Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne
Private collection, since 1984
Lausanne, Galerie Alice Pauli, Balthus, Giacometti, Bonnard: Dessins de collections, 17 May – 14 July 1984, no. 11, ill.
Andros, Museum of Contemporary Art-Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Balthus: Dessins, acquarelles, huiles, 30 June – 17 September 1990, no. 88, ill. p. 112 (the exhibition subsequently travelled to Rome, under the aegis of the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, 9 October – 18 November 1990, catalogue Balthus a la Villa Medici, ill. p. 72)
Andros, Museum of Contemporary Art-Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Glancing at the Century, 28 June – 20 September 1998, pp. 118-119, ill. p. 119
From 1961 to 1977, during his stay at the Villa Medici in Rome as director, Balthus carried out only twenty oil paintings. The slowdown of his pictorial production was balanced out with his interest for drawing: Balthus was no longer seeing it as a simple preparation for a painting but as a work its own right, the creation of which requires an independent process.
Young girls are his main theme. Michelina, daughter of an employee at the Villa, appeared in 1970 and during the years she was posing, dozens of works on paper and barely an oil painting would continue to accumulate, revealing her passage from childhood to adolescence. By explaining his fondness Balthus said that “[…] it is here, in the caress of the drawing, where you can find again this grace of childhood fading so quickly and of which one keeps the inconsolable memory forever [...]. That’s why I’m still rebelling in front of these stupid interpretations claiming that my young girls arise from an erotic imagination. Pretending this is not to understand them, it is their slow transformation from the angel’s state to that of the girl which concerns me, to be able to grasp this moment of what I could call a passage”.
In the drawing Michelina on an armchair with her arms raised we are in front of this perturbing frankness of childhood, ignorant of its crucial role in the creation of a work of art, which does not try neither to pose nor to tempt. Despite her sulky pout, her position being slightly slumped, she remains graceful, and especially resigned to wait in this -almost feline- stretch. In return, she asks only for one thing: time to dream, play and, according to a witness of that period, read the adventures… of Tintin.
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