last scrap' of her attention, which ultimately allowed her the fullest
emotional-affective relationship with them:

Visual beauty and ugliness were now real for me, because my attention had to latch onto the form
of which they are qualities. I lived intimately with art.
Then a statement pretty far ahead of its time, anticipating the 'Death of the Author' but
transcending that notion's easy free-for-all in nuance and complex simplicity: The work of art is the
joint product, the point of intersection of the process of the attention of the artist who makes
it...and of the process of attention of those who look at it.
And again, it's not simple or straightforward, this process of attention.

We must not be misled (and we are) by the fact that an artist can give all his attention to the
picture he is painting...for the artist is doing a dozen things besides merely contemplating his work;
and the critic is examining, comparing, measuring, judging. Both are living a very complex life in
reference to the work of art. This is the reverse of what the enjoying person is supposed to do,
expecting to empty out his consciousness of everything save that seen or heard thing, and then
perhaps a little bitterly surprised, almost humiliated, at not being let alone by his habitual thoughts
and observations....The action of art is not hypnotic, not mono-ideistic: it is synthetic; it excludes,
but by making a little walled garden of the soul of all manner of cognate things, a maze in which
the attention runs to and fro, goes round and round, something extremely complex and complete,
taking all our faculties. This is the basis of a theory of art (this and not a theory of Einfuhling or
anything else), this: the observed phenomenon of aesthetic attention.

Meaning is a work in progress, perhaps. But observable in making progress. Related inextricably
to attention is Lee's 'aesthetics of empathy': namely that the work of art requires for its enjoyment
to be met halfway by the active collaboration of the beholder. Attention keeps the empathetic
collaboration in check, makes sure it's a collaboration. If a work is the confluence of the attentions
of maker and viewer, then criticism is the confluence of attention and empathy. Novelists are
inattentive to attention. And ego gets in the way of empathy. They are bad collaborators.
This is not a hard and fast rule. And there are great examples of novelists using painting. Proust
use of Vermeer’s View of Delft is great: but then it's more about someone looking at Vermeer’s
View of Delft than Vermeer’s View of Delft. Or Vermeer’s view of Delft for that matter. And he also
makes up a petit pan de mur jaune, a 'little patch of yellow wall' in the painting which is impossible
to locate with any certainty, is either totally misremembered or invented, depending on who you
believe. In the novel, funnily enough, it's a review which describes this patch of yellow wall and
which brings an old man, who cannot recall it in the picture he thinks he knows so well, out of his
bed and over to the exhibition. Finally he sees the yellow patch, regrets not having lived and wrote
with more colour and promptly dies, presumably from the exertion.
Worse are the ramblings of ramblin' Robert Walser, his writing on art recently translated and
collected for the first time as Looking at Pictures. Which I assume is a gesture of Walserian irony
on the part of the publishers. A more accurate title would be Not Looking at Pictures, or perhaps
Mentioning Pictures. Walser's inability to stay focused on the painting at hand for barely the
duration of a sentence is so complete as to be totally comical. It has to be intentional. A discussion
of a Cranach ends up being a discussion of a reproduction of a Cranach which his landlady has
taken down. She reads Walser's defense of the picture (basically that he's very fond of it) and
relations are repaired, along with his trousers A glance at a Fragonard seems like the right
moment to mention that they didn't have central heating in the 18th century. Details of old jobs,
travels and girlfriends fill out most of the texts, along with the usual protests that one can't possibly
debase the work of art by actually talking about it. One should always refrain from making
observations, don’t you agree?, he asks Manet’s Olympia. He’s only half joking.
It's extremely annoying, I thoroughly recommend it. Looking at Pictures is a primer for how not to
talk about art. But really, it's only a more naked version of the kind of talking-around or talking-at
pictures that Julian Barnes, say, gets away with. What's much more disheartening is the way
these writings have been packaged, presented and received. There's the recurring sentiment
across end-papers, introduction and reviews that unlike dogmatic critics who might want to help
others to appreciate, to discuss, to evaluate [a work's] importance, and other such barbarous
things, Walser instead helps us to see afresh with his unique eye, his delicate, intoxicating
perceptiveness, his magic screwball wit. I'm not sure they got the joke though.

The problem is he's presented as something like a critic, or rather a kind of antidote to criticism.
He was a favourite writer of Kafka's. It's not hard to see why when we think of the absurdity of
Walser's pose as a critic who'd sooner die than talk about paintings. That's if it is a pose. Doubts
persist.
Ostensibly reviewing 'An Exhibition of Belgian Art' for The Prager Presse in 1926, he spends more
time reviewing Belgium, and, now and then, the other reviewers. (As I stood before a nude
reclining on a soft sofa, someone addressed me, doing his best with his criticisms to show off in
front of me. I, however, found it appropriate to give him to understand that such forwardness was
not to my taste.) He concludes: Pleased as I am to have had to opportunity to speak about a
beautiful artistic event, I consider myself obliged to limit myself with regard to the extensiveness of
my remarks. Everything I have neglected to say can be given voice to by others. In the
introduction it's argued that while Walser barely has anything to say about the show, never mind
the works on display (beyond remarks like now a vernal landscape, now a snowy one, now a
flower painting, now a picture of a lady...), there is however a wonderful array of emotions and
visual images explored. What more can one want from an exhibition?, it asks, concluding that the
implication here is that the value of art might lie in its ability to inspire viewers to rare and beautiful
thoughts of their own. Reflecting this pervasive idea that critical connoisseurship is a kind of
philistinism.

I flip back through Davenport. Lo and behold there's Walser, way back at note #3: If, as Robert
Walser remarked, God is the opposite of Rodin, Balthus is the opposite of Picasso. No further
comment. I'm not sure exactly what either of them mean.
Poets tend to be better. Ashbery writes a pretty great defense of Kitaj, unfairly judged to be ‘Mr
Meaning’ and critically crucified for daring to be overly erudite. While it’s true that what often
damns Kitaj is an excess of meaning, reference and significance, it’s also what sets him apart from
the banalities of many of his contemporaries. His desire to communicate lets him down, but it can
also be what saves him. He aims big. And he's as interested in the spare and seemingly import-
free as he is in the overcrowded and portentous. The two tendencies coexist, pacing each other
like a sphinx and a tabby.

Look at his Batboy, offering us our pick of the baseball-bats like a card magician, or a draw from
the tarot deck, or a set of sticks form the I Ching. Two red blots like oversized aces, or blood clots,
or sealing wax. Brown clay and old newsprint. Signs and significance, choice and fate. 'Meaning'
here a trading card game played between picture and viewer. It feels sunny, dusty and old, like
memories of afternoons on baked playing fields; paintings being old playing fields themselves.
Kitaj's pictures often feature annotations and inscriptions. Often very neat, just as often scored
through and cancelled, redacted. Often it's less that he's being an illustrative painter and more that
he's making paintings which posit illustration. Graceful meaninglessness, hideous clarity. Less that
he's trying to communicate and more like he's wondering and wandering about the limits and
extremes of communication.

Perhaps most critics just weren't attentive enough to Kitaj's pointed ambivalence toward meaning.
Kitaj himself: We lose our way in cities; we get lost in books, lost in thought; we are always looking
for meaning in our lives as if we’d know what to do with it once we found it...Nothing is
straightforward. Reducing complexity is a ruse.
I said Ashbery makes a great defense of Kitaj. But it's mostly through comparisons with poets and
writers. He doesn't get much into the specifics of specific paintings. To create a work of art that the
critic cannot even begin to talk about ought to be the artist’s chief concern, Ashbery wrote. I think
this is to involve the critic too much. It also sounds too much like an excuse.

Bonnard’s pleasure is really something else: to name it would be to see it vanish. Would it? Asbery
was, from time to time, among those who tend to think words explain away the delicate mysteries
of painting. But those delicate mysteries are nothing but conjecture and high hopes if we're not
willing to interrogate them.

Again: Johns is one of the few young painters of today whose work seems to defy critical
analysis, and this is precisely a sign of its power — it can’t be explained in any other terms than its
own, and is therefore necessary. Perhaps that was somewhat true back in the day, but Johns is
entirely explicable. That it's explicable only within its own terms is much more the thing. That I can
get along with.
Ashbery preferred Edwin Dickinson to Edward Hopper:

Coming on this show fresh from Whitney’s Hopper retrospective made me wonder once again if
we really know who our greatest artists are. I would be the last to deny Hopper’s importance, but
in even the smallest and most slapdash of these oil sketches, Dickinson seems to me a greater
and more elevated painter, and all notions of his “cerebralism” and “decadence” — two words
critics throw around when they can’t find anything bad to say about an artist — are swept away by
the freshness of these pictures, in which eeriness and vivacity seem to go hand in hand, as they
do in our social life.

Ashbery preferred Edwin Dickinson to Edward Hopper, and I think I often prefer Ashbery's version
of Dickinson to Dickinson's version of Dickinson. (I also like de Kooning's version of Dickinson,
which is what the Dutchman took with him). I think Dickinson's a little too melodramatic at times,
can be too un-various in mood. He always maintained he was as uncertain of the meanings of his
works as anyone, but still the more 'ambitious' of them give the sense of being overthought or
overstuffed, while the more seemingly modest of them allow a genuine space for the mysterious.
He's a proto-Kitaj in some ways. But you can take what you want from him. He's malleable. And
Hopper just as often walked the tightrope of 'illustration' as anyone.
Judging by his own collection, Ashbery's tastes ranged from the zippy and trashy to the apparently
mundane, the abstract and the abject. Hélion, Fairfield Porter, early Alex Katz, Larry Rivers. His
little Hélion still life of conkers on a bench, blandly anonymous, the nuts a bit too close to the eye
to be artful, but with the potential for a wild cosmic poetics. It says, yes, this is a trifling picture of
the world, frightening isn't it? Dickinson's Sunflower at Wellfleet says the same thing. Or at least, I
think it might to Ashbery. Here we meet that distant cousin of the critic: the collector. Peter
Schjeldahl: It helps when the specter of a particular person, who particularly loved particular
things, stands at your shoulder, urging attention, inviting argument, and marveling at the shared
good luck at being so entertained.

