Indecency. A big book of Balthus’s paintings, and not because of his adolescent girls. It is the size of the book that is indecent, its imposingness. As though all such books should be small, cheap, and their reproductions should be poor, not good.
What happens to the reproductions of Da Vinci’s paintings in Tarkovsky’s films? They are rain-splashed, rain-mottled. They threaten to vanish into the greeny-blue of the landscape, but not quite. The image survives despite near-ruin: the Lady in Ermine, say; the Madonna cartoon. Survives, but age-marked as though they’d fallen out of the Museum that contained them like Dorian Gray’s painting, and aged all at once.
And so with Balthus’s paintings, so splendidly present in this volume. Their splendour gives them too much immortality, and nothing of what the Japanese call sabi, the patina of age, that Munch tried to lend his paintings by leaving them out in the rain.
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