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The Crimes Against Thérèse Blanchard

12/26/2017

14 Comments

 
Mia Merrill, a human resources manager, happened to see a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it upset her so badly that she started a petition to have it taken down. Her petition garnered more than 10,000 signatures in less than a week. (see below) She did not ask that it be destroyed... just taken down. In fact, she was even okay if it stayed up:  “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’s artistic infatuation with young girls'.”

And here is the Met's response:  “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.”

And here is my response: "Oh, for f*** sake." Literally.
Picture
The painting is titled Thérese Dreaming by Balthus.

Here's the thing...

There was a real Thérese. Her name was Thérese Blanchard, and she was eleven years old in 1936, when she had the misfortune to catch the eye of her Parisian neighbor, Balthus.  She was the daughter of a restaurant worker, and her family may have welcomed, or even needed, the extra income to be had from modeling. In any event, Therese posed for Balthus for the next three years. He made ten paintings of her. The art world considers them his finest work.
PictureThese are Balthus portraits of Thérèse from 1938 and 1939, respectively. She would have been 13 and 14. No, I'm not going to post "Thérèse Dreaming."
Let’s get back to Thérèse. She was a child. She posed for Balthus on numerous occasions for three years. We cannot know if she wanted to pose for him or if she was ordered by her family to do it. In the case of Thérese Dreaming, the child had to hold an awkward and physically uncomfortable position (both arms held over her head) for long stretches of time. She also had to hold an emotionally excruciating position… exposing her elevated crotch and underwear with her legs wide apart. I would submit that the physical and emotional discomfort of the subject were components in of the painter’s choice of pose.  I would also submit that, if Thérèse is dreaming at all, it is of something to make it stop. In fact, the subject’s eyes appear to be squeezed tightly shut, her eyebrows contracting from the effort.
 
Non-consensual voyeurism is a form of sexual abuse, and a twelve-year-old child is not of age to give consent to exposing herself in her underwear to a painter. Repeated non-consensual voyeurism constitutes stalking. Thérèse Dreaming is actually evidence of a crime—documentation of the crime scene. And, yes, harm is happening. The child is being objectivized, fetishized. In posing, she is being compelled to participate. What is happening to her is a violation of her personhood and of her rights to privacy.

PictureLarry Rivers and his victim, daughter Emma.
The Met appears to be unclear on this point.
 
Seven years ago, the art world was very unclear about a film by Larry Rivers titled “Growing.” The film had been part of an archive of his work belonging to the Larry Rivers Foundation, but in 1910, it was just sold, with the archive, to New York University.
 
“Growing” was a film in which Rivers filmed his daughters every six months over a period of at least five years. According to one of his daughters, when she objected at the time, he called her “uptight” and  “a bad daughter.”  When she confronted him as a teenagers, he gave the justification that his “intellectual development had been arrested.”

PictureIn 2016, Emma Rivers, showed a series of dollhouse sculptures depicting her childhood memories... the "Stage Set" series.
Rivers edited the footage of his naked daughters into a 45-minute film that he was intending to include in a 1981 exhibition of his work. The mother of the girls stopped him.
 
Initially, New York University refused the now-adult daughters’ request that the film be destroyed. They did agree to restrict access to the film for the lifetime of the women, insisting that “Growing” was the work of a great artists and not child pornography.  The public did not agree, and the story went viral. In the end,  NYU did not want the controversy, and they returned the film to the Larry Rivers Foundation. The Foundation has said they will never allow the film to be shown publicly.
 
The simple fact is, “Growing” is child pornography, and it is illegal to buy it or to own it. This is a film where the father’s voice is heard telling his reluctant daughters to take off their clothes. The camera zooms in on the breasts or the genitalia, while the father asks prurient questions about their boyfriends and comments on the changes in their bodies. The filming began, like Balthus’ paintings of Thérèse,  when one of the subjects was eleven.

PictureBathus' portrait of his colleague Andre Derain. Also 1936.
I blogged about the Larry Rivers situation at the time, and in my blog I made a radical proposition intended to break the deadlock over, “When an important artist makes child pornography is it still art?”  I will repeat that proposition here:
 
I propose that childhood be recognized as a sovereign state, and that children be treated as the indigenous populations of a world colonized by adults.
 