Now when we look at a Dickinson we think, the great poet liked that. Ditto the things he owned.
There are multitudes of not very good reasons why Edwin Dickinson will never be a mainstream
artist like his neighbor in South Truro, Massachusetts, Edward Hopper. Dickinson is unpredictable,
if not downright strange, in some of his subject matter. You can’t figure out what he is trying to get
at, and you suspect that perhaps he didn’t either, which isn’t very comforting. He is not modern
and urban the way Hopper is. He didn’t know who his audience was and he didn’t paint for it. As
contrarian as Hopper also was, I find it harder to say that about him. Perhaps it is because it is so
easy to betray Hopper’s paintings by turning them into little stories that you can stick on the work,
like Post-It notes.

Thank you, John Yau. As much as it can seem like Yau likes everything, perhaps it's more that he
only writes about what he likes, and he writes and likes a hell of a lot. Which we shouldn't hold
against him. If there's anyone with an office post-it note blanket-ban it's Yau. He's caught a little of
the spirit of our Davenport here, with this talk of betrayal.

And he goes on:

As the painter and printmaker Michael Mazur astutely pointed out; “Dickinson could easily destroy
the coherence of a straightforward subject like the side of a house, as in his ‘Stone Tower’ (1941),
with a smeared patch of paint that might stand for a tree or simply for itself. Only in the paintings
and drawings of Willem de Kooning have I seen such spontaneous disregard for coherence within
the struggle for coherence.”

It's altogether strange to compare Hopper and Dickinson anyway. Hopper would never allow the
dreamy wispiness of Dickinson's Villa and Allice (1941). In a Hopper, Alice would be sitting on a
bench out front, or laying on a deckchair, or dozing underneath a window, or a picture frame,
observed at a full-body distance. Here, it's all the same whether Alice is dreaming the house or the
house is dreaming Alice, or the painter is dreaming both. Or she's the toppled bust of a statue. Or
the shadow on the wall above her head is that of a cockerel about to crow-in the morning. Whether
the hand on her face is her own or her waker. Whether the loop hanging from the tree is a child's
tyre swing, tied up for later. Whether she's dreaming of her own childhood or her own child, not yet
grown or too old for swings. Either way, the picture seems to be about its own interstitial state and
space as much as it's about all these others.

And it's about these interstitial sates as much as Hopper's pictures are about dreamy interstitiality
within and despite their solid shapes and spaces.
Then there’s Frank O’Hara. He may be too damn good a writer to be considered a serious critic.
But he never ‘blurs’, is never ‘blind’. There’s no betrayal with O’Hara.

Then there are journalists. Schjeldahl has a library of dazzling sentences (sample: How I did it was
to stroll nonstop through the show, finally pausing in the last room with the eerily deliberate
paintings of de Kooning's dotage that lay out rudiments of his genius like silk ties on a bedspread.)
But I’m not sure they add up to much. Good on him for being so fluid, so attentive to an artist’s
work though. Unfortunately it’s ‘work’, not ‘a' work. A prisoner of his profession, he seems almost
duty bound not to linger too long on specific works of art. I suspect he could, and would love to.
Fear of boredom or indifference from an audience all too often snuffs out sustained criticism. The
need to be entertaining or academic, depending on circumstance, are just as bad. Word counts
are a nightmare. O’Hara could make the most of a couple of sentences. T. J. Clark can spend a
book on two pictures. But most reviews sit at a horrible median. Six hundred words. Eight hundred
words. Three hundred words. Too much to be snappy, to little to really get going. Too little to get
into the complexity you might want to get into, the complexity the work might demand you get into.
We have to decide what it’s important to say. But often this is qualified by a need to say what’s
important and can be said well within the space set aside. Thought is limited by what’s expected.
We make out like things are simpler than they are. This is true of painting more than almost any
other art. Nobody has faith in its complexity. Or, if they do, it’s a faith misplaced in theory. Nobody
wants to hear qualifying statement after qualifying statement about how this picture does such and
such a thing, but also does the opposite, and is about such and such a thing, though equally
posits its own being actually about such and such other thing, admits that possibility, while also
acknowledging that it is not. Nobody wants to hear this even though it's often the case. When I first
heard Merlin James say ‘there’s actually no such thing as art criticism being practiced in the world
right now and there never really has been’ it was laughably true. Most books on painters start at
entry level and don’t get beyond the coffee table. Ones that do are rare, and most often rarefied:
more like illustrated editions on continental theory.

But these are insoluble problems. If Clark can spend a paperback talking about just two Poussins,
what are we meant to do when talking about exhibitions chock full of them? If people don’t write
about the real complexities of specific paintings how are we supposed to believe in their capacity
to be complex? Much less dare make complex, daring paintings.
Sentence Number 6 is a an outlier in some ways. It comes from left field. It was the least
interesting to me, I thought, but here we are, words and words later. Blind to his [sic]
achievement? Achievement in what? In the realm of meaning? Because that’s what we’ve been
talking about until now. It’s a suggestion, by association, that an artist is in some proportion to be
judged on the quality of their ‘meaning’. On their meaning handicap. And that to miss the meaning
is a betrayal.

Schjeldahl’s best contribution? I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panolply of
art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: "What would I like about this if I
liked it?" I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this
be like? Anthropology.

There's surely a follow-up question of ‘what would it be like if I liked this?’. Open minded criticism
is to imagine a world in which works like this one before you were well-received and understood: a
world in which painting looked like This. In which This was demonstrative of painting as form,
activity and perspective on the world, in which works like This were more of a rule than an
exception. How would it be if This was painting? If the world of meaning the work suggests checks
out as being both familiar and unfamiliar, unconventional but totally viable, then it and you are on
to something. The world and the art form have been remade, they've done it again!

Great paintings open up a world of alternative criticism, a canon of their own.

Willem de Kooning was an artist who built a career on doing it again. De Kooning is a character
who's cropped up here pretty frequently. He who said it's impossible today to paint a face, but also
impossible not to. His late paintings' cool reception back in the 80s is considered these days a
failure of criticism. A failure of critical imagination, of attentive attention.

Untitled XXIX is like a viaduct above a raging sea. Or an architectural sea beneath a raging
viaduct. Nothing will convince me Untitled VI is not a still life, with a jug or pitcher, and perhaps the
flapping ear and eyes of Disney's Goofy, about to drop it. Gorsh! In fact, these late works
frequently have the unfathomable geometry of earlobes. They meet the eye and mind like sound
waves meet recording studio baffles. They have the alkaline joy of wringing toothpaste from a
tube, then eating a banana.

But we have to be careful. The pictures are not these things. They are, in fact and in part, about
not being these things, though they float the possibility of it. The dynamic play of volume, space
and pictorial tension where they meet painted marks are things we can concretely say they are
dealing with. But they are also dealing with the dynamic flow of attention and interpretation, at all
levels. They also say, what if my paintings were like this? They could be. What if paintings were
like so.
Fairfield Porter on de Kooning: His meaning is not that the paintings have Meaning...The vacuum
they leave behind them is a vacuum in accomplishment, in significance, and in genuineness.

7.The arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means is a mistake
that closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of discovery.

We’re often encouraged to think of meaning as subjective and pretty much up to the viewer.
Reader Response theory, death of the author, etc. And yet Davenport is advocating an overriding
single and specific definitive meaning being correctly assigned to a work, as demonstrated by
qualities apparent and encoded in the work. That meaningful and even daring criticism actually
depends on the belief, the acceptance even, that works of art have a single definitive meaning.
The apparent freedom of subjective response theories, he sees as stifling, meandering. Chasing a
single meaning is much more of an ‘adventure’.

But there’s an ambiguity in this last sentence, especially taken out of context. He writes of the
arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means. Based on what's come
before, I'm fairly sure what he’s saying is it’s arrogant to claim that a work can mean whatever you
might think it means, or whatever you’d like it to mean. But this could also easily be taken to mean
that it's arrogant to insist you actually know what a work means at all: insisting that you’ve found
the concrete and absolute meaning and cutting yourself off from the adventure of your own
discovery. Which is obviously the opposite.
 The ambiguity is definitely there because I clearly remembered the first meaning in the passage,
but searching the book to find it again I almost couldn't, and totally misread it when I did. I couldn't
find it for misreading it. I took it to be saying the second meaning. I had it all wrong. Davenport was
decrying the arrogance of insisting on single fixed meanings. So I had almost fallen into that trap
of thinking it meant whatever I wanted it to mean. I had betrayed Davenport.

