M and I went to see the Balthus show at the Met on Sunday, and coincidentally, in the new issue of the NYRB I snagged from my office (man this sentence makes me sound pretentious) there was a review of the show by Ian Buruma. Serendipity! Here’s a gross fact I learned from the piece:
“His painting The Guitar Lesson shows a music teacher, modeled after Balthus’s own mother, maliciously pulling the hair and pawing the crotch of a half-naked girl in white knee socks sprawled helplessly across her lap. Robert Hughes called this picture of molestation “one of the few masterpieces among erotic paintings by Western artists in the last fifty years.”
The Guitar Lesson, not on view in the Met show, was once stored at the Museum of Modern Art, then sold to the filmmaker Mike Nichols, and now belongs to the Niarchos family—the old shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos had it in his palatial bedroom.”
Ouch.
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