Balthus

Who2 Biography: Balthus, Artist

Born: 29 February 1908
Birthplace: Paris, France
Died: 19 February 2001
Best Known As: 20th century French painter of The Guitar Lesson

Name at birth: Balthasar Klossowski de Rola

Balthus was a French painter in the second half of the 20th century, famous for his somewhat disturbing paintings of pubescent girls and for his association with some of the greats in modern art, including Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Balthus painted figures and landscapes in a more traditional style than his cubist and surrealist contemporaries, and throughout his career was supported primarily by other artists and dealers. He claimed to be a count, but he was also known to be a prankster who fabricated biographical details while keeping his real life story a mystery. In the 1970s the exhibition of The Guitar Lesson in New York caused a controversy (the painting depicts a suggestive act between a teacher and pupil) and became his most famous work as a result. In his later years he rarely granted interviews and lived in near isolation in Switzerland with his family.

In 1932 Balthus illustrated an edition of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Balthus

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(born Feb. 29, 1908, Paris, Fr. — died Feb. 18, 2001, La Rossinière, Switz.) French painter. Born in Paris to Polish parents, he was considered a child prodigy and was encouraged by family friends including Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Without formal training, he supported himself through commissions for stage sets and portraits. He had his first one-man show in 1934. In the midst of 20th-century avant-gardism, he explored the traditional categories of European painting: the landscape, the still life, the subject painting, and the portrait. He presented ordinary moments of contemporary life on a grand scale and utilized traditional, Old Master painting techniques. Balthus is best known for his controversial depictions of adolescent girls. His disturbing and erotic images and his carefully cultivated persona made him an international cult figure. From 1961 to 1977 he served as director of the French Academy in Rome.

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Art Encyclopedia: Balthus

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(b Paris, 29 Feb 1908). French painter, illustrator and stage designer. Appreciated for many years by only a handful of collectors, and ostensibly out of step with the modern movement, Balthus's classically inspired work won the recognition and admiration of a wider public only late in his career. Although he received no formal training, he came from a highly artistic family background. His father, Erich Klossowski (1875-1949), was a painter and art historian, born to an aristocratic family in East Prussia and the author of a book on Daumier; his brother, PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI, was to become a painter and writer; and his mother, Elizabeth Spiro, was also a painter. Beginning in 1919, she engaged, under the name of Baladine, in a long-lasting relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, providing etchings to accompany many of his poems. In this environment Balthus met the writers Andr? Gide and Pierre-Jean Jouve, as well as Pierre Bonnard, who gave him his earliest guidance. Rilke also acted as Balthus's mentor, writing the preface for an album of drawings by the 13-year-old artist entitled Mitsou (Zurich, 1921), the story of a cat in which narrative themes and stylistic traits of the later work are already apparent.

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Biography: Balthus

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Balthus (born 1908) was a European painter and stage designer who worked within the Western tradition of figure painting. He is best known for his paintings of everyday life invested with a sense of mystery, symbolism, and eroticism.

Balthus was born Balthasar Klossowski in Paris, France, on February 29, 1908, to a Prussian family that had left Silesia five years before. His parents were both painters, as was his brother, and they lived in Switzerland and Berlin during the turbulent years before, during, and after World War I. Balthus did not study at the Academy of Fine Arts or in the studio of another painter. Instead, he taught himself by copying masterpieces at the Louvre Museum, as had many painters in the 19th century. He did attend sketching classes at the Grand Chaumiere, an informal art school, where he received criticism from Maurice Vlaminck and Pierre Bonnard, two prominent painters associated with the Ecole de Paris.

Balthus copied works by the French Neo-Classic painter Nicolas Poussin and the Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a close friend of his mother, urged him to use his childhood nickname, Balthus, as his artistic name. Married twice with three children, Balthus lived most of his life in Paris but moved in 1977 to near Beatenburg, Switzerland.

Painting Style and Subject Matter

Balthus' work was always figurative, despite the strong tendency toward abstraction in the 20th century. Throughout his career the subject matter of his work was fairly constant, depicting street scenes, landscapes, portraits, and interior domestic scenes. He is best known for his paintings of adolescents, especially young girls who are often nude or partially clothed in intimate, indoor settings where the painter - and by extension the viewer - appear to be peeking. His manner of painting is often considered classical: the figures and objects are weighty geometric forms that appear frozen in time. Balthus' composition, derived from Renaissance models, used the inter-relationship of figures, objects, and setting to create a sense of space. The atmospheric stillness in Balthus' painting infuses the everyday activities he depicted with a psychological sense of mystery and intrigue.

Balthus worked outside the main artistic currents that developed in Paris, but during the 1930s he was in contact with the Surrealist group and he became friendly with the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. The Surrealists, who were interested in the psychology of the unconscious, were drawn to the dream-like quality of Balthus' paintings, their sexual ambiguity, and his confessed desire to shock. Balthus himself disavowed the erotic content in his work.