Only on re-reading it, carefully, did I arrive back at what had seemed so clear the first time around.
And I think this ambiguity is part of why it’s great. It mirrors our experience of works and their
meanings, which can be at once so solid and yet so fluid, so unsubstantial. So easily misread with
certainty. We have to be careful. It's easy to get caught up in the details. They're like booby traps.
We have to mindful of the bigger picture.
And I'm not alone. My misreading incident is not unique. There's another confirmed case, in the
Times Literary Supplement of all places. In his 2021 review of the republished A Batlhus
Notebook, Harry Strawson writes that:

Davenport has no interest in explaining Balthus in a traditional art-historical sense. The

“arrogance of insisting” on an artwork’s meaning “closes off curiosity, perception, the adventure of
discovery”.

Strawson's somehow fallen into the same trap I did the second time around. He's read the
sentence in isolation. Okay, it's true Davenport is not interested in traditional art history. But
Strawson's missed out the crucial part about works of art having 'one meaning only', and skimmed
over the ambiguous but equally crucial phrase about the arrogance of insisting that a work means
what we 'think' it means: that this is actually what cancels our adventure. He's blurred Davenport.
Davenport who is actually very insistant about a work's meaning. It's a case perhaps, of the critic
seeing what he wants to see. That it seems like Davenport is letting him off the critical hook. That
we don't have to tax ourselves by having to pin down the actual meaning. Strawson,
understandably, thought it meant what he thought it meant. And he thought it meant that that was
okay.
Of course all this hand wringing could be avoided if we just admit that works of art mean hardly
anything at all. Exhibit the look and feel of complexity but nothing else. Appear complex and
meaningful by their nature. We can tidy our papers and push in our chairs. Case closed.

On the other hand, meaning isn’t necessarily a fixed unit and it’s not on a fixed scale. There’s no
degrees Fahrenheit of meaning. There are totally different states and conditions of meaning in
different pictures. Even, especially, necessarily even, in pictures by the same artist. Chardin’s
figures obviously have more 'meaning' (or more obviously identifiable meaning) going on than the
still lives; and some of the still lives seem to have more content going on than others, while some
are more about form and tactility, about stuff.
 We could argue that what Chardin is actually doing is probing the informational capacity of objects
and the pictures we make of them. Chardin considers them as blank receptacles here, then as
reassuring totems there; then as blunt accouterments of a profession there again, then as
enigmatic, numinous apparitions over here. As conjured feelings of sustenance, as portions of
time set aside, moments of reflection and re-fill, objects of leisure, or of respite, or of toil. His
subjects are the real and made objects of daily life and their continuity and contiguity with it.
Davenport's other major work with a painterly leaning, Objects on a Table: Harmony and Dissaray
in Art and Literature, is a study of still life. Emphasis on literature, poor Chardin hardly gets more
than a passing salute. But in the first pages, Davenport places still life as somehow the most
meaningful, or meany-ready, of genres. Partly as it has the longest continuity of meanings, going
back to its origins in cave art (the painting, essentially, of 'food') and in ancient Egyptian tombs:

Still life persists for four thousand years, and deserves study for that alone. The portrait rises and
falls away, or is forbidden, or loses significance (as in our times). Landscape is intermittent– we
rarely find it even in descriptions. Pausanias described Greece without a single view of meadow or
wood, riverbank or mountain. All the genres of painting except still life are discontinuous, and only
the lyric poem, or song, can claim so ancient a part of our culture among the expressive arts.

I don't think this is quite right (surely still life drops out during the early medieval period?), but it's
very accurate, I think, in describing how still life picks up on the idea of 'continuity', even as it has
its own continuity. There's a extent to which still lifes take their meaning from the genre's past
perhaps more than any other genre: equally that they take their meaning from the continuity of
objects and their roles in our lives. Cups may change in design but remain basically unchanged.
Fruit may vary wildly in species and depiction but remain eternal. We still fill up and pour out
vessels much as we have and have had to since antiquity. Still life's changing but changeless
vessels reflect the changing put changeless vessels that are painted pictures. Paradoxically, it's
the humble still life that crops up each time representational art shifts along a peg. 17th century
Holland. 18th century France. France again in the 1910s. And yet, it's also the staple of the
beginner, the amateur or dilettante, the humble student. It can be put together meaningfully or it
can be put together to mean, apparently, nothing at all. Chardin, I think, tries his hand at both.
 Often he tries it with the one object. He investigates how a copper pan sitting on its base, seen
from the side and showing its surface, means something different to a pan upturned on its side,
showing its emptiness; means something different to the pan held by a kitchen hand staring into
space, and the small hole in a wooden barrel which faces it.
This selfsame copper pan crops up, looking almost copy-pasted once you notice it, in several
genre scenes by David Teniers the younger (an underrated master of mini-still life paintings within
paintings), a hundred years before Chardin. It toddles from Chardin to Chardin, as it does from
Teniers to Chardin, and from Teniers to Teniers, carrying the journey with it. Probably humming I
Got Plenty O' Nothin' as it goes.
If you scoop out a vessel's contents it still exhibits the scooping. Dutch 17th century painting, which
is partly Chardin’s point of reference, is the emergence of secular, non-moralistic painting: painting
which is much less apparently 'meaningful' than that which had come before (and, as Svetlana
Alpers argues in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, part of an
emphatically visual culture compared to the 'textual' culture of 15th-16th century Italy).

But even then, Teniers reintroduces aspects of meaning and significance– or at least, questions of
meaning and significance. There's a sense in which he's dealing with the spiritual void left when
painting's patronage, its reason for being, moves from the dominantly ecclesiastic to the
mercantile. That painting has to look for or to find 'meaning' within its own form.
So he'll paint everyday tavern scenes: which if they have a functional meaning, then surely it's as
broad satire. The foolish ways of foolish peasants. But in the way these pictures are composed
they're about much more than this (just as they exceed those of his predecessor Adriaen
Brouwer). They're also about the material cycles and processes of imbibing, smoking, drinking,
urinating; gathering and dispersing socially, spending time, energy and money; work and leisure;
inside and outside. You might say, isn't any picture of people in a tavern? Well yes, to an extent.
But these pictures encourage such trains of thought in their pictorial play. Windows and hatches
suddenly open, people come and go, look in, look out. Pale sunlight makes sundial triangles
around the room. Time is whittled away smoking from whittled pipes. Simple drawings are pinned
to the walls near the windows, the corners of which curl up from the humidity, displaying their own
hinterland between two and three dimensions, flatness and volume. Hats are hung on the backs of
claimed chairs, become objects of substitution. All these are dynamically measured against one
another, considering how human beings occupy and inhabit spaces by considering how they
occupy pictures (and how they occupy themselves). They divide the rectangle, play games with
flatness and depth, light and dark, proximity and distance, which are not merely games but which
question, existentially, the walls and limits of human experience. The enclosures we roam in and
those we build for shelter, in the case of the landscapes.

The landscapes pull out for the wide shot. Games of skittles and ice skating below massive skies.
Areas of pasture or construction sites. They seem to ask what does all this work and play mean?
What does it amount to?
We haven’t talked about Balthus. This often happens. I’ve witnessed lectures about Balthus where
they don’t really talk about Balthus. Certainly not the work, or its complexities, or the problems it
presents, even though these are often advertised in the introduction as being what we’re about to
investigate for the next two hours and then have questions about.

Balthus is always a problem. But here’s the thing: I’m not so sure Davenport follows his own
advice. He doesn't go doggedly after the definitive ‘meaning’ of a specific work of art by Balthus.
Which is fine, it’s a notebook. But pictorial analysis is so often something people are more likely to
preach than to practice. It’s always a kind of tease. So many essays, books and lectures suggest
that they’re finally going to dig deep and get to the heart of the matter, but it’s a promise that goes
largely unfulfilled. Many speakers conduct their lectures as extended introductions, deferring the
subject till some quick comments in the last minutes. Many essays do the same. Many essays, in
fact, can get several pages in before a single painting is mentioned. Interpretation, in its fullest
sense, is something we're always meaning to get around to but constantly putting off. It's as if we
sense the size of the job and what it's going to take to do it properly and just plain don't want to.

Why waste time? Why not hit the ground running? Works of art do.
It takes Davenport till note #3 to mention Balthus by name. He says, if God is the opposite of
Rodin, then Balthus is the opposite of Picasso (quoting Walser, remember him?). Then that’s it till
#6: Balthus’s childhood drawings of his cat. Rilke. Hogarth. Colette. Emily Bronte. Ruskin. Then
we’re on to note #8: Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw passes by, which he says now that we
have Balthus seems Balthusian. All of this is involving, exciting stuff, but still no mention of a
specific painting. A work is finally referenced at note #10. The Passage du Commerce Saint André
(1952-54), which we’re told takes place in a neighborhood which once saw the movements of
David and Diderot (and Chardin, probably, but nevermind). For the moment this passes for
sufficient analysis. The next notes provide more general pictorial comment, comparing Balthus to
Stanley Spencer for example, stating that Balthus is all about accuracy of detail, about never
generalizing. Which ignores the amazing painting in Edinburgh's Scottish National Gallery of
Modern art, Le Lever (Getting up, 1955): with its very deliberate elisions and inaccuracies,
wrenched awkwardly between the conventions of the reclining nude and the crucifixion, descent
and resurrection, straddling night and day, child and adult, the sacred and profane. Even the
figure's gender seems yet to be definitively assigned. Some of these are, of course, themes also
explored by Spencer: but ploddingly literally. Here it's all in the construction of the image, not in
what the image necessarily depicts. How it is, not what it shows.
At note #16 we get a roll call of titles– the titles of Balthus paintings which are said to be in
conversation with Bonnard (The Window), Cézanne (The Farmyard), Courbet (The Living Room),
Chardin (The Dream). But no further comment on the hows and whys. Which is a shame as
there's plenty to explore in any one of these examples. The Living Room (1942) is cited, I
suppose, for its recollection of Courbet's many sleepers. But the best thing about it is the
seascape, hidden in the painterly description of the blank pages of the book.
It's this collision, perhaps, that actually summons Courbet. And starts a chain, if you want to go
there, of sea associations. Of turmoil and change beneath calm waters; the rhythms and cycles of
lapping waves; the figure's nose pressed to the book, the fingers gently between the spine; the
proximity of this to the girl's open legs. If this sounds like far fetched leering, consider the infamous
cat lapping at a bowl of milk below a young girl's exposed underwear in the so awful they
petitioned to have it removed Thérèse Dreaming (1938). The jury's still out on that one. It's his
most unforgivable work.
In any case, the little book that looks like a painting that looks like the sea is a thrilling detail of The
Living Room, which the rest of busy picture revolves around, once seen. It's a fun poetic turn on its
own, split into three parts: pages read and known (land, the yellow beach), the page being read
(the purple-blue-grey ocean), the unknown pages still to come (white horizon and grey sky). A
triangle of pages, waves, and patient carnality.