Most folks don’t want to think of children that way, because most of us don’t want to consider how many children are living as captives, how the socialization of the child is really about her colonization. It’s easy for us not to think about children this way, because they do not have a voice, a movement, a lobby, a dime—and they never will.  Children do not have a language specific to their experience with which to frame a paradigm of their sovereignty. And that lack of language is one of the most priceless aspects of their culture. It is a culture of astounding plasticity, adaptability. It is a culture of magic, of naiveté, of gullibility, of heartbreaking innocence and spontaneity… and nearly endless opportunities for exploitation.  

PictureCultural restitution of artwork stolen by the Nazis.
“Cultural restitution” is a term that refers to returning stolen works of art and artifacts and bones of indigenous cultures. When the Nazis raided the museums of Europe to enhance their own prestige, they were operating according to the laws of their own corrupt regime. These seizures are not recognized as legitimate by a world restored to sanity, and, after a slow start, the stolen works of art are being identified and returned. It is immaterial that they may have been sold to third and fourth parties unaware of their original status as Nazi contraband. The rights of the victims have been affirmed.
 
“Cultural restitution” also refers to art and artifacts taken from indigenous cultures to be housed in museums or historical collections. Skeletons and burial artifacts are being returned to the tribes from whom they were taken by archeologists. There is an acknowledgement that a sovereign people have a right to their history and their culture, and that it is a violation of the sovereignty for another people, even a conquering one, to appropriate the artifacts of that history or culture.
 
This obscene film by Larry Rivers was an artifact of his daughters’ raided and stolen childhoods. It was never his to bequeath, and it had no place in the archive passed on to the Larry Rivers Foundation, and New York University had no right to acquire it. It belonged to the daughters.

PictureThérèse Blanchard by her perpetrator.
Thérèse Blanchard is not alive today. She, unlike Rivers’ daughters, cannot stake a claim to the documentation of her abuse. But in continuing to display works like this (and much of Balthus’ canon), we perpetuate the prurience of the perpetrators.
 
Children have a right to their lives, to their experience, to their privacy. And when a colonizing, predatory adult invades this world, exploiting and monetizing their vulnerability and raiding their innocence in the name of “art,” children should have the right of an indigenous people to claim the artifact that bears witness to their invasion and colonization. And if the child victims are no longer here to stake that claim, then we should make sure that these crime-scene artifacts, no matter how "tasteful" or "masterful" the execution, will never be revered as works of art.

14 Comments
Gerry Capone
12/27/2017 10:46:21 am

The first painting Balthus did with Therese was called, I think “Therese with a Cat,” and “Therese’s Dream” also includes a cat lapping milk. Thus Therese as model is a pet too, because Balthus doesn’t see the cat detracting from his sexualized model, but accentuating her vulnerable status.

Balthus goes even further in his 1939 painting “The Guitar Lesson” which is deeply embedded in the Sadean tradition. Here he attempts to be a step ahead of his critics, by using a female guitar teacher as the rapist of her young girl pupil. The model here is Laurence Bataille, who was the daughter of Balthus’s concierge.

This painting was initially shown in the Galleria Pierre in Paris. However, the owner decided to hide it off in a back room as a kind of “peep show” addition to the exhibition. The painting was last shown publicly in 1977 at a NYC gallery.

I agree that these works are sex crimes: the key being the non-consensual age of these models and the obvious cruelty forced on them which is apparent in the works themselves. The extreme objectification is not only conceptual but, as in pornography, actual.

As to whether it’s art or good art... Why does art stick around and finally at some point become enshrined by western culture. In the case of Balthus, a very repetitive artist, I would think controversy and sexism has worked in his favor.

Reply
William
9/25/2021 06:20:06 pm

Get your facts straight. Laurence Bataille was not Balthus's conceirge's daughter, but the daughter of Silvia Bataille, Balthus met Laurence when she was seventeen and lived with her for three years. Later she became a distinguished psychoanalyst.

Reply
Argos
10/25/2021 12:08:01 pm

"... and the obvious cruelty forced on them which is apparent in the works themselves. "

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens

Reply
Eleanor Cowan link
12/28/2017 07:26:05 am

Grateful that pedophile manipulation and control under the guise of ‘art’ is brought to the fore by protesters who aren’t fooled and who have the confidence to voice the truth.

