"The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century"
About this Quote
Balthus isn’t mourning painting so much as staging a provocation: a patrician defense of craft as both discipline and moral posture. When he claims the “craft of painting has virtually disappeared,” he’s drawing a bright line between knowing how to make a painting and merely having something to say. The jab at “the painters of this century” lands as an intentionally broad indictment of modernism’s speed, celebrity, and concept-first swagger - a world where the idea can eclipse the hand.
The intent is less nostalgic than territorial. Balthus built a career on slow, classical looking pictures that arrived in a century addicted to rupture: Cubism’s fracture, abstraction’s retreat from the figure, the readymade’s insolence, Pop’s embrace of the commercial image. In that context, “craft” becomes his counter-weapon, a way to reassert hierarchy: training over trend, apprenticeship over aura, drawing over declaration. It’s also a neat rhetorical move because it shifts the debate away from subject matter (where his eroticized adolescent figures made him vulnerable) toward competence, where he can pose as a custodian of standards.
The subtext is a kind of cultivated disdain - not just for modern art’s outcomes, but for its permission structure. If painting can be anything, then the painter’s authority shrinks. Balthus wants authority restored: the right to judge, to exclude, to insist that difficulty matters. Even the phrase “for evidence one has only to look” performs certainty, daring the reader to disagree and, in doing so, revealing the quote’s real subject: power disguised as craft.
The intent is less nostalgic than territorial. Balthus built a career on slow, classical looking pictures that arrived in a century addicted to rupture: Cubism’s fracture, abstraction’s retreat from the figure, the readymade’s insolence, Pop’s embrace of the commercial image. In that context, “craft” becomes his counter-weapon, a way to reassert hierarchy: training over trend, apprenticeship over aura, drawing over declaration. It’s also a neat rhetorical move because it shifts the debate away from subject matter (where his eroticized adolescent figures made him vulnerable) toward competence, where he can pose as a custodian of standards.
The subtext is a kind of cultivated disdain - not just for modern art’s outcomes, but for its permission structure. If painting can be anything, then the painter’s authority shrinks. Balthus wants authority restored: the right to judge, to exclude, to insist that difficulty matters. Even the phrase “for evidence one has only to look” performs certainty, daring the reader to disagree and, in doing so, revealing the quote’s real subject: power disguised as craft.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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