But hang on, we're talking about meaning. Surely the debate around Thérèse Dreaming is partly
the debate about what a picture means vs what a picture shows. Or rather, what it is taken to
mean. Lauren Elkin in frieze:

..the painting is troubling. But still I find myself wanting to defend it. There is a way to look at
Thérèse that doesn’t make us complicit in the abusive sexualization of children. Yes, Balthus is a
perv. But look again at the painting: Thérèse is as pervy as the artist. Look at her enraptured face,
her closed eyes; you can almost feel the quickening of her breath [...] I’ve always loved this
painting. It makes me feel sexy; but in an adolescent way; it restores to me, retroactively, the
diffuse desire I felt at 12 or 13. I didn’t know who or what I desired, if it was sex or something more
nebulous; just like boys, young girls that age are desiring machines. And as I spoke to female
friends, and read what women have written about the painting, I found I wasn't alone. [...] Jen
George, writing in the Paris Review last year, said she obsessively identified with Thérèse, and
would spend hours in the gallery looking at her. ‘I liked that she was both in this room and not; she
was dreaming, but I couldn’t see where she’d gone.’ [...] The writer Stephanie LaCava told me that
‘what’s best about [Thérèse] and most art I love is that she is knowing... as if she’s hovering above
the whole thing. To me, it’s not only that she’s complicit and empowered, but that she realizes her
role at large as a woman, even a mythical one – like Peitho, Pandora, Calypso even – she is not
relegated to some domestic bullshit or second tier intellect. She’s greater and able. This is what
frightens people more.’ LaCava is right: it’s Thérèse herself that’s unsettling. Our culture is terrified
of sexually-awakened young girls. Our rush to ‘protect’ them is sometimes just a bid to protect
ourselves from their monstrous nubile desire. By trying to control the way people look at this young
girl, we rob her of an interior life. Female sexuality cannot be forever cloistered and footnoted and
appended: sometimes we have to just let it stand (or sit, awkwardly), no matter how troubling.

There's something going on here. The picture, for various people, independently of one another,
seems to be unshakably about a certain specific state of experience. Powerfully so. It would
appear for those who have had an immediate, followed by a prolonged and intimate relationship
with this painting, that this is what it is about. This is its meaning. To an extent we should take their
word for it. Elkin's is the most eloquent of the picture's defenses, regardless of whether you think
the picture is worth defending. Because unlike most cases for the defence, it doesn't focus solely
on why art shouldn't be censored, freedom of expression, cancel culture etc., but on what the
picture demonstrably 'means'. What it means rather than what it shows. What it should be allowed
to mean.

Still it's a curious thing for a man in 1938 to paint. Still more curious why this picture, which is
apparently so resonant and understanding of emergent female sexuality is unacceptable while
Lolita, written purely from the pervert's point of view, is not. Perhaps another example of our belief
in the complexity of the written word vs our skepticism about the complexity of painted pictures.
What really does it I think, what crosses the line for a lot of people, perhaps even without their
realizing, is that Thérèse may also be menstruating. There's a definite red-brown that could be as
stain. A stain as absent from the history of art as frank, unapologetic female desire.

I wish the cat wasn't there. It's too much a cypher for Balthus himself. But it is there, like it or not.
Back to Davenport. Not until note #23 do we meet sustained analysis, returning to The Passage
du Commerce. A fan of crime fiction Davenport writes: our seeing the painting is very like
Maigret's learning a neighbourhood where a crime has been committed. But this is perhaps an
example of Davenport’s warning about blurring meaning. What, exactly, in the picture recalls a
crime scene? I’m not saying that it doesn’t. But there’s no visual evidence given here. We’ll forgive
him as he ends note #24 by saying the painting insists that the eye that’s awake in all this sleep of
attention is the artist’s, making a basic definition, sweetly obvious but extraordinarily important, of
what a painting is in the most archaic meaning of image, the seen. Which is lovely.

Then note #25: the characters in this and the related picture, The Street (1933), are like puppets,
he says; we notice all the perpendicular lines above their heads, wrist, ankles, and can easily
imagine the strings. But he doesn't follow this thread, which leads to Thérèse sur une banquette
(1939). She was originally meant to be playing with a cat but Balthus left it out: instead she
appears to pull her leg and/or skirt up, pulls herself up (the bluntly indicated bench legs are
negligible). A picture of self containment, playing both puppet master and marionette, or perhaps
just a dangling decoration, or bait, it's a key work in any study of Balthus's artist-model power
dynamics. Just as Balthus is arguably an incredibly incisive artist on the bizarre nature of this
setup in itself, which exists only in and for pictures. I'm sure Davenport mentions this painting
elsewhere. Curious that he doesn't get into it here. But at least there's some sustained pictorial
analysis, and so close to the 27th note, the one that concerns us.
From there on there’s more analysis, more adventures in meaning, if not towards ‘a’ meaning.
Mostly about the Passage du Commerce itself, rather than the picture of it.

Davenport writes in note #33 about Rilke's bees and adolescents. I wonder if the word ‘latent’ in
sentence two of note #27 has a certain connotation of adolescence. Meaning is latent. That the
latency of meaning and of adolescence in Balthus is somehow the same thing. That latency is the
meaning. Adolescence's long afternoon of the soul. Balthus is less interested in eroticism than in
emergent eroticism, latent eroticism. Which has been a problematic thing, reputation wise, for him
to have been interested in. But nevertheless, perhaps an untapped aspect of the best of the
pictures is this echoing of latency in adolescent sexuality against emergent meaning and
revelation in painted images.

Note #35: he explicitly says we can imagine what kind of writer would make Balthus’s pictures.
Balthus's paintings are illustrations for a writer we can imagine the style of, but who doesn't exist.
This writer would have Francis Ponge's metaphysical sense of French meadows, Proust's
sensuality of girls' bodies and clothes, Rilke's ripeness of fate and time. But what writer can deal
with the happy fat boy and his pigeons, the Japanese woman in her Turkish room, the crones and
gnomes, the daimon cats, part Cheshire, part hearth-god?
Wow. All through the text literary associations have generally trumped painterly ones. Davenport
again blurs and breaks his rule. But it’s another amazing, dead-on paragraph. It perfectly captures
Balthus's universe, stuck as it is at 4.30 on an endless Sunday. I'm just put out that it’s another
example of a writer re-writing a painter into his own art form. But then, as much as Davenport's got
something to say about criticism he never claims to be a critic. Perhaps he would prefer the title of
'interpreter': more language less judgement.

Note #40, he finally gets to Balthus's inevitable problematics, and succinctly, perhaps frustratingly
succinctly, dismisses them. Understandable, as Davenport himself walked blithely past objections
to pubescent sexuality in his own fiction. I think Davenport, the classicist modernist, would find
only a slim difference between, say, Degas' Young Spartans and the indeterminately aged
'children' in Balthus.
There's something in the landscape of the Degas, actually, which is very like Balthus. A certain
strangely hazy-limpid light, textured-flatness. Then there's the awkward semaphore of the bodies;
the boy with his stretching arms distantly recalling those of Thérèse; the boy on all-fours like so
many of Balthus's carpet crawlers. It's partly about the awkwardness of adolescence within the
grace of the classical setting; modernity and contemporaneity within art's classical and classicising
impulses.
Weirdly, if we approach the paintings as if they were painted yesterday their problematics look
intentional, calculated, and are therefore somehow neutralized. Their shock value seems to be
worse if they're made with sincerity, and in 1955. The 2019 Balthus show at Fondation Beyeler,
sparsely hung on coloured walls, made him look a bit more like a Michaël Borremans, or a John
Currin, or a Liu Ye.
But somehow a rupture has to occur in a Balthus. We have to be hit by contradictory impulses.
They are specific in their indeterminacy. Explicit in their 'latency'. Modern in their classicism.

'Adolescence' is partly just in the pictures. In the pictures' hinterland between classicism and
modernity, (just as Degas adapted the faces and clothes of his young Spartans to look more
contemporary-Parisian). And not just plain and simple 'adolescence', but all the micro-divisions of
neither-here-nor-thereness within it.
Indeterminate modernity is a field of study in itself. And Balthus is a key figure in that field. One of
a handful of artists who wriggled around in what's often seen as a stunted halfway house
modernity. Nothing of the sort, it was in reality a place from which to survey where art had been,
where it might go, where it might meet the world: not an attempt to define modernity, but to let
modernity be constantly emergent, various, happening work by work. Breaking, but continuous
with the tradition, move by move, fraction by fraction. Less a halfway house modernism than a
haunted house.
Davenport, #43: It is precisely those harmonies which have become dissonant we want to study in
every way we can, for they had a harmonic origin. They changed. We changed. We need to know
why.

