The Last Studies

Originally Posted Saturday, March 29, 2014

Balthus: The Last Studies

It came unexpectedly yesterday.  It was on the porch when I got home.  Big. 18"x14.5",  a boxed set with two volumes.  "What have I done?!" I thought.  I'd not paid attention.  I'd spent an enormous amount of money on something that was an impulse, something I had decided that I didn't really want.  I'd seen the video of the art exhibit and realized that for the most part it was the same picture over and over and over.  What the fuck, what the fuck.  Where would I even keep such a thing?  It is bigger than a bookshelf.  I am childish, I thought.  I am a fool. 

And this on the day I was surely dying.  I'd had a bad throat all day.  Not a sore throat but a throat that hurt every time I thought about swallowing.  It was like a tear or a trauma from a blow.  It had begun in the morning and had gotten worse during the day.  Weren't my lymph nodes hurting?  I had grown certain that this was the going to be the beginning of something very bad.  Throat cancer.  I thought of Michael Douglas.  He had survived it.  It wouldn't be pleasant, of course.  But he had all the money in the world, the best treatments.  I would get something else.  The "Standard Plan."  I was weepy inside, already defeated.  I thought of Christopher Hitchens.  I thought that both he and Douglas had unbelievable help and support.  I, on the other hand, would have to go it alone.  I thought of the smells, the messes.  I thought of the pain and how uninteresting it would all be.  I wondered what I would do with the hundreds and hundreds of large prints and the multitude of hard drives that house my "work."  I thought about burning everything.  If I weren't such a coward, I would put everything in my wooden house and set it all ablaze around me.  All that would be left would be the charred remains. 

Fuck it, I thought, and I bought a bottle of scotch.  If it hurt to swallow, it would hurt less with scotch. 

At home then, with the big box of Balthus sitting on the dining room table, I took the box cutter and began to open box after protective box until I got to the kernel.  They looked rich.  They looked impressive.  I took out Volume I gingerly.  These were books you could damage.  I set it down flat upon the table and opened it.  The whole thing was soft and wiggly because of its size.  It was bound on the short side which was obviously not the strong way to bind it.  I read the opening pages.  Then the were the first polaroids.  I ran my hand across the page.  Unbelievable.  I'd never felt anything like this.  You could actually feel the roughness of the ink on the paper.  Scary, I thought, but something of a thrill, too.  Page after page after giant page, blurry, underexposed Polaroids of the SX-70 type, the same girl with slight variations, pictures taken once a week for eight years, mostly in the same outfit, mostly in the same pose.  My heart beat quickly.  I could feel it.  Balthus is one of the painters whose work informs me when I photograph.  Now here they were--the photographs that looked unbelievably like the paintings.  The photographs that looked unbelievably like mine.  There were so many of them and I was turning the pages too rapidly.  Stop it, I thought, look at each one.  I closed the book and went to pour a drink.  I'd spent a lot of money on these two volumes.  I wanted to enjoy them.  I would have to wait.  It is like that for me often when I look at art.  At the Matisse retrospective at MoMA, I was overwhelmed and had to stop and sit many, many times.  Some things are too much to look at in volume.  Some things should only be shown one or two at a time.  Modigliani did that to me as well. 

"[D]rawing is a kind of writing, at times fast and at times slower.  One must always draw, draw, and draw some more.  And when one cannot draw with a pencil, one must draw with one's eyes and one's thoughts."  
               
                   Balthus

The spine will never hold up.  I want to keep this copy pristine because it will surely increase in value.  But I want to look at the pictures again and again and each time I open and close it, each time I turn a page, I can hear the binding weaken.  Mine will be a very worn copy, I'm afraid. 

I die too often now.  It is stealing too much of my time.  I feel better today, I think, though their is still a pain there.  Balthus was dying when he made these Polaroids, I guess.  His model says he could not hold the pencil in his fingers any more.  His eyesight was going.  He made the Polaroids as studies for the paintings.  The model was his neighbor's daughter.  The neighbor was his doctor.  The model, now grown, said that her father told her that she was Balthus' best medicine.  She went there every Wednesday afternoon for eight years.  She is/they are, in Salter's words All That Is. . . or, as Sally Mann has said, What Remains.