Reply
John Plotz
6/28/2018 10:05:08 pm

I just read an article by Lev Mendes in the New York Review about Balthus -- one of a seemingly endless series, all saying more or less the same thing. Following up on the internet, I stumbled on this excellent piece by Carolyn Gage.

In my view -- the view of a 70-year-old retired lawyer, male, with no expertise in art and no sexual interest in young girls -- there is no contradiction between "high art" and crime. A piece of art can be both evidence of a crime, or itself a crime, or itself a disgusting degradation of its subject -- and yet be a work of high artistic merit. I see no contradiction. By way of example, I think Sally Mann's photograph "Venus After School" -- http://www.artnet.com/artists/sally-mann/venus-after-school-Wu17arwtJHuIXyETEYkGkw2 -- is an outstandingly good photograph -- an erotic photograph -- AND a piece of child abuse that Mann should have been prosecuted for.

Emphatically, I do not think that one's worth as an artist is a defense against a criminal charge. Ezra Pound was a traitor. What difference does it make that he was also a great poet (though I myself never saw his greatness)? Roman Polanski was an out-and-out rapist. Why should his competence as a director shield him? Why should his crimes detract from the worth of his films?

And then we come to the question of exhibiting Balthus's paintings of pubescent girls -- Therese Blanchard in particular. Are they pornographic? Of course, Should Balthus have been prosecuted for child abuse back in 1937? Yes, I suppose so. Should the paintings be exhibited today? I don't know. Yes, I guess, with extravagant apologies. Think of the many paintings depicting, say, torture -- like Titian's "Flaying of Marsyas", or Goya's drawings of the French invasion of Spain. Great art -- but should that art be displayed today? Answer: Yes. Will some viewers get a sexual frisson from the art? Yes -- but that shouldn't prevent the display.

Query: Titian did not have an actual real human being as a model for his "Flaying" (though he probably did for his "Venus of Urbino"). If you are a museum director, should it make a difference? Suppose Balthus had merely imagined a pubescent girl instead of having an actual Therese Blanchard in front of him. Would that make a difference?

Another query -- sincere -- I'd really like to know -- what happened to Therese Blanchard? According to the Web she died at 25. What circumstances? Did those Balthus paintings, or her posing for them, have any effect on her life?

Please forgive my rambling.

Reply
carolyn gage link
6/28/2018 10:40:32 pm

Hi, John, I appreciate your comments and I am sad that his victim died so young. She would be unique among child victims of pedophiles, if her abuse had not had a significant effect on her life.

Reply
Pervert
10/25/2021 12:10:17 pm

" is an outstandingly good photograph -- an erotic photograph -- AND a piece of child abuse that Mann should have been prosecuted for."

You are mentally ill and should be locked up to protect society from your perversity

Reply
Samuel
1/17/2023 11:13:36 pm

I just noticed a similar artwork to Balthus's "Thérese Dreaming":

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/117241/girl-with-cat

In this painting, the girl (a different model) is facing the viewer, and with her legs in a similar pose. I wonder if the only reason Thérese is facing away in "Dreaming" is because Balthus wanted her to be staring off into space? ("Girl with Cat" clearly wasn't painted with that in mind.)

Besides, I have a strong feeling Larry Rivers' "Growing" would have been a great deal less abusive (and would potentially be seen more like "The Century Project") if he had raised the girls in a "casual nudity" setting from a young age.

Reply
Anthony Mendez
4/20/2023 08:54:16 pm

"Non-consensual voyeurism is a form of sexual abuse, and a twelve-year-old child is not of age to give consent to exposing herself in her underwear to a painter. Repeated non-consensual voyeurism constitutes stalking. Thérèse Dreaming is actually evidence of a crime—documentation of the crime scene. And, yes, harm is happening. The child is being objectivized, fetishized. In posing, she is being compelled to participate. What is happening to her is a violation of her personhood and of her rights to privacy."

I totally disagree with this point of view.