They could've hung this short note on a banner across the The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris for the landmark Derain, Balthus, Giacometti show in 2017. All three were these modernist-
traditionalist wrigglers, obsessed with 'dissonant' harmonies. Artists whose works seen next to the
the full bloom of people like Matisse or Picasso look like slightly browned fallen petals.

Jed Perl:

Some of the darkest, most beautifully saturnine dimensions of the modern imagination are
explored in an extraordinary exhibition mounted in Paris this summer. “Derain, Balthus,
Giacometti: Une amitié artistique,” at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, plunges
visitors into the melancholy of modernism, but a melancholy so vigorous, provocative, and
heartfelt that it has its own kind of exhilaration. ..These three were determined to revisit the
relationship between art and reality following the revolutions of early-twentieth-century artists, who
had so often rejected the naturalism that dominated Western painting and sculpture for five
hundred years. They were gathering together the broken pieces of what some disparaged as the
sunny old reality. They wanted to discover a new, moonlit truth. [...] Picasso and Matisse, those
supreme magicians of modernism, are the easiest twentieth-century artists to love. Their dramatic
shifts in style and sensibility are playful even when they're sombre; we admire them for their
changeableness. Derain, Giacometti, and Balthus take a very different approach. They are the
metaphysicians of modernism. They burrow into the enigmas of style; they investigate the
relationship between style and truth...All these artists...embraced the fundamental modern
discovery that the essence of the visual arts wasn't naturalistic truth but pictorial truth.
Derain, Balthus, Giacometti, allowed perhaps the best glimpse of what Balthus was getting at,
even if he is always going to be the lesser of the three amigos. Each of them were engaged in the
place where art, and art's past, met a real living world. A real living world that, as much as works
of art, is like a foreign language, is closed to us until we learn how to read it. That is, meaningless
until we learn how to encode it in words or pictures: that encoding giving it meaning. Each of these
three artists, immersed in the tradition as they were, determined to read the world afresh, to begin
again. To re-engage with realism as it relates to a world of meaning, via the language of 'style',
genre, form. With the caveat that access to a real world is practically impossible.

There is our world, and there is the world of pictures, and never the twain shall meet, though they
may greet each other cordially. Because the tradition is not a barrier or a burden, but something
active in the world: it's as if art's been around long enough to have rubbed off on it. Imbued it, in
the end and despite the odds, with meaning. But at the same time we know this is a fiction. The
world itself does not mean. And yet out representations of it can't help but make it mean...These
are the philosophical circles which these three painters wormed around in.
Derain was a big influence on Balthus. His many pictures of his niece, Geneviève, surely
influenced Balthus' 1930s pictures of his young neighbor, Thérèse.

Derain's The Painter's Niece (1931) is very close to Baltus' 1938 Thérèse in the Met: each picture
almost identically rhyming human and furniture legs, which in turn define the limits of the picture
frame. Both investigate self assurance with awkwardness, fluidity with rigidity. In each picture
there's also an ambiguity of anatomy, a confusion over which leg is which: each figure is
apparently anchored in space but still somehow at a general disconnect. The oversized bigness of
the chairs is also emphasized, while the frame crops and closes in on the figure (the wall and table
surge forward to meet Thérèse, as the shadow cast by the distant table looks equally as if it could
be cast by her knee). It's as if they're expanding (like Alice in Wonderland), growing
disproportionately to what's perhaps expected of them (pictorially and developmentally).
Geneviève is acting the dainty picture-lady for her silly uncle (the picture plays with its own
formality, like an exaggerated curtsy), as if perhaps she's already outgrowing the role of passive or
willing accomplice, outgrowing this picture, humoring this picture and its world of manners.
Thérèse could be consciously trying on the look of a provocateur, or could have equally just
arrived at this pose in her self absorption. Each picture posits itself as a staged occurrence, which
doesn't negate the real complexities of the picturer or the pictured, nor the relationship of one to
the other. They, we, are all in on it.
 The sheer moodiness, neither up nor down, of this kind of art – surprisingly – reaches a kind of
'adolescent' peak with Giacometti. Jed Perl writes in Paris Without End that his pictures have
about them a self consciousness, an almost adolescent cultivation of angst and sentimentality :

Giacometti is all too willing to show us the agony of creation, the point where clarity breaks down
and confusion reigns. But his self-pitying, expressionist side is kept in check by the force of will
that measures itself against the standards of tradition– and of the most recent developments of
tradition, which are to be found in modern French painting.

Again we find this sense of 'adolescence'. An almost self-cancelling excess of feeling and of
expression. But then, formalized, codified, the almost nulled 'expression' becomes viable again–
genuine 'expression', such as it is, possible because held in check, but equally possible because
'performed', posed, framed. Given a language with which to speak. (That adolescence comes with
a certain inarticulateness is a common trope). In a way, what they're also 'expressing' is
modernism's sense of adolescent melancholy for the past: an acute sense of distance from that
which not long ago seemed so certain and eternal. For Geneviève and Thérèse it's as if the
costumes and props, the decor and the furniture, don't fit anymore. They continue to inhabit roles
which they've partially outgrown; just as Balthus and Derain continue to indulge in games which
art was supposed to have tidied away.

But Giacometti's still lives and his people in rooms play a slightly different game to those of Derain
or Balthus. The staging is different, the poses 'neutral'. There's a more concerted attempt to purge
'style'. Yet this purging emerges as instantly identifiable in style. Neutral poses still posit their
neutrality. There are no apples more purged of their symbolism either– apart from their being
strong symbols of painterly-pictorial study. Their status as pictured objects clings to them.
These pictures end up being about the line between art and life, appearance and its inseparable
relationship with significance. Giacometti is incapable of seeing, or rather picturing, the world
without tracing a wavering frame around it: the rectangle that gives portions of the seen world
'meaning'. We watch as it gets closer and closer, closing in around his subjects, or boxing them off
to the side. It could contract or expand indefinitely. He has to decide where to put it. The unstable
frame cordons the subject off as an area of study while admitting that this study is partly
compromised: compromised, as it will always be, by being a picture. It's a transfixing mixture of
the the intense and the arbitrary. Which is, I think, what Giacometti is saying paintings are. Or the
world is.

Beckett spoke about painting straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise. What, if
anything, is a sitter in Giacometti's studio if not a presence of matter in a space? A picture. It's the
unimaginably less bawdy version of Teniers' taverns; the room to his stage; Beckett to his
Shakespeare.
People in rooms and pictures, how they inhabit one and the other. That's perhaps the endless
enigma which unites these three artists. A certain – troubled – fascination for the artist and model
as subject. As 'arrangement': professional, personal, aesthetic. What that arrangement means.

It's an arrangement we're equally tied up in. We all agree– artist, model, viewer – to play along
with its conceits. The studio portrait/nude/study acts out something which only occurs in art.
Because of art. What we're seeing is staged, is put on. It's an investigation of painting
masquerading as an interrogation of the real world. Or is it the other way around? We observe as
Derain, Balthus and Giacometti lean this way then that.
Geneviève à la pomme (1937-38) finds Derain's niece a few years older again: now rolling her
eyes at the apple she's been asked to hold artistically. She's visibly not giving it her all, and Derain
seems totally excited by this. He grasps the chance of depicting her mind as it wanders from the
setup, thereby bringing the setup almost to the point of collapse. It's the perfect Derain portrait in
this sense. The elements are co-operating – highly, dazzlingly functionally – but only just. They're
playing at art to see if it's still viable. And it is viable– but only if it acknowledges its own limitations,
its own frozen distinction from a real, temporal world.

Derain's is a kind of self-sabotaging realism. Or, if you look at it another way, it's a kind of reality
affirming fantasy. She might roll her eyes at having to play Eve to the picture's apple, but it's still a
picture of a 'fall' of sorts: Geneviève the child is lost to him, lost to herself, lost to time. It's hard not
to see in her raised arm leaning on the table the raised calf resting on the big chair, six or seven
years before. Still turning her head to the left in the hint of a shrug, but this time looking away.

There is a sense in which as much as Derain can play with the plasticity of paint and images, the
world refuses to be captured, to let itself be known; that everything has a mysterious life of its own,
including painting. Each element has a complex independent existence. Frequently his models
look bored, or uncomfortable or distracted: that try as he might to get people, objects and places to
play along, they are not totally ruled or understood by him, just as he himself is a medium through
which the consciousness of Painting passes. Just as 'meaning' is a property generated not by the
subject before him, but by its picture-painterly transfer.
Derain's pictures fundamentally acknowledge all of this. If Derain paints a nude, it's a nude on the
verge of disappearing from a world of meaning, yet just about holding on. They often signify art
itself more than they signify eroticism. Or they displace the eroticism: Nu assis à la draperie verte
(1930) lets the breasts fade into discrete mid-tone with schematic lines and dots, while the left
arm, coiled hair, and wedge of negative space create a lushly described frame around them. She
'frames' herself (either unconsciously or as-directed by the painter) just as her formal pose is
partially framed by the 'artistic' drapery. It's a picture poised between a sense of presentation and
a sense of shielding, withholding; a critique of 'artful' toplessness, pictorial revelation and display
tempered by reticence, emptiness. It expresses a great sadness, perhaps, that all of this makes
sense only in the picture.
We feel the tug of a world of 'meaning', but it's a world that exists only in art. And it's a world of
meaning which modernism had irrevocably changed. The painted nude was precisely one of those
harmonies which Davenport says had become dissonant. They changed. We changed. We need
to know why.

