Parisians, most of them children with strangely adult faces, stand transfixed or walk past each other, engaged in what the urban theorist Jane Jacobs called “an intricate sidewalk ballet.” That is the subject of Balthus’s 1933 painting, “The Street,” which has inspired the artist Peter Doig to organize an exhibition by that name at Gagosian, one that is as tantalizing and enigmatic as its modernist centerpiece.
Balthus — the name adopted by Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, a Polish-French artist whose life spanned almost the entire 20th century — considered “The Street” to be his first major painting. It is owned but infrequently displayed by the Museum of Modern Art.
Doig, who received a midcareer retrospective at Tate Britain in 2018, is a figurative painter with a masterly flair for color and light. Born in Scotland and raised in Trinidad and Canada, he lives in Trinidad and London now. Doig has said he was captivated by this “endlessly beguiling” painting, in which “you feel like you’re witnessing something unfold before your eyes.”
Instead of turning to Balthus’s influences (Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, Seurat), he draws together 22 other works that conjure similar impressions of city life, turning the gallery into a prism that refracts the different moods of the painting.
Foreboding stillness is the atmosphere that Balthus favored, and he knew that nowhere is lonelier than a big city. Giorgio de Chirico, the master of deserted classical plazas, is represented by a beautiful early work, “The Delights of the Poet” (1912), whose mysterious flatness resonates with “The Street.” An untitled cityscape by Mark Rothko dates from about 1936, before Rothko had discovered his trademark style. Behind a statue of a top-hatted man, it represents a row of New York buildings, including the Flatiron, with windows looking out blankly in the gray light. Two formidable paintings by Martin Wong of locked and shuttered storefronts show how easily an open-door welcome in a city can turn into an impassive rebuff.
Balthus had a penchant for painting pubescent girls, often in precarious and menaced positions. In the most controversial portion of the picture, which scandalized viewers at the time it was shown, a demurely dressed young female passerby is being assaulted. (Before Balthus repainted it in 1955 so that it could be shown at MoMA, “The Street” was more explicit, with the boy’s hand groping under her skirt.)
Doig has expanded on this sinister element by including the British artist Edward Burra’s “Beelzebub” (c. 1937), a watercolor of the eponymous demon looking on delightedly as warriors spear the inhabitants of a classical city that is collapsed in ruin. That mood of horror in the shadow of Hitler and impending war is amplified in the harrowing “Hölle der Vögel” (“Bird’s Hell,” 1937-8), one of the first paintings Max Beckmann made in Amsterdam after fleeing the brutal Nazi regime in his native Germany. It depicts giant birds cutting into the flesh of a shackled naked man laid out on a table, overseen by an exultant bare-breasted woman who is emerging from a giant pink egg and raising her arm in the fascist salute.
Balthus makes a more oblique allusion to suffering in the image of a white-clad workman near the center of the picture, who is carrying a wooden plank on his shoulder. The image is drawn from a Piero fresco that Balthus greatly admired and that suggests Christ carrying the cross. In “Tribute to Winston Rose” (1982), the Grenadian-born, English artist Denzil Forrester reimagines the wake for Rose, a mentally ill neighbor and friend of Forrester in the Caribbean community of London’s East End, who died while in police custody. With an apartment tower looming in the background to represent the oblivious city, it’s a powerful tableau that brings out the pain and violence that simmer beneath Balthus’s cool surfaces.
A city can also be beautiful. Balthus uses the color red as an accent that recurs horizontally across his canvas. But it is a daytime scene, and the lurid allure of a modern city emerges only at night under artificial illumination. Beauford Delaney’s “Untitled (Greenwich Village Street, New York),” painted in 1945-6 and rendered in gorgeous greens, blues, pinks and purples, depicts a pedestrian approaching elevated train tracks in the lit-up darkness. Doig has paired it with his own “Night Playground” (1997-8), one of three of his works in the exhibition. He uses a palette much like Delaney’s to evoke a luminescent New York, with ghostly figures passing behind a metal fence.
Not all the paintings connect to “The Street” in a way I could detect, but they rhyme with other pictures in the show — and anyway, they were so good that I didn’t care. “Rimbaud,” made in 1975-6 by Frank Auerbach, the great London painter who died this month, plays off Forrester’s “Tribute to Winston Rose.” It dreams up a church altar in which a large portrait of the transgressive French poet, depicted with red hair and brilliant blue eyes, stands before an array of candles. Francis Bacon’s atypical “Jet of Water” (1988), a painting of a high-powered spume inundating a man in a three-dimensional enclosure of the sort that usually figures in a Bacon picture, relates to the quiet fountain in the de Chirico pool; the red and black surround of Bacon’s water outlet also rhymes with the elegant cloche worn by a woman in “The Street.”
Doig, with his intuitive and sly connections, turns curation into performance art — an appropriate response to “The Street.” Like Balthus, he recognizes that, whether we know it or not, in a modern city we are all actors, and every boulevard and alleyway is a stage.
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