See the picture, The Street
The Picture
Oil on canvas, MoMA, New York
The Street, Balthus’s first large painting, was one of several that scandalized audiences when it was included in the artist’s earliest solo exhibition, in Paris in 1934. Balthus rendered each of the figures in his scene of Paris’s rue Bourbon-le-Chateau frozen mid-movement; none of them seem to notice the aggressive sexual struggle underway at the painting’s far left. Balthus eschewed stylistic categorization, but The Street was of great interest to Surrealist artists for its rendering of a crowded street as an uncanny site of mental isolation and for its exploration of sexual taboos.
Though set in a real place—the rue Bourbon-le-Château, Paris—The Street has the intensity of a dream. The figures in this strange frozen dance are precisely placed in a shallow, frieze-like line, yet except for the struggling couple on the left, they don’t interact at all. The toque-wearing chef isn’t even human—he is a pavement sign for a restaurant—but he stands no more stiffly than the other characters, who, stylized and solid, seem less to walk than to pose.
Part of the work’s tension comes from the diversity in the traditions it fuses. Its receding architectural perspective emulates Renaissance geometry, for Balthus much admired Quattrocento artists, particularly Piero della Francesca. But another, quite different influence links him to his Surrealist peers: long after painting The Street, he would still say that he had never stopped seeing things as he saw them in childhood. He well knew children’s books such as Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories, with their illustrations by John Tenniel, and, indeed, the girl caught in the tussle has been said to be Alice herself; the youth in the centre resembles Tweedledum or Tweedledee; and the man with the plank could be Carroll’s carpenter, without his walrus companion-though his simultaneous resemblance to a figure in Piero’s Discovery and Proving of the True Cross, at Arezzo (c. 1455), suggests a different symbolic register.
Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 165.
Cited by Jacques Lacan
Seminar XIII[xxii] 18th May 1966 :
See Session of Seminar XIII : 18th May 1966 : Jacques Lacan, at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19660518 or 19651201)
pXVIII 227-228 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : Velasquez is manifestly so much there in order to mark for us the importance of this distance, that he is not, notice, you must have noticed it but you did not say it – he is not within range, even with his elongated brush, of being able to touch the picture.
Naturally, people say he stood back to see better. Yes. Of course. But after all, the fact that obviously he is not within reach of the picture is here the capital point, in short, that the two key points of this picture are not simply the one who for his part is also escaping …………. towards a window, towards a gap, towards the outside, posed there as if in parallel to the gap in front, and on the other hand Velasquez whose (49) knowledge, what he tells us there is the essential point. I will make him speak in order to end, not to end because I still want you to see Balthus’s picture all the same, to say things in a Lacanian language since I speak in his place, why not?
In reply to “Let me see”: “You do not see me from where I am looking at you” (tu ne me vois pas d’ou je te regarde). It is a fundamental formula to explicate what interests us in every relationship of looking, it is a matter of the scopic drive and very precisely in exhibitionism as well in voyeurism, but we are not here to see whether, in the picture, people are tickled nor whether something is happening.
We are here to see how this picture inscribes for us the perspective of the relationships of the look in what is called phantasy is so far as it is constitutive. There is great ambiguity about this word phantasy. Unconscious phantasy, all right, that is an object. First of all it is an object in which we always lose one of the three pieces that are in it, namely, two subjects and one (o). Because do not believe that I have the illusion that I am going to bring you the unconscious phantasy as an object. Without that, the drive of the phantasy would spring up elsewhere. But what is disturbing, is that every time (50) people speak about unconscious phantasy, they also speak implicitly about the phantasy of seeing it. Namely, that the hope, from the fact that people are chasing it, and this introduces a lot of confusion into the matter. I, for the moment, I am trying to give you, properly speaking, what is called a frame (bati), and a frame which is not a metaphor, because unconscious phantasy depends on a frame, and it is this frame that I do not despair, not only of making familiar to those who listen to me but of making it get under their skin. This is my goal and this is an absolutely risky exercise which, for some people, appears to be derisory, that I am pursuing here, and that you only hear distant echoes of.
I am now going to pass around among you, thanks to Gloria, Monsieur Balthus’s image. There is a Balthus exhibition on at the moment. It is at the Pavillon de Marsan, I am giving you the information free. For a modest sum, you can all go and admire this painting.
Well then, it is a little homework that I am giving to some people. I am giving them the whole vacation for it. Let us see. Look at this picture. I hope to get some reproductions of it but it is not very easy. I owe this one to Madam Henriette Gomez who happened, it was moreover for her astonishing, who found that she had it in her (51) filing index. There you are, there is a slight difference in the picture that you will see, you see, contrary to what happens in Velasquez because obviously there are questions of epoch.
Here, in this picture, people are being tickled a little and to ensure the tranquillity of the present owner this hand has been slightly raised by the author.
I showed it to him again last evening, I must say that he told me that, all the same, it was very much better composed like that. He was sorry for having made a concession that he thought he ought to ……….., it was a sort of counter-concession. He said : “After all, perhaps I am doing that to annoy people, so why not drop it”, but it is not true. He had put it there because it ought to be there. In any case, all the other things which are there ought also to be there and, when all is said and done, when I saw this picture, I had seen it once previously and I no longer remembered it, but when I saw it this time, in this context, you will attribute this to what I do not know, to my lucidity or to my delusion, you have to decide, I said: ”That is Las Meninas”. Why is this picture Las Meninas*? This is the little piece of holiday homework then that I am leaving to the best of you.
* Les Meninas by Diego Velázquez (1656)
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This picture is also on the picture slider and at ‘Sigmund Freud’s & Jacques Lacan’s use of the Pictures shown in the Slider : first posted 8th February 2023 : Julia Evans’, see this site /August of this year or last’s.