The week with four thursdays 1949

Curator: Today we are looking at Balthus's "The week with four thursdays," painted in 1949 using oil paint. Editor: It feels...suffocating. That muted palette and those elongated limbs, it's like a dream turning sour. Even the cat seems sinister! Curator: Notice how the painting is structured; Balthus carefully orchestrates a series of spatial ambiguities. The reclining figure dominates the foreground, but her gaze, or lack thereof, directs us elsewhere. Editor: To the girl at the window, almost blending with the light? She feels like a ghost, or maybe a suppressed part of the first girl's mind? And that impossible cat, standing at attention like it rules this strange domestic space? Curator: The cat introduces an element of the absurd, a deliberate disruption of conventional portraiture. Formally, it serves to balance the composition, mirroring the verticality of the girl by the window. Semiotically, it is, as you say, a subtle signal, maybe, that nothing here is quite as it seems. Editor: I keep coming back to the title. What week has four Thursdays? Time feels distorted here, elastic. It adds to the claustrophobia; like they are trapped inside the artist’s distorted memory. Or the model is trapped in her languid dreaming. Curator: It might refer to the disorienting post-war era; a society grappling with uncertainty and disillusionment. Balthus distills psychological unease via the pictorial language of interrupted actions. No one completes an action. Editor: It's haunting. It taps into some primal fear, the kind that lurks just beneath the surface of everyday life. Not bad, for something done with paint, in my opinion. Curator: An unsettling harmony rendered meticulously through tonal variations and compressed spatial relationships. It offers us a profound analysis, but also questions representation itself.