PIEYRE DE MANDIARGUES André (1909-1991) - Lot 444

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Lot n° 444
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1000 - 1200 EUR
PIEYRE DE MANDIARGUES André (1909-1991) - Lot 444
PIEYRE DE MANDIARGUES André (1909-1991) Balthus, je me souviens, autograph manuscript signed, circa 1975; 7 leaves in-4 (269 x 209 mm). Black ballpoint pen on green paper, recto only, rare erasures and corrections. Attached: The carbon copy of the text (4 leaves in-4). "Balthus, yes, from his first exhibition raised the curtain on an essential show that since Courbet no one had wanted or dared to show [...]". The writer met Balthus in 1934 during his first exhibition at the Pierre Loeb gallery. This text was published in June 1975 in No. 44 of the magazine XXe siècle and reprinted in 1995 in Quatrième belvédère (pp. 199 to 203). "[...] Balthus's painting is a theatre where movement has been interrupted at a chosen moment. Hence the solitude into which the actors seem to have been thrown; hence the tension, the charm; by rupture of life, as by rupture of current [...] Didn't Artaud, more defiantly, write 'Above the surrealist revolution, above the forms of classical academism, the revolutionary painting of Balthus joins a sort of mysterious tradition'. The great painting of La Rue, in its earliest and later versions, is characteristic in this respect, and one does not need other examples, which would not be lacking, to recognise that this 'mysterious tradition' is the one which guided the approach of several old Italian schools. Without quoting too much, let us recall, in the Tuscan school, Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, in the Ferrarese school, Tura and Cossa, in the Venetian school, Carpaccio. Of the last named, the History of Saint Ursula at the Accademia of Venice, has never ceased to enchant me to the supreme point. Through its humanity, poetry and prodigious cruelty, through the solitude and elegance of the characters drifting from love to death, this vast fresco is a crossroads, the meeting point of Carpaccio with Shakespeare, Artaud and Balthus. If I were to play the game [...] of being able to save one thing, but only one thing, from the art of the West, I would save the History of Saint Ursula. At the same time I would be preserving the best and most important essence of Balthus. Or to be more frank, what I prefer in his humanism [...] For Balthus' humanism is erotic and cruel. It was not the least important thing about the 1934 exhibition that the return of something that had been out of sight since Delacroix and especially since Courbet, and that is eroticism [...]".
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