Separating art from the artist

If you’re in a rut, move to Tahiti and take a string of child-mistresses. It worked for Gauguin.

Two Tahitian Women, 1899, Paul Gauguin, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Last year, the Metropolitan Museum took heat for a 1938 painting by Balthus, Thérese Dreaming. The painting is not overtly obscene, but Balthus had a sexual obsession with prepubescent girls. In light of that, Thérese’s panties are an art-history problem. Where should the line be drawn between censorship and veneration?

The Met also owns many paintings and prints by another Frenchman with a girl problem—Paul Gauguin. Excising Gauguin would be far more problematic. He profoundly influenced 20th century art.

Gauguin is most famous for traipsing off to Polynesia at the end of his colorful, fractious life. He wrote that he wanted to escape European civilization and ‘everything that is artificial and conventional,’ but his grand statements always had the whiff of dross about them. He had a family in Copenhagen whom he’d abandoned, and he expected to get rich in Tahiti.

Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), 1891, Paul Gauguin, courtesy Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

He arrived in Papeete in 1891. Instead of nubile, naked Tahitian girls, he found church-going ladies in Victorian dress. Moreover, it was full of expatriates and colonists and was expensive. Disappointed, he moved to a bamboo hut in Papeari.

Gauguin’s first Tahitian portrait was Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), above. It’s neither exotic nor exploitative. Instead, it is investigatory. He studied her face, and he put her in the western dress that she really wore.

Back in Paris, Gauguin had read some Dutch texts written in the 1830s, about the Arioi. This was a Tahitian secret religious order. They practiced complete sexual freedom before marriage and aborted or murdered any babies that were conceived through these unions. They worshipped a war god named ‘Oro.

Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), 1892, Paul Gauguin, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

If this sounds like a Marvel comic book, you recognize the basic tone of 19^th century ethnographers. These stories were probably a farrago of lies, rumor and truth.

Gauguin was fascinated. He was free to invent the details, which meshed with his own self-promotional legend as a depraved sensualist and a martyr to his art.

Gauguin did twenty paintings and a dozen carvings over the following year. Nine were shown in Copenhagen. Gauguin was sufficiently optimistic to return home, although he was still broke. Moreover, he was already showing the signs of tertiary syphilis.

Paul Gauguin with his mistress Pahura (second from left) and another woman, who looks less than thrilled with his hand on her breast. Courtesy Daniel Blau.

Gauguin took three young native girls as vahines, or ‘wives’, during his Tahitian period. They were 13, 14, and 14 at the time. There’s no suggestion that they were unwilling.

He used them as models and to do the work of survival in a pre-industrial society. While Papeete was westernized, Papeari had no corner grocery store; its families fished, hunted and gathered breadfruit and bananas from the mountains.

But mostly, it was about sex. “He loved the whole idea of someone getting pregnant and showing the world that he still had it,” said art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews.

Gauguin returned to Paris in 1893, swanking around the Left Bank dressed in Polynesian costume and carrying on with a Malay teenager called Annah the Javanese. As usual, it rapidly went sour. He was broke and bitter. In 1895, artist Eugène Carrière bought him a cheap, one-way ticket back to Polynesia.

Self portrait, 1903, Paul Gauguin, courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel

Gauguin spent the next six years living an apparently comfortable life in and around Papeete. His vahine during this period was Pahura, who was age 14 when she moved into his house. Later, he would accuse her of thievery, and rail at the colonial police for not taking him seriously.

In 1901, Gauguin moved to the Marquesas, complaining that Papeete had become too westernized. There he built a house called Maison du Jouir. That’s hard to translate, but “Love Shack” probably comes closest. His health continued to deteriorate. He became a regular user of morphine and laudanum. His lost paradise was falling victim to time. 

His vahine, Vaeoho, seven months pregnant, went home to Hekeani to bear his last child. She didn’t return. By December, 1902, he could no longer paint. He was found dead on the morning of May 8, 1903, by a neighbor. Tioka confirmed his death in the traditional manner, by chewing on his head in an effort to revive him.

A great master is censored in Manchester

What hath #metoo wrought? Removal of a very beautiful 19th century masterpiece by John William Waterhouse.

This morning, I’m heading down to Boothbay Harbor to deliver two nudes to What’s Nude in Boothbay Harbor at Studio 53. These belong to a body of work I did for a duo show with Stu Chait at Rochester Institute of Technology’s Dyer Gallery in 2014. The show was closed after administrators took a gander at my nudes.

Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896, John Williams Waterhouse (courtesy Manchester Art Gallery)

I felt badly for Stu, but it did give me the experience of being censored. Today, I’m joined by the illustrious Victorian painter, John William Waterhouse, whose Hylas and the Nymphs has been removed from the walls of Manchester Art Gallery. As usual, the administrators have put the best possible face on it, making the painting’s absence a ‘dialogue’ and asking patrons to comment on Post-It notes pinned up in its space. That’s a clever trick. You can’t write much on a Post-It note.

Curators explained that this was being done in connection with a current debate on historical cultural depictions of submissive women, calling the painting a “Victorian fantasy.” If that’s their criteria, then all their pre-Raphaelite paintings are destined for the dustbin. The pre-Raphaelites are the heart of Manchester's collection. They’re unlikely to burn any of them as zealots did during the Protestant Reformation; they’re too valuable. Still, it’s a worrisome trend, in part because it’s so uninformed.

The Servant, Carol L. Douglas, will be on display at Studio 53, Boothbay Harbor, February 9-11, 2018.