The formal nude is the event horizon of painterly 'meaning'. It means painting. Whatever the
mythological overtones, the nude is essentially a vacuum. Paradoxically, we're very aware that
when we're looking a nude we're often not seeing a person but an idea. The idea, essentially,
being 'art'. Which is why they're often objectionable. It's all well and good when painting vases and
flowers or empty copper pans to say that they're about the limitations of the visual, the
shallowness of surfaces, while imbuing these things with at least the sense of significance. It's one
thing to prop out a studio table, another to drape and arrange a human being. In paintings of nude
or semi-nude models, we sense the individuals' loss and gain in the meaning stakes, just as
details and anatomy are glossed over or reshaped for the sake of the picture. It's the surface life of
the picture at the cost of the interior life of the model. But the nude is so woven into the DNA of
painting it's something you almost just have to deal with. Like rectangles or the colour brown.

How it is, not what it shows... But then it would be absurd to discount what a picture depicts.
The woman in Nu assis à la draperie verte is a not too distant cousin of the model in Jean Hélion's
á rebours (1947). The artist (we assume he's the artist) is standing between the extremes of
abstract and nude, modernity and tradition, painting and model, public gallery and private studio. It
makes explicit all the implicit associations sparked by the apparently 'meaningless' nude in the
Derain, while throwing in its own distinctive oppositions: the problems of representation and
abstraction, form and formalism, the divide between art and life, display and objectification (of the
grapefruit breasts particularly, here again framed by the arms and swimming in mid-tone);
mechanical eroticism, bodies in public/private/pictorial space, openness and reticence (the
painter's hands open, vaginal, the woman's clasped, like the window shutters; he like a humble,
aproned artisan, or a supplicant priest; she watching the distinctive gesture of his hands and
perhaps about to imitate him by flipping hers'); the cultural, the contractual and the commercial
(pictures like Nu assis à la draperie verte are considered by many to be Derain's money-making
pot-boilers, which doesn't account for their complexity of mood).
If the nude is a vacuum, then it's a pretty loaded one.
Hélion's return to Paris after the war was a return to a world of meaning. And with it, an attempt to
re-engage with the what it shows as much as the how it is. The problematic studio nude must've
had a certain piquancy for him: one of his subjects which have very little to do with the everyday
routines and rituals he loved and a whole lot more to do with the routines and rituals of art. The
artificial life of painting. They're related in this respect to his pictures of people viewing paintings in
exhibitions and displayed in shop windows. But they're also inseparable from his pictures of the
studio, his shop window mannequins, his still lives of bread and pumpkins, which we watch being
bought from vendors and brought into the studio. Painting for Hélion is like a revolving door,
through which life comes and goes in both directions. It's not a one-way street.

Paintings within paintings, paintings of paintings, and the whole notion of picture-study which the
studio nude represents, are also a big part of his incredibly seductive 'study' paintings: single
canvases with multiple versions of the same subject scattered seemingly at random. Sometimes
outlined, sometimes with no dividing frames at all.
A man leans on a ledge. He leans on it again. That same man leans on another ledge, both of
them smaller this time; or perhaps this is just a picture of the leaning man, painted on the wall
behind him? We hardly ever take pictures or 'study' sheets like this literally. But then why should
we take any depictive image on a surface for anything other than what it 'is'? These are issues at
the forefront of any Hélion. How much and what nature of attention should be given to each thing?
How proportionate should our attention be? How does an image 'mean'? How much can any
image or utterance be said to be partial and incomplete? How much is any picture anything more
or less than a 'study'?
These are common enough painterly questions. But in Hélion they take on a life of their own. Each
image he repeats gains something in its multiplicity. A woman in a cardigan stands, twice, on
either side of her own statue, or three of her sit in a room, not looking at one another. Nothing
happening in a room with a pumpkin on a table next to a window happens again and again;
nothing continuing to happen but the wind agitating the curtain, slightly. Resting hands rest on
resting hands, as if the person they're conjoined to has momentarily become a consciousness
entirely of knotted palms and wrists (recalling the focal point of Dorelia in a Black Dress, a 1903
work by Gwen John, who more and more seems to anticipate these artists' existential
preoccupation with models in rooms). A skull sits on a circular table, again and again, and refuses
to speak of anything, finally, other than death as a shared fact among skulls and their owners. The
top of the cranium's been sawn off and sits like a lid, as if the rest of the skulls, tables and rooms
could fit inside each other, Matryoshka-style. Pretty chilling when we consider the very biggest
skull which they're all now held within is our own.

The pictures are not comic book sequential but simultaneous. As if someone misheard half a
definition of cubism across a crowded room.
Balthus was a friend, and welcomed Hélion's return to realism in the 50s. They would each live
and work into the later half of the 20th century (Balthus actually made it into the 21st), survivors of
a tradition stretching back in friendship and fraternity to the early days of cubism. Hélion was in
many ways the heir apparent to the waywardly individual modernism of Derain, Balthus,
Giacometti. Derain's compulsion toward variation upon variation, his compulsive variousness;
Giacometti's sense of study, of styleless style as style; Balthus's hauntingly wavering realism of
studio and room, his two grand streets...

All these artists were concerned with completeness as much as incompleteness: the possibility of
recombination after cubist fragmentation. Of something more monumental, and perhaps even
meaningful. Hélion worked completeness back into fragmentation. His street scenes are an
attempt to make something monumental of the apparent chaos. His entire oeuvre is an attempt to
join the dots between the person in the chair and the paper on the table and the city below the
rooftops outside the window and you, the viewer in the gallery.
He maintained that these multiple study paintings were just that, studies. But taking them as they
are it's surprising how much they hold together, and how much the 'meaning' is compounded or
extended in the multiplication. How much they seem to work as works of art. A lot of this, I guess,
is up to the temperament of the viewer. How much the viewer might want to listen to the artist and
not the work, trust the teller not the tale. We could debate whether or not they were actually
something more than mere studies for Hélion, whether they're just too well-composed to be true,
or whether he just couldn't help himself– but they're there regardless. So we have to deal with
them. They certainly seem to signify, to 'mean' something more than simply 'study'. Or at least,
I've briefly made the case that they do.
 On the other hand, the 'study sheet' is a common enough painterly artefact– a tool more than a
work, say, and one we shouldn't take to 'mean'. But when we look at Edouard Vuillard 's Carton
d'études (from 1934, well past his prime by most accounts) do we a see simply a sheet of studies?
Or do we see an ingeniously dumb allegory of the various painterly genres as they jostle in the
world? Do we not see a Hélion-esque studio portrait in the literalist sense: the artist or dealer
holding up a big turquoise canvas behind a vase of real flowers on a real table, a mirror beside
him to the left, a little painting of a hauntingly receding hallway to the right, the rooms nested like
the compartments in Hélion's little mobile drawer-cabinet. All these 'studies' need are a few drop-
shadows and a couple of highlights on their corners and we'd have a straightforwardly coherent
space. But then, we wouldn't want that. Not from Vuillard!

When Teniers depicts the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, or A picture gallery with two
men examining a seal and a red chalk drawing, and a monkey present, we're looking at the same
kind of play between art and illusion, multiple and micro, flatness and depth. The same box of
tricks. It's also just a more elaborate, operatic version of the windows and caricatures pinned to his
chamber-piece taverns.
 In the same way, it's hard for me to see the distinction, really, between Hélion's multi-study
paintings and the endlessly recombined and recombining motifs in the more apparently substantial
compositions. They seem to operate in the same area, to mean something similar: except in a
more offhand, or seemingly offhand register. But perhaps this is a contemporary bias. A certain
21st century sympathy for what Raphael Rubinstein famously called 'Provisional Painting': that is,
the casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling. Work made by artists who
deliberately turn away from “strong” painting for something that seems to constantly risk
inconsequence or collapse:

I take such work to be, in part, a struggle with a medium that can seem too invested in
permanence and virtuosity, in carefully planned-out compositions and layered meanings, in artistic
authority and creative strength, in all the qualities that make the fine arts “fine.”

Hmm. These artists, Derain, Balthus, though perhaps less so Giacometti, have frequently suffered
reputation-wise by being too seemingly 'fine'. Even as they explore the philosophical implications
of art's 'fineness'. This they did with subtlety, and art criticism rarely has time for that. Derain
especially trod a tightrope between the slapdash and the virtuoso, risking inconsequence and
collapse from hell to breakfast. And Hélion met enormous resistance in his post-abstract years:
penalized for his concern with 'layered meaning' which for many amounted to a bankrupt
symbolism. Forgetting that he was as-concerned with the effect of depiction upon the 'meaning ' of
the depicted.
Provisionality and 'authority' are not mutually exclusive. When Derain's slapdash he's a virtuoso of
the slapdash. Balthus has moments of pointed provisionality (particularly in Getting Up, but also
the barely-there bench below the thread-dangling Thérèse). Rubinstein puts Giacometti forward as
a proto-provisional painter: but however tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling Giacometti gets,
philosophically, materially, it's never casual, never dashed-off. He may constantly risk collapse–
but you never sense that he's risking inconsequence. All these terms are easy to bat around. But
each term is tied to an enormously complex set of ideas, specifically as they relate to painted
surfaces/images, and what they might 'mean' in turn. If there's one of these qualities going on in
complex art, then the opposite quality is usually in there somewhere too; pulling one another into
discord here, harmony there. This push and pull is partly how and what they mean.

