Balthus

Born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908, Balthus was a prominent figure in modern painting despite working in a self-consciously pre-modern style. He rejected the twentieth century trend toward abstraction, though his work had definite elements of surrealism. He cultivated an image as a quintessential old world European aristocrat, adopting the title "Count" and living in a series of palatial country estates. He was best known -- or at least, most notorious -- for his paintings of young girls in dreamlike reveries, occasionally in various states of undress and vaguely erotic scenarios. His most shocking work, The Guitar Lesson, has not been shown publicly in decades.

ARTICLES

John Russell reviews the life and career of Balthus, the artist who died this week at age 92.
New York Times

Michael Kimmelman reviews the life, work and pronouncements of Balthus, who died last week at age 92. The article features lots of arch denunciations of American hypocrisy, puritanism and philistinism from the quintessential European esthete intellectual. As Kimmelman notes, "Like many Europeans, Balthus found ridiculous the American assumption that art is a moral occupation." Alas, Kimmelman makes some annoyingly illogical comparisons with the recent Brooklyn Museum flaps, a prime example of the journalistic fallacy of treating two events as intimately interconnected just because they happened around the same time. Kimmelman also makes the asinine assumption that anyone who doesn't consider Balthus one of the century's great artists must be a standard American hypocritical, puritanical philistine, as if no one could possibly hold a cultured, cosmopolitan, libertine worldview and yet place Balthus several notches below the pantheon.
New York Times

Robert Hughes reviews the career of Balthus in Time, avoiding the extremes of praise and derision often surrounding his work. "The definitive influence on him, however, was the 15th century Italian painter Piero della Francesca, whose cycle of murals Legend of the True Cross Balthus saw on a visit to Italy in 1926. Piero's unique combination of physical intensity and complex, abstract formality seems to have shaped Balthus' deepest pictorial ambitions. But the streak of ambiguous desire he brought to his imagery of the nude was peculiar to Balthus, and it invested his work with a permanent scent of scandal."
Time

The New York Times prints an excerpt from Nicholas Fox Weber's new biography of Balthus.
Salon

Jed Perl profiled the artist Balthus, "a go-for-broke dreamer and a ferociously self-critical craftsman," in 1999.
The New Republic

Philippe Dagan visited with Balthus, or "Monsieur le comte," in 1991. "Thus he lives not at all in the manner of a painter, conventionally understood, but in the opulent and quiet style of a world-weary aristocrat. He allows no casualness in his dress; a cashmere scarf is knotted at his neck; he leans on a dark wooden cane encrusted with mother-of-pearl; he comports himself like a successful country gentleman."
New Criterion

John Goodrich reviews the Balthus retrospective at Beadleston Gallery. "Is Balthus really the world’s greatest living painter, as some maintain? Or is he simply the creator of a 'unique, marginal oeuvre' (as described in the Guggenheim’s recent Rendezvous exhibition catalogue)? Whatever one’s viewpoint, this mini-retrospective covering nearly fifty years of the reclusive artist’s life is an eye-opener."
Review NYC

Valery Oisteanu reviews the Balthus retrospective at Beadleston Gallery. "Balthus is not only a figurative painter, he proves himself as a narrative, erotic, mysterious, suggestive, and master of the human form. He's bent on exploring the secret dreams and desires of his subjects. His art also suggests dark humor and cynicism, with a haunted atmosphere."
NY Arts Magazine

GALLERIES

Orazio Centaro has two Balthus paintings online: La Chambre de Cathie (1933) and La Chambre Thurque (1966)
Orazio Centaro

Balthus's most notorious work, The Guitar Lesson (1935) has not been shown publicly in decades, though The New Yorker printed a full-page color reproduction as part of a 1999 article about Balthus.