This early shocker still shocks. Other Surrealist pieces with explicit nudity are findable on the net in high-res museum photos; but for Guitar Lesson, this was the best photo I could find. Even the booklength study Balthus (Skira/Rizzoli, 1979/82) has it only in a small black and white reproduction. Even a century later, it pushes everyone's buttons. Rape; an underage victim; betrayal by a teacher; and a lesbian rapist too.

It's got a cunning reference most of us would miss, but viewers a century ago would catch. The tutor plays her student, whose body echoes her guitar--ukelele, really. That uke at the foot of the canvas echoes the instrument in Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy a generation earlier--a lion in the desert approaching a sleeper with guitar or lute. Different predators, different genders, but parallel predicaments.

Only... it's not what it seems. If the tutor pulled her student's panties, where are they? If she tore them off, did she carefully chuck them across the room, out of our field of vision? Or... did this girl really come to her lesson naked under that dress?

This is either planned consensual roleplaying, or a staged depiction of rape, or a dream. However you explain it, you can't trust what meets the eye. Admittedly, a lot meets the eye. Hard to look past it to think about motives.

Magritte was more obvious. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."

I wanted one painting that shows why Balthus is an uncomfortable figure even among 20th Century artists, whose private lives were often scandalous (and not very private--by intention, as they'd caught on to the advertising maxim "all publicity is good publicity".) But Balthus's paintings are the scandal. While sexual violence is rare in his work, he does frequently paint underage girls, clothed or nude, and this has made modern critics assume he was pedophilic. Yet most of those nudes aren't especially sexual, and I haven't read of any of his models claiming he molested them.

I think the charge is exactly half true: pictures like this convince me he did find underage girls sexually exciting, but he himself said he wanted to portray the world of his models, to portray unselfconscious childhood--not violate it. Orientation isn't action.

Is this relevant for dreamwork? Yes. "Keep calm and look beyond your first, knee-jerk reaction" is a must for those of us who face dreams with scary content. And that includes just about every dreamworker.

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