BALTHUS — Paysages et natures mortes, Galerie Henriette Gomès, Paris, 1977

Balthus. Paysages et natures mortes. Galerie Henriette Gomès, Paris, 2 June–8 July 1977. Exhibition invitation. Printed card on cream stock; 15 × 10.5 cm. Red typography to recto; verso blank.

A small invitation for an exhibition of landscapes and still lifes at Galerie Henriette Gomès, Paris, in the summer of 1977. The exhibition is independently documented under the title Paysages et natures mortes de Balthus, and at least one major painting, Le Gottéron, is recorded as having been shown there.

The subject of the exhibition is important precisely because of how unfashionable it appears in relation to 1977. That year, the Centre Pompidou opened in Paris as a radically different model of cultural institution. Documenta 6 was being described as the “Mediendocumenta,” expanding attention toward photography, film, video, artist books and the self-conscious examination of artistic media. In New York, Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition brought together Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch and Philip Smith, helping announce a generation increasingly concerned with reproduced and mediated images. Punk was transforming visual culture through deliberate rejection of established taste. And in the middle of this, Balthus was exhibiting landscapes and still lifes. Trees. Mountains. Rooms. Fruit. Flowers. Places.

This was not Balthus attempting to catch up with contemporary art. By 1977 he had just completed fifteen years as director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici in Rome and was entering another phase of withdrawal. He and Setsuko moved that year into the Grand Chalet at Rossinère in Switzerland, which would become his home and working environment for the remainder of his life. Seen from that perspective, Paysages et natures mortes feels less like a conservative genre exhibition than a declaration of separation.

The audience was probably quite specific. Galerie Henriette Gomès had a longstanding relationship with Balthus and his work, and the invitation assumes familiarity rather than explaining why the artist matters. Its design reflects that constituency: no reproduction, no manifesto, no graphic intervention. Cream stock, restrained red type and the name BALTHUS. The object looks almost insulated from 1977.

Today we tend to reconstruct an era through the practices that appeared to predict the future: conceptual art, photography, performance, appropriation, institutional critique. But at exactly the moment Pictures was beginning to destabilise the idea of the original image, someone in Paris received this little cream card inviting them to look at landscapes and still lifes. Both belong to 1977. The invitation preserves another version of contemporary art history: not what was becoming new, but what refused the requirement to become new.

A temporary card for paintings concerned with permanence. A conservative-looking object surviving from a year of cultural rupture. The avant-garde moved forward. Balthus withdrew. Both entered the archive.

Condition: very good. Light age toning and minor handling consistent with period ephemera.

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