Nobody's daughters: Balthus and the sexualization of adolescents in interwar France

Abstract

In 1934, the painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, 1908–2001) opened his first one-man show in Paris, comprising five erotic and sexually violent scenes involving adolescents and younger children. Over the following decades, he continued to depict girls in ways that art historians and critics have widely discussed as morally problematic. There is no shortage of art historical writing on Balthus, but his work raises a relatively overlooked question for the cultural history of twentieth-century France: how to explain the extraordinary success of an artist whose works depict, in a stylized realism, sexualised scenes involving children? To respond to this question, this article first sketches the limits of interwar French society's toleration when it comes to sexual innocence and adolescence, with a focus on Balthus’s Surrealist milieu. It then interrogates how in 1934 and after, Balthus's work pushed up against those limits and yet largely avoided condemnation. It does so by setting his earlier work against the popularity of the genre of news known as faits divers, and then by examining, in relation to his later work, how his painterly style and approach to depicting adolescents continued to discourage moral questioning. As such, it seeks to approach Balthus anew in an era that demands a more direct scrutiny of any idealisation of sexual exploitation.