ABSTRACT
Gustave Courbet, in particular, loomed larger in his art than any element of style or sensibility specifically traceable to the postwar scene, and indeed Balthus's only connection with the hurly-burly of that scene seemed to be the distance that separated him from it. What distinguished Balthus's attachment to the past was a total lack of defensiveness. There was about many of Balthus's pictures an aura almost of voyeurism, of a passion that exceeded the purely pictorial and engaged the innermost recesses of fantasy and appetite. Balthus often took over from his nineteenth-century master specific poses and motifs; he seemed to want to evoke and engage the past at the very moment he was disclosing the specifications of his own obsessions. The art of Balthus, at least, retains a distinctly modern cast, if only because he interiorizes so much of what, in his nineteenth-century prototypes, was firmly given as objective and beyond the personal.