Later, he built up thick layers of oil paint on his canvases, called an impasto, and painted with bright, warm colors which made the paintings look like frescos executed in plaster. The sense of bright light in them is almost Mediterranean, and it appears to dissolve distinctions between things, a pronounced difference from the sharp focus of his earlier work. Besides this further reference to Renaissance art he also executed work based on Japanese prints.

Designed Stage Sets for Artaud

Balthus did not paint continuously throughout his life. He also designed stage sets and costumes for the theater, most notably for his close friend Antonin Artaud, the dramatist, actor, and poet. Balthus did the set for Artaud's Les Cencis in 1935, a violent and scandalous story, and for productions of Shakespeare and Mozart's Cosi fan Tutti. Balthus fought in World War II in Alsace and was the director of the French Academy in Rome between 1961 and 1977.

Career Flourished First in U.S.A

Earlier in his life Balthus was better known as a painter in the United States than in Europe where he had only two one-person shows between 1934 and 1946. The artist owes much of his fame to two American businessmen who took note of him in the 1930s. Connecticut millionaire James Thrall Soby, purchased Balthus' The Street in 1937 and then donated the painting, revised by the artist himself to censor an image of a boy grabbing a girl's crotch, to The Museum of Modern Art in 1956. Pierre Matisse, an art dealer, gallery owner, and son of Henri Matisse, began selling Balthus' work in New York in the 1930s. Matisse gave Balthus seven one-man shows in his gallery over the years as well. He was shown more in New York during the 1930s and 1940s and was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984.

Work Difficult to Categorize

Balthus' work is difficult to place within the history of 20th century art as he never embraced any of this century's major art trends and he was never associated with any group of artists. He remained a kind of solitary figure. His insistence on working figuratively ran counter to much of the mainstream art of this century, although he was held in esteem by many abstract painters for his purely formal strengths. Picasso owned at least one of Balthus' major paintings. What identifies his work as modern is the presence of a highly personal psychology in his painting and the challenging nature of his subject matter. Balthus' art is not an art of experimentation or innovation, but one of reinvestigation of traditional painting attitudes and techniques and of an attempt to reinvest Western painting conventions with new meaning. A renewed interest in Balthus can be explained by recent attempts by art historians to revise the orthodox history of modernism to explain the work of ideosyncratic artists such as Balthus and to acknowledge the continuing presence of figurative art throughout the 20th century.

Life and work

Early life

In his formative years his art was sponsored by Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. His father, Erich Klossowski, a noted art historian who wrote a monograph on Daumier, and his mother Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro (known as the painter Baladine Klossowska) were part of the cultural elite in Paris. Balthus's older brother, Pierre Klossowski, was a philosopher and writer influenced by theology and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Among the visitors and friends of the Klossowskis were famous writers such as André Gide and Jean Cocteau, who found some inspiration for his novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929) in his visits to the family.

In 1921 Mitsou, a book which included forty drawings by Balthus, was published. It depicted the story of a young boy and his cat, with a preface by Balthus's mentor, Rilke. The theme of the story foreshadowed his life-long fascination with cats, which resurfaced with his self-portrait as The King of Cats (1935). In 1926 he visited Florence, copying frescos by Piero della Francesca, which inspired another early ambitious work by the young painter: the tempera wall paintings of the Protestant church of the Swiss village of Beatenberg (1927). From 1930 to 1932 he lived in Morocco, was drafted into the Moroccan infantry in Kenitra and Fes, worked as a secretary, and sketched his painting La Caserne (1933).

A young artist in Paris

Moving in 1933 into his first Paris studio at the Rue de Furstemberg and later another at the Cour de Rohan, Balthus showed no interest in modernist styles such as Cubism. His paintings often depicted pubescent young girls in erotic and voyeuristic poses. One of the most notorious works from his first exhibition in Paris was The Guitar Lesson (1934), which caused controversy due to its sexually explicit depiction of a girl arched on her back over the lap of her female teacher, whose hands are positioned on the girl as for playing the guitar: one near her exposed crotch, another grasping her hair. Other important works from the same exhibition included La Rue (1933), La Toilette de Cathy (1933) and Alice dans le miroir (1933).^[2]

Balthus, Guitar Lesson, 1934, oil on canvas

In 1937 he married Antoinette de Watteville, who was from an old and influential aristocratic family from Bern. He had met her as early as in 1924, and she was the model for the aforementioned La Toilette and for a series of portraits. Balthus had two children from this marriage, Thaddeus and Stanislas (Stash) Klossowski, who recently published books on their father, including the letters by their parents.

Early on his work was admired by writers and fellow painters, especially by André Breton and Pablo Picasso. His circle of friends in Paris included the novelists Pierre Jean Jouve, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Joseph Breitbach, Pierre Leyris, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris and René Char, the photographer Man Ray, the playwright and actor Antonin Artaud, and the painters André Derain, Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti (one of the most faithful of his friends). In 1948, another friend, Albert Camus, asked him to design the sets and costumes for his play L'Etat de Siège (The State of Siege, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault). Balthus also designed the sets and costumes for Artaud's adaptation for Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci (1935), Ugo Betti's Delitto all'isola delle capre (Crime on Goat-