“It is precisely those harmonies which have become dissonant we want to study in every way we can, for they had a harmonic origin. They changed. We changed. We need to know why.”
- Guy Davenport
Thérèse Dreaming
Guy Davenport
Guy Davenport on Balthus
“…Both Balthus and Spencer give us the surface of the canvas as a mimesis of natural textures, not paint. In Picasso, Van Gogh, on out to…Pollock, it is paint. The difference is a philosophical one, perhaps even a religious one.
Spencer’s iconography of saws, ironwork, human flesh reseen without the authority of neoclassical conventions, kettles, drying laundry, the location of shadows in naked light, parallels Balthus’s return to a realism of an accomplished eye that demands accuracy of detail and that generalizes nothing.”
- Guy Davenport, from “A Balthus Notebook”
Jeune fille a la fenetre (1955)