But what if provisionality is nothing more than a stylistic trope, rather than a matter of profound
artistic conviction and philosophical reflection? I keep rereading a sentence I came across in one
of Frank O’Hara’s art reviews: “It is simply a property of Bonnard’s mature work, and one of its
most fragile charms, to look slightly washed-out, to look what every sophisticated person let alone
artist wants to look: a little ‘down,’ a little effortless and helpless.” Could provisional painting, or at
least some of it, be merely the medium on a casual Friday?

I hope it's just some of it. Or that it can be both a matter of profound artistic conviction and
philosophical refection, and perhaps something a little shabby-chic. There's room for that. We're
also back to what Ashbery said: careful not to talk about 'fragile' Bonnard in case we break the
spell. As if fragility and strength, doubt and conviction cannot be reconciled in art. If not there then
where?
How does one respond, as a critic, to a provisional work of art? Can one practice provisional
criticism? What would this look like? Given the way that every judgment, evaluation and
interpretation is subject to revision—if not total rejection—by the passage of time, isn’t every piece
of criticism provisional? Maybe. But at the same time, doesn’t every critic also try to offer
something that will be completely nonprovisional, i.e., durable and confident? After a long period
when painting was frequently dismissed as a complacent, indulgent, narcissistic medium in
contrast to other modes (conceptual art, relational esthetics, etc.) that were supposed to be more
faithful to the skeptical, oppositional character of historic avant-gardes, some painters have been
rediscovering doubt as an aspect of their medium, reclaiming Cézanne as an ancestor and
nominating as their tutelary spirit Samuel Beckett, a writer who favored paintings where he found
“no trace of one-upmanship, either in excess or deficiency. But the acceptance, as little satisfied
as bitter, of all that is immaterial and paltry, as among shadows, in the shock from which a work
emerges.

This surely, is the plot twist on which Davenport's 'single meaning' adventure ends. We want
meaning to be definitive and durable but know, in out heart of hearts, that we could think differently
tomorrow. They changed. We changed. We need to know why. If we believe in the search for
meaning we must also reserve the right to change our minds.
Is provisional criticism such a bad idea? What does the dictionary say (a book that knows a thing
or two about meaning): Provisional-adj.-as a temporary arrangement for the present, c.1600, from
provision (n.) + -al, something that will "provide for present needs”.

A temporary arrangement for the present. There are far worse definitions of painting.

As for criticism, it may mean much the same thing. A criticism, perhaps, of due deference to what
is literally provided, given, what is there and what is hinted at or suppressed within the physical
arrangement of the work. A criticism which would emphasize the present encounter with the work
while acknowledging that this is just one in a long line of encounters – each valid – and just one
encounter again in an indefinite future of presents. Not a criticism which hedges its bets. Far from
it. But a criticism which would include within its terms and conditions an implicit disclaimer of
humility. As with Vernon Lee's merger of attention and empathy, we have to be attentive and
empathetic collaborators– that's also part of the arrangement. The object has to be met half way.
That's one of its terms.

Howard Hodgkin described how in his paintings the picture is somehow hovering in mid-air
between myself and the spectator so that it looks as strange or as interesting or whatever to me as
it does to any other spectator. They're very physical objects paintings. Yet what we're often
discussing are these spectral, hovering things that stand in front of them, which we call 'pictures'.

We talk about resolved compositions. The truth is this resolution and reconciliation happens our
end. But we have to be cautious. We have to balance the books when it comes to being active or
reactive, lest we be blind, lest we blur. How do we collaborate with the work, actively, while
allowing it to take the lead?
In his Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, Michael Baxandall confronts
the problem of reconciling our historical distance from a work with our present experience of it. In
order for the contemporary viewer to arrive at the truest sense of a picture's intended meaning, he
argues that we have to work backwards: inferring artistic intentions not from artistic outcomes
alone, but from the culture that surrounded a given work in the widest possible sense. History for
Baxandall is a kind of corrective lens with which to signifiacntly reduce interprative distortion– in
order that we might as faithfully as possibly see with what he called the 'period eye'. Understand
the peiod eye and we might at least understand why works of art look the way they do. (In an
earlier book, Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy, he makes the case that a Renaissance
patron/viewer's sense of pictorial proportion was intimately linked to the ability to quickly gauge the
volume of a barrel, for example. I'm sure he would've done quite a number on Balthus if he'd been
inclined.)

Baxandall describes the work of art as something like the result of a 'brief'. Either a literal contract
set by a patron or, more metaphorically, the 'brief' set by the wider culture– the visual intelligences
which the picture could've expected to meet, as much as the internal 'culture' or continuity of the
art form. Perhaps the 'brief' of criticism is just as historically variable, historically conditional. Or
perhaps criticism's 'brief' is set, instance by instance, by the individual work of art, with each work
demanding a criticism all its own? And yet, like the steady control element in experiment, criticism
must also compare and evaluate its way through multiple works. It has to have certain standards.
That's its unchanging brief. And to complicate matters, surely the criticism of the day is a large part
the 'brief' set by the culture on a work? The brief which Baxandall tells us is constantly changing,
variable. If criticism is supposed to be a solid set of foundations, a firm vantage point from which to
survey and judge the vagaries of works of art, then it is a set of strong foundations built on
quicksand. They changed, We changed. We need to know why.
In some ways criticism is to art what the law is to human affairs. Monolithic, absolute and eternal
until it needs to change. Until progress forces it to change. In truth one determines the other. Each
must adapt.

Baxandall writes that we can make stronger or weaker claims about a picture, but that we will
always be left with the original provision – the work of art – which remains one step ahead of even
the best things we can say about it. Like a particle floating across the vitreous of the eye, disturbed
by and darting away from the motion of the eyeball that's straining to see it.

Just as any scientific study affects that which it observes, a painting seen is both compromised
and completed. The painting evades meaning just as it also cannot avoid it. Baxandall suggests
that we don’t actually talk about pictures, that we can’t quite get at the picture. What we do is we
talk about talking about pictures: what we actually explain seems likely to be not the unmediated
picture but the picture as considered under a partially interpretative description...a representation
of thinking about having seen the picture.

Any looking is interpretation. Again, the active action of a work is to mean. Which it constantly
does and also does not do. 'Meaning' is not a substance, quality or activity which we can
scientifically measure, and so it's an emphatically human thing. It's linguistic, stimulative, social.
Schjeldahl: I wonder, What must the people who like this be like? Anthropology.

Baxandall writes that his ‘inferential criticism’ is one of affirming and cheerful skepticism: that it is
the impossibility of firm knowledge that gives inferential criticism its edge and point. He prefaces
his incredibly strenuous historical interpretation of pictures as being not only rational but sociable.
Rational and social...we may think again of Lee, objectively attentive but also empathetic. It's a
gentle reminder that pictures are always things seen by people, made by people for people. And
nobody's perfect.
Baxandall rightly subtitled his work as the historical explanation of pictures. But if a work of art is
worth our time then it should be able to 'mean' independently of the history books. The strong work
carves its own peculiar little furrow of meaning behind it, a general strain of meaning which it
maintains and cultivates through the years, while weathering whatever changes in the visual
consciousness. Embracing and available to whatever changes in the visual consciousness.
Successful works of art work. They are not only available to 'interpretation', but actively respond to
human attention and interpretation, compounding it, directing it. And it tends to be those works
which have some sense of their own provisionality, which have a strong and distinctive balance
between what they show, what they hint at and what they withhold, between what they show and
how they show, which are the best works. Works with a capacity for ambiguity and metaphor.
Works not with the strongest, clearest, most definitively assignable 'meaning': but works with the
best hope of transcending their historical circumstances and continuing to 'mean' independently,
dynamically, indefinitely. That will continue to provide for present needs.

Perhaps we need a strong and strenuous provisional criticism equal and attentive to the strong
and strenuous provisionality of works of art. To the ways in which they are each specifically
'provisional'. The many arrangements attended to by a provisional criticism might ultimately be
said to affirm the humanity of the relationship between work and viewer: like truth (as Benjamin put
it) bodied forth in the dance of represented ideas.
But let's not wander too far into obscurantism. As Orwell wrote of his own writing where he lacked
a political purpose, writing on art where we fail to attend to the material specifics of specific works
tends to fall into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug
generally. And I've indulged in more humbug here than I'd normally sanction. I hope. But then, like
Davenport I'm talking about criticism, not performing it.

Note #47. He says a commentary on the paintings would reach deep into history and biography.
Commentary, maybe, but not criticism. During preparations for the catalogue of his 1968 Tate
retrospective, Balthus firmly insisted against the inclusion of any biographical detail. The best way
to begin, he said of the introduction, is to say: "Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And
now let us have a look at the paintings".

In the afterword to the David Zwirner edition of A Balthus Notebook, it's said that Davenport
mentions 150 individuals, roughly 30 novels and as many artworks by name, along with around 20
Greek and Roman gods. Strange then that we should have this and only fleeting references to
specific Balthus paintings. And yet we emerge dazzled, with a rich sense of what Balthus is all
about. What a beautifully infuriating book.

