Balthus | ZETEO

Among Chicago’s Most Extraordinary Women

March 19, 2015 by William Eaton

This post juxtaposes brief notes with reproductions of five women-focused works at Chicago’s Art Institute. Readers are invited to make whatever connections they will and draw whatever conclusions they might between the art works, which seem to me unified only in their focus on women, in the genius of their making (by men, by the way), and by their co-existence in one Chicago institution. I would also note that these works are not unified even in their reproducibility. Three of these works are sculptures, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art, Art Institute of Chicago, art museums, Balthus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Laura Mulvey, male gaze, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mirό, Roland Barthes, Willard Van Orman Quine, women

Morton Bartlett’s likenesses of children

October 13, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

I was recently forwarded an article about American photographer Morton Bartlett. I had never heard of Bartlett before, but his sexualized representations of prepubescent children during the first half of the 20th century reminded me of Balthus, who was a contemporary of his. The comparison might be a stretch because Bartlett was not an educated or trained artist. But he is gaining posthumous fame for his half-size polychrome dolls or sculptures of children and the photographs he took of them. The sculptures […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: Balthus, childhood, children

Revisiting the problem with protecting the innocent

June 23, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Last winter I quoted, inspired by the sexual undertone in Balthus’s paintings of children at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an article about the negative consequences of equating childhood with innocence. In “Who Are You Kidding? Children, Power, and the Struggle Against Sex Abuse,” Jenny Kitzinger criticizes people’s tendency to describe childhood as an innocent time and space for at least two reasons: [1] If defiling the pure and deflowering the virgin is supposed to be erotic, then focusing […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: Balthus, child prostitution, childhood, children, immigrant children, innocence, sexuality

The dark side of childhood: 3-9 Nov 2013 (ZiR)

November 6, 2013 by Alexia Raynal

A week of reading about childhood: 3-9 November 2013 By Alexia Raynal, Zeteo Managing Editor [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.] 3 November 2013 I think the Metropolitan Museum of Art missed an opportunity to challenge modern constructions of childhood by naming its solo exhibition on Balthus Cats and Girls: Paintings and Provocations. Cats were, indeed, a big part of the painter’s persona. But I would never say that Balthus’s works are deep and […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: art, Balthus, childhood, Metropolitan Museum of Art, parenting, poetry, reading, sexuality