Aux sources du paysage balthusien : la photographie

Résumé 0

When Balthus’private archives were deposited at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, his atelier yielded a last mystery: a series of preparatory photographs that were used as sketches for a large landscape painted in the beginning of the 1940s, Le Gottéron. Five years after the discovery of the very numerous polaroids from his last years of creation, this new body leads to rethinking the rapports of the painter with photography. The camera visibly integrated the Balthusian palette well before the incapacity of the body to draw, which tends to challenge the commonly accepted assumption of its purely late and palliative use. Distant from the motif of the young girl associated with Balthus, these photographic notes also translate the importance of landscape in the work and its function as a formal laboratory. This article will thus deal with the twists and turns of the work focusing on an almost unknown medium and a less studied pictorial type. It opens a new analysis of the artist’s creative process, documented through numerous photographs and at the origin of a photographic esthetic. In 1943, the shooting device that will preside over the images of the 1990s is already in place.