I still don’t think it’s criticism though. Neither I think did Davenport. And yet note 27 has the space
in 7 sentences to form a totally workable manifesto for art criticism (but manifestos are awful). In
seven sentences it's about criticism as it relates to the broad, intrinsically human search for
meaning and truth. And how the pictures we paint sit at their own specific adjunct to that search.
Which is all great. But Davenport is hardly concerned with apparently irrelevant things like surface,
touch, texture. With paint and painting essentially. The precise things which mean Balthus is not
some lost writer, some missing link in the French literary imagination. Balthus the painter – not
Balthus the painter of girls and cats – is really still waiting to be written about. Certainly at book-
length.
It's easy to treat the paintings as a series of catalogue illustrations, bypassing their physicality. The
surface vibration of the textured shirts and blouses that clothe his figures. The intensely worked,
crusty-bread and sandpaper fields, the coral-reef and carpet meadows. He's a much-underrated
painter of furniture. How it feels, the familiarity of it. Which is essential in creating the full effect of
the figures' erotic world. The light passing through the little bottle of oil (is it oil?) in la Fenêtre, cour
de Rohan (1951) is magically painted. A little treatise on painterly light as matter, on the different
substances' light resistance or reflection. Light as that which materializes or, in the case of the
hazy knife next to the bottle, that which dematerializes, atomizes. His touch can be powdery then
oily, a kind of moment to moment negotiation between the unconventional surface play of Chardin
and the substantiality of de Staël, carrying a memory of washed out frescoes across dryly rubbed
expanses.
 Even without figures, pictures like la Fenêtre, cour de Rohan play out many of Balthus'
compositional motifs. His subtle play with perspective and space. His habit of pulling lines slightly
off the perpendicular and then slicing them with sudden diagonals. The visual feint of apparently
incomplete legs, or legs which don't reach the floor (in this case we might see the darkened
rightmost edge of the alcove as a stunted table leg). There's a play of form and morphology within
and across Balthus' works as much as a recurring set of subjects, a cast of forms as much as a
cast of characters. That morphology adds up to its own kind of 'meaning'. It's in this way that
vessels and sheets on a table become a woman getting out of bed become the artist himself,
opening the window to his studio or about to draw the curtains. Words can describe how these
pictures visually echo one another, seem to anticipate, haunt one another. Describing only what
they show, without the how, does not.
Painter and His Model (1981) is a moving retelling (revision?) of Balthus' life's work. A once
troubling power play that has become almost sweetly familial. If we ignore the title, perhaps only
the stepladder and paint/oil-can definitively indicate that we're looking at an artist and model here,
and not simply a grandfather and granddaughter, say, pottering around. At the same time there's
no doubt that this is a studio setup. Partly because it plays along with many conventions of the
subject/sub-genre. A girl reading, or pretending to read, or pretending not to know that she's being
seen. A man, usually the artist, occupied with his rectangle. There are sparsely arranged tables
and chairs with still life objects conspicuously arranged on them, various fabrics and drapery to
soften the geometry. All pretty standard.
One distant relative is Matisse's The Painting Lesson (1919): sometimes called the painting
Session, or Séance in French, from the old French seoir, 'to sit'. To the English speaking viewer
reading this, the painting may become – if it wasn't already, with its crystal ball mirror and divining-
rod, magic wand paintbrushes – a kind of table-tapping communion with the 'spirit of painting'. As
if sitting-for or setting-up this kind of picture is a kind of ritualized invocation of Painting. Another
studio-picture relation, the granddaddy of them all, is Vermeer's The Art of Painting (1666-68).
Perhaps there's a little tip of the hat to that picture's chequerboard floor in Balthus's little box of
biscuits or whatever it is, or even in the black plates of the slim book in the Matisse. Again: books,
rectangles, model, painter. Tables and chairs, objects and drapes.

These paintings are incredibly generic in some ways, maybe. Allegorical, definitely. But also
distinct and distinctive in character and meaning.

They each embody a certain internalization of the tradition, and at three historical junctures. The
Vermeer, just at the beginning of painting's sense of itself, of the games that can be played purely
within its own terms; as a hermetic language and discourse unto itself, but with allusions to an
outside world (exterior light, a map, history books). The Matisse, well-past the initial modernist
breakthroughs and just at the beginning of a certain drive from the 1920s onwards to somehow
bring the real world back inside; an impulse which would occupy Hélion, Derain, Giacometti across
the rest of the twentieth century. And then Balthus, painting towards the end of his life, a modernist
of sorts who had become post-modern by plain persistence.

Each of these paintings uses painted rectangles to reflect on the primary painterly paradox of
three dimensions represented in two. But each of them has distinctive things to say about
perspective and portioning. Each of them negotiates, actually depicts the negotiation, between
inside and outside, painting and world, embodied in the image of an artist and model in the studio.
What's light and perhaps playful in the highly staged Vermeer becomes partly melancholic partly
mechanistic in the Matisse becomes over-familiar but also movingly familiar in the Balthus.

It's a somehow anachronistic and unviable work of art. But affecting in its stubborn conviction that
new things are still to be found within this relationship, this arrangement. These indoor games. (It's
not something that the critic should make an evaluative judgement on perhaps, but the painting
also has the very distinctive quality that the drawings and handwriting of older people have. The
weird feeling of a 'period eye' that has persisted, that is unknowable. Of hands guided by
mysterious forces that are not our own and which are not entirely replicable. And we don't need
the date to tell us this– the cut of his jacket just somehow says this wasn't painted in the 1940s or
50s, despite the datedness.)
 In the Balthus, there's a subtle visual connection between her turning the page and the old man
dutifully drawing the curtain. The angle of his green-sleeved arm is like that of the lighter green
book; the little sliver of upturned page like the little sliver of window under his elbow. As with the
puppet strings Davenport imagined he could see in the Rue du Commerce, we can just about
imagine these two as simple clockwork figures. When she turns the page his arm will move and
the curtain will close. Or perhaps they'll each move in the opposite direction? The way her hand is
poised it's like she's flipping between pages, holding her place or about to go back and double
check something: just as he could be pulling the curtain forward or back. We sense a
synchronized simultaneity between the two actions and reach for a causal relationship, as if
perhaps the turning of the page or the pulling of the curtain determines the other. In any case,
Balthus the artist has become much more embroiled in the world of the painting, subject to its
conditions. The balance of power has shifted. The polarities of active and passive have been
switched. Or, at least, have become less polarized, have become flattened.

The window actually appears to fold like the pages of a book. He could easily be putting a canvas
up, his invisible left hand supporting the base. The back of his head is curious, like a kind of
bandaged Invisible Man. But then he, seen from behind, looks much more real than she does, with
her medieval head. She flips between the pages of her book, he looks from room to outside world.
I'm reminded here of one of the basic tenets of temporal eternalism: that the past and future are as
real in time as distant objects are in space. Would I want to make a meal of the picture's play
between time and space, spectator and simultaneity/relativity, the mechanical and metaphysical
universe, painting's history and present, though? Probably not. These are things seen and felt in
the picture, not rationalized. Even if the seeing and feeling are rationally explicable.
The whole picture speaks of revelation on the one hand– of a shift in perspective, a change of
view. Window. Stepladder. Book. Turning pages, opening curtains. Changing light as it falls on
objects in rooms. And yet all these things are instantly collapsable. The wrenched curtain. The
closed book. The fold-away stepladder with its conspicuous hinge, an inversion of the model's
arm. The blank window. The little box on the table. The turned back. It's hard not to see in Painter
and His Model the old man's version of Getting Up. Where that picture appeared to wrench itself
between two worlds – the living and the dead, masculine and feminine, the sacred and profane
– this one is a pop-up book, a world halfway between opening-up and closing-in on itself. Like the
action of a picture summarily turned around or turned away. The young model's world is
expanding just as the old painter's has begun to shrink. It's a fitting envoi to the world of painted
meaning.

This is the 'single meaning' I would assign to the picture. A meaning which extends and is
extended by our knowledge of Balthus's body of work, as that body of work relates to the wider
meta-textuality and meta-morphology of the western canon. It's his final word on the arrested,
eternal latency of adolescence as it might relate to the arrested, eternal latency of pictorial
meaning.
There's an atypical Balthus landscape from 1935 of not much at all. Titled l'Allée it's a pathway to
nowhere. The longer you look at it the less the forms and space make any sense. In a way it's as
awkward as many of his figures. It would be easy to make comparisons with Uccello's dark wood.
But that picture presents mystery within order. The Balthus re-affirms the essential meaningless
jumble of the physical world. A meaningless jumble that we can't help but believe contains within it
some significance, if only we could straighten it out. See the wood for the trees.

As with the choice – which is no choice at all – between giving ourselves up to fate and at least
acting as if we have free will, if we really can't believe that works of art have one meaning only
then we have to at least agree to behave is as if they do. Otherwise nothing might get said or
done. We have to act as though the end is in sight. That we'll catch a glimpse of the game as we
peer through Uccello's dim wood. Even though we know the game's the thing.

. . .
No, no--there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I
don't know what I DON'T see--what I DON'T fear!

- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific

Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form
Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.
The light sinks today with an enthusiasm
I have known elsewhere, and known why
It seemed meaningful, that others felt this way
Years ago.

-John Ashbery Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

I hate painting. Most of the time it’s irrelevant. It doesn’t mean enough, ever, quite.

-Howard Hodgkin

Hamm: We’re not beginning to...to...mean something?

Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something? [Brief laugh] Ah that’s a good one!

Hamm: I wonder. [Pause] Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be liable to get ideas into his
head if he observed us long enough. [...] To think perhaps it won’t have all been for nothing...

-Samuel Beckett, Endgame

For more information on Balthus please listen to Balthus Bemused by Colour on Harold Budd's
The White Arcades album.

. . .