Hylas is a character from Greek mythology. He was Heracles’ youthful spoil of war, lover, companion, servant and fellow Argonaut. Hylas was kidnapped by nymphs—who are neither human nor prepubescent—of the spring of Pegae, Dryope. Broken-hearted Heracles and his pal Polyphemus went off to find him. The Argo sailed on without them. Heracles never found Hylas, who was blissfully happy in his spring with his nymphs. The story has been retold in art since about 300 BC.

Unlike Balthus, there is no indication that Waterhouse had any improper relations with his models. He was a quiet, private man who was married to a woman he met at his parish church in Ealing. He died after a long, suffering illness with cancer, in 1917.

We have little information about his models for Hylas, but we do know something about the women who sat for him. His sister Jessie is believed to be among his first models. His sister-in-law, Mary Waterhouse Somerville, posed for The Lady of Shalott in 1888, and his wife Esther also sat for him.

Reading, by Carol L. Douglas, will be on display at Studio 53, Boothbay Harbor, February 9-11, 2018.

Muriel Foster first modeled for Waterhouse in 1893 at the age of fifteen, decorously draped in a long gown as La Belle Dame Sans Merci. She was probably one or more of the nymphs in Hylas, although the nymphs are pastiches of different faces and forms. She sat for Waterhouse until his death.

Beatrice Flaxman modeled for Waterhouse from 1906 to 1916. She modelled for Ophelia, 1910, Penelope and her Suitors, 1912, Annunciation, 1914 and I am half sick of shadows, said the Lady of Shalott, 1915.

Gwendoline Gunn was the daughter of the Waterhouses’ friends, Marcus and Mary Eliza Gunn. She modeled for him in the early 1900s, but more importantly, became a friend of the artist and his wife in her own right. She and her daughter took care of Esther Waterhouse until her death in 1944.

Waterhouse also worked with the same stable of professional models as used by his pre-Raphaelite peers. Many of them were notorious for their intimate relationships with their models, particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

So why Waterhouse?

Pubescent erotica

(Note: this post contains an image that I find offensive. Read at your own risk.)

Thérèse Dreaming, 1938, Balthus, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum in New York has refused to remove Thérèse Dreaming, a portrait of 12- or 13-year-old Thérèse Blanchard showing her knickers. This 1938 painting by Balthus is ambiguously sexual. Much of his work was more overt.

A petition started by New Yorker Mia Merrill to have it removed has gathered almost 11,000 signatures. “Given the current climate around sexual assault and allegations that become more public each day, in showcasing this work for the masses without providing any type of clarification, The Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children,” states the petition.

The Met has a long-standing policy against censorship. “Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present, and encouraging the continuing evolution of existing culture through informed discussion and respect for creative expression,” they responded.

The White Skirt by Balthus, 1937, is a painting of Balthus’ wife in her mid-30s. He makes sure that we understand her aristocratic background by the drape, at right.

Balthus was a terrific liar about his own history, changing the details to suit his audience. Genetics refute his tale of being descended from the Polish and Russian nobility: his son died at age two from Tay-Sachs disease, indicating that one of Balthus’ parents was an Ashkenazi Jew. He and his brother both adopted the Rola coat of arms, although any connection to the Polish petit nobility was spurious. 

But there was something about the family that attracted celebrity. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was Balthus’ mother’s lover. Balthus married twice, once to a Swiss aristocrat and once to a Japanese beauty 34 years his junior. His son was a famous London playboy in the 1960s. Balthus’ funeral in 2001 was attended by international celebrities. Bono sang.

Girl in Green and Red, 1944, is also a portrait of Balthus’ wife, who by then was approaching middle age.

“A bad man is the sort of man who admires innocence,” said Oscar Wilde. Balthus may have paid homage to innocence, but he probably slept with it, too. His models Laurence Bataille and Fré´dé´rique Tison both said they had affairs with the artist while in their teens.

There is nothing one can say in defense of The Guitar Lesson. If this wasn’t high art, the owner (a private individual) would be doing time for possessing child pornography. Balthus painted several studies of this, including one with a male teacher.

Equally unnerving was his habit of painting adult women as little girls. His wife was in her early thirties when she posed for The White Skirt, and even older when she posed for Girl in Green and Red. In both cases, he gives her the face and body of an adolescent.

The Guitar Lesson, 1934, Balthus

By the end of his life, Balthus was pretty well sexed-out. In the 1990s, he took a series of 2,000 Polaroids of the youngest daughter of his doctor. Every Wednesday afternoon, from the age of eight until the age of 16, Anna Wahli posed for him, usually semi-naked.  "It took such a long time to change what seemed to be a minute detail and, from my point of view, all the photographs looked alike,” she wrote.

One of 2000 Polaroids taken by Balthus in the last years of his life. If you want, you can buy them in coffee-table book form for about $350. (Courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

When he was 14, Balthus told a friend that he wanted to remain a child forever. That’s hardly exculpatory; I imagine a lot of pedophiles do. Nor is the fact that Balthus is so compelling as a painter. That just makes him a better pornographer than most.

Formally, Balthus’ paintings are brilliant. He took the painting style of the Italian Renaissance, and jazzed it up with vivid color and compositional innovation. But instead of the Virgin Mary, we have his own fantasies about little girls. As social mores change, what do we do with him?

It’s a difficult question. I didn’t appreciate my own work being censored, and I don’t approve of censoring history. I’m equally opposed to sexualizing children, however, and I don’t think high art should get a special pass. However, Balthus’ paintings are now worth millions. They’re not going away any time soon.

Mia Merrill is not asking for the painting to be permanently shelved. “I would consider this petition a success if the Met included a message as brief as, ‘Some viewers find this piece offensive or disturbing, given Balthus’ artistic infatuation with young girls,’” she wrote.

I signed.