ABSTRACT
Balthus has been acknowledged as one of the great artists of the 20th century. His childhood in Europe was one in which he experienced paternal abandonment, poverty, homelessness, and witnessing his mother’s obsession with the poet Rilke. Balthus seemed to have restored his narcissistic equilibrium by lying about his background and calling himself “The Count de Rola.” Letters written to him by Rilke when he was 13 appear to contain hidden homoerotic messages. Balthus’ portraits of little girls in bare dress, of children playing, or reading with their buttocks in the air, and of a guitar teacher inappropriately holding a child on her lap, are all considered to be pedophilic in nature. It is hypothesized that Balthus dealt intrapsychically with Rilke’s attentions through a lifetime of staring at his young models while painting them.
