Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski de Rola), Therese Dreaming (La Reve). 1938. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
''You know why I paint little girls? Because women,
even my own daughter, already belong to this present world, to fashion.
Little girls are the only creatures today who can be little Poussins.''
-- Balthus, interviewed by Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times, 1988
Immaturity is not always innate or imposed by others.
There is also an immaturity which culture batters us against when it submerges us
and we do not manage to hoist ourselves up to its level. We are "infantilized" by all
"higher" forms. Man, tortured by his mask, fabricates secretly, for his own usage, a sort of "subculture":
a world made out of the refuse of a higher world of culture, a domain of trash, immature myths,
inadmissible passions...a secondary domain of compensation.
That is where a certain shameful poetry is born, a certain compromising beauty...
Are we not close to Pornografia?
--Witold Gombrowicz, in the preface of his 1966 novel, Pornografia
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