The ambiguous childhood of balthus: When painting defies time

You may have encountered his works in museums—those silent interiors where adolescent girls in ambiguous poses seem to be waiting for something—or someone. Their evasive gazes, their half-unclothed bodies, their gestures suspended between innocence and provocation have made Balthus one of the most controversial painters of the twentieth century. But behind the scandal lies a meticulous craftsman, a nostalgic dreamer, a man who spent his life searching in painting for what the modern world had lost: mystery, slowness, the beauty of things that resist explanation.

01The painter who rejected his era

Balthus was born in 1908, at a time when Paris was still the capital of the art world. Yet he grew up far from the noisy avant-gardes. His childhood, spent between Switzerland and Italy, was steeped in literature and old art. His father, an art historian, opened the doors of museums for him; his mother, a painter, instilled in him a taste for patient work. But it was Rainer Maria Rilke, a close family friend, who left the deepest mark on the young Balthasar. The poet, fascinated by his childhood drawings, wrote the preface to his first book in 1921, Mitsou, the illustrated story of a boy and his lost cat. Forty ink drawings, already imbued with the melancholy that would characterize his entire oeuvre.

When he settled in Paris in the 1920s, Balthus deliberately turned his back on the dominant movements. Cubism? Too intellectual. Surrealism? Too automatic. He dreamed of recapturing the grandeur of the old masters, those painters who knew how to give light a nearly divine quality. He studied the frescoes of Piero della Francesca, drew inspiration from the distorted perspectives of Japanese painting, and developed a technique so precise it became almost invisible. His canvases, smooth as mirrors, seemed to belong to another time.

Yet Balthus was no reactionary. He drew from the past to better question the present. His interior scenes, populated by dreamy young girls and enigmatic cats, are traps set for the viewer. They play with our expectations, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. As in The Street (1933), where figures frozen in strange poses seem to be waiting for an event that will never come. A work that, when shown at the Salon d’Automne, shocked with its unsettling stillness—as if time itself had stopped.

02The studio as sanctuary

Step into Balthus’s studio, and you enter a world apart. No scattered paint tubes, no unfinished canvases strewn across the floor. Everything is order and silence. In Rome, where he directed the Villa Medici from 1961 to 1977, he set up his easel in a room bathed in golden light, surrounded by antique furniture and Japanese screens. Here, time stretches. A painting might take years to complete.

Balthus worked like the Renaissance masters: slowly, patiently, with the precision of a goldsmith. He began with dozens of pencil sketches, then moved to oil paint or tempera—this medieval technique using egg yolk, which he was one of the few twentieth-century artists to master. Colors were applied in successive layers, each glaze adding new depth. The result? Smooth surfaces, almost photographic, where every detail seemed designed for eternity.

Take The Golden Days (1944–1946), one of his most famous works. A young girl in a blue dress sits on a bench, her back turned to the viewer. Behind her, an idyllic landscape stretches into infinity. Everything seems peaceful, and yet… something is off. The perspective is slightly distorted, as in a dream. The light, too golden, evokes less a summer afternoon than an idealized memory. And that blue dress, so similar to the Virgin Mary’s in religious paintings, adds a sacred dimension to the scene. Balthus did not paint reality. He painted what reality might be if it obeyed the laws of dreams.

03Those girls who haunt our gaze

They are everywhere in his work. Adolescents in languid poses, their gazes at once candid and provocative. Thérèse Blanchard, his neighbor, posed for him from ages eleven to sixteen. She appears in Thérèse Dreaming, of course, but also in The Guitar Lesson (1934), where a half-naked girl seems to surrender to her teacher’s hands. A canvas so scandalous it was removed from an exhibition in 1934, deemed "indecent" by the police.

Why did these young girls fascinate Balthus so? Was it an unhealthy obsession, as some have suggested? Or an attempt to capture that fleeting moment when childhood tips into adulthood? He himself rejected any psychoanalytic interpretation. "I am not a psychologist, but a painter," he said. Yet his models were never objects. They have a presence, a density that makes them almost tangible. Look at The Room (1952–1954): a girl in a simple nightgown stands before a mirror. Her reflection, slightly off, seems to belong to another version of herself. As if Balthus wanted to remind us that adolescence is that age when we search for ourselves without ever quite finding who we are.

These female figures, often criticized for their ambiguity, are also symbols of resistance. In a century marked by speed and consumption, they embody slowness, mystery, incompletion. They are neither children nor women, but something in between—a state that our era, obsessed with categories, struggles to understand.

04The cat, the artist’s secret double

If the young girls are the heroines of his work, cats are its silent accomplices. They appear in nearly all his paintings, sometimes discreetly, sometimes in the foreground. In The King of Cats (1935), one sits on an improvised throne, fixing the viewer with an almost human authority. Balthus, who called himself "the king of cats," saw these animals as alter egos. Like them, he was independent, mysterious, a little wild.

The cats in Balthus’s work are never mere accessories. They play an active role in the narrative. In Thérèse Dreaming, the one lapping milk at the girl’s feet seems to watch over her—or to be waiting for something. In Cathy’s Toilette (1933), a black cat perched on a chair observes the scene with almost human curiosity. These felines add a dreamlike dimension to the paintings. They are the guardians of the secret, the silent witnesses of a world where ordinary rules no longer apply.

Balthus owned more than twenty cats in his house in Rossinière, Switzerland. He painted them with the same attention he gave his human models. As if, for him, the boundaries between animal and human, reality and imagination, had never truly existed.

05Light as raw material

With Balthus, light does not illuminate: it sculpts. It draws deep shadows, carves faces, gives objects a nearly sacred presence. Look at The Passage of Commerce-Saint-André (1952–1954): a girl in a white dress crosses a room bathed in golden light. Every fold of her dress, every reflection on the floorboards seems calculated to create an atmosphere at once realistic and unreal.

This mastery of light came from his admiration for the old masters. Like Vermeer, he knew how to play with contrasts to give depth to his scenes. Like Caravaggio, he used chiaroscuro to create drama. But where the classics sought to represent the world as it is, Balthus transformed it. His interiors are never quite real. They resemble stage sets, where every detail has been chosen for its evocative power.

Take The Turkish Room (1963–1966). A naked young woman stands before a mirror. Light from an invisible window bathes the scene in a golden glow. But something is wrong. The mirror does not reflect exactly what it should. As if Balthus wanted to remind us that reality is never as simple as it seems.

06The legacy of a timeless painter

Balthus died in 2001 at the age of ninety-two. He left behind a body of work that continues to divide. Some see in it a celebration of beauty and mystery; others, a form of unhealthy voyeurism. Yet his influence on contemporary art is undeniable. Painters like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage have taken up his themes, playing with ambiguity and eroticism. Filmmakers like Bernardo Bertolucci and Luis Buñuel found inspiration in his canvases for their dreamlike worlds.

But beyond the controversies, what strikes us in Balthus is his ability to create images that resist time. His paintings do not age. They seem to belong to another era, as if they had always existed. Perhaps because they speak of something universal: that troubled period when we pass from childhood to adulthood, when everything is still possible, when the world is both wonderful and terrifying.

Today, as our era seems obsessed with transparency and speed, Balthus’s work reminds us that there are still shadows. Mysteries that ask only to be contemplated, without necessarily being explained. Like those young girls who, for nearly a century, have been watching us without ever quite revealing their secrets.