The neighborhood is designed to keep nonresidents like you and me standing on one toe, like the implied triangle of the red and white rectangular signs hanging off the building on the left, held in tension by the red sphere below. The wobbly world contained within this canvas was solidly built by a 25-year-old French-Polish master. Piero della Francesca, “Brera Madonna” (1472), tempera on panel, 98 x 59 inches, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy (via Wikipedia) (click to enlarge) But what about the ferocity of sweaty lechery? Someone deserves a swift kick in the nuts. Here is a Parisian backstreet washed clean. Radios and sighs and kitchen aromas are stifled behind closed windows. There are no meows, beeps, or screams on Balthus’s street, the rue Bourbon-le-Chateau. The pavement absorbs all sounds of footsteps and a bouncing red ball. The carpenter is busy building invisible walls to hide the splintered seams between nightmares and dreams. No place for handshakes, which would be too everyday even for the least otherworldly, least forbidding, of Balthus’s oeuvre.
The arrangement of the figures form a see-through barrier blocking our entry. But there are no greeters in this neighborhood with its random alliances of silence. “The Street” greets viewers at the entrance to the Rome exhibit, with an oil study hanging beside it (the two images have never been displayed together before). Adding to this impression, the painting is hung low, our eyes and feet close to those of the people on the street. They could as likely step out of their painting into the museum as museum-goers could step into the canvas.
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