Reply
chloe
6/12/2023 12:28:42 am

I don’t have much experience with art at all, and I’m a teenage girl. Later teens, but still relevant. My first exposure to this piece was through Maya Hawke’s song ‘Thérèse’. When I searched for the meaning of the lyrics I was led to the painting, interpreting it the context of the music. For Maya, this piece evoked a feeling of nostalgic girlhood, a careless shoulder stretch, a propped leg revealing milk white underwear (milk being associated again with children and white with innocence- a recurring motif in the color of the cat in the foreground). She mentions half formed thoughts of boys and being more interested in ceilings, conjuring an image of tentative curiosity, vulnerability, and burgeoning sexuality. She repeats “it’s just Thérèse” again and again. So this is how I first felt about the painting- simply Thérèse. A figure whose naïveté and authenticity I could relate back to, pity, and envy all at once. Reading further into the controversy on having the piece in the MET via this post, I learned of Balthus’s fixation on young girls. How the position Thérèse took was not carefree but rather painful hold. How her family may have forced or pressured her into this role as a model. And how, of course, the 1930s were a time where women and girls were readily objectified and sexualized by men to a greater extent than today. I now don’t know exactly how to feel. Is it moral to display a girl that was taken advantage of by this painter and by society as a whole? Probably not. But did this art speak to me? Did it speak to Maya and to the thousands of girls who listened to that song? Is it making me (who has never commented in an art feed before) and everyone else in this thread write long winded responses? It certainly is. A conversation has been sparked, and Thérèse’s feelings are now being considered by strangers almost 100 years later. We are not forgetting her. We are helping to transform her memory from a victim to the contemplative, innocent, free child she should have had the opportunity to be. I think she deserves that. Don’t take this to mean we should ignore Balthus’s obvious corruption. The art blurb beside the painting in the MET should expose his wrongdoing without restraint. What I’m trying to say is that we women should take control of the narrative, and Maya Hawke does an excellent job of this. Please go listen to her song on Spotify:)

Disclaimer:
My writing is not as elegant or well-informed as some other comments. I may not have my “facts straight.” I hope you can see past my lack of analogies and elaboration where I would’ve referenced the ever growing debate of separating artists from their work. Honestly that’s just too complicated. It’s past midnight, and I don’t want to start over-generalizing and destroying my point. If anyone bothers to read this, thank you and please write back. I’d love to discuss and promise to only judge in the fashion of a critical intellectual lol

Reply
Carolyn Gage link
6/12/2023 07:37:11 am

thank you chloe...

Reply
Diego
6/18/2024 08:55:39 pm

If the girl had to endure unsufferable periods of time modeling, i dont want even to think how much the cat must have suffered having to stay still in front of the milk not being allowed to drink it, for the same periods of time.

Reply
Liam J. Ostermann
1/23/2025 03:20:40 am

It has been asked what happened to Therese Blanchard who died at 25 . According Herve Guibert in 'L'Homme au chapeau rouge' Editions Gallimard 1992 (translated into English by James Kirkwood as 'The Man in the Red Hat' Quartet Books 1993) Balthus told him "... poor little Therese did not live long, died of some atrocious disease, I seem to remember it was the Koch TB bacillus or something like that..." page 70 of the 1993 Quartet Books edition.

I be interested to know if those who take exception to the work of Balthus would want similar action taken against 'Amor Vincit Omnia' by Carravagio for which a real boy, Cecco Boneri, modelled; Donatello's David or the Roman sculpture Spinario (boy with a thorn) boy are no doubt based on real 'underage' boys. In the case of the Spinero the model was possibly a slave so with even less freedom than Terese Blanchard.

I have no answers but if you are going to stop the exhibition of the Balthus painting for its 'erotic' nature and the use of models which could not give consent then it must be applied consistently to both sexes and all times.

Reply
Claudia B
3/27/2025 10:05:17 pm

The comparison to Donatello's David and the Caravaggio is absurd. Those subjects were not posing as themselves, they were costumed as fictional characters of David and Cupid. The pictorial language (nude boys) is not exceptional; it was fashionable and therefore not shocking.Also the societal norms of Rome or the Baroque period are not comparable to 20th c.laws .

Therese the child is fully herself and that is the point. She is the subject being oggled and violated, asked to sit for extended periods in sexual poses that exploited her. She wasn't costumed as a character ; she wasn't playacting. The exploitation of her agency, privacy and childhood is on full view. And to the person who said the cat had to sit there. No, that is not how it works. You don't get a cat to pose.

Reply



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    “… Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America…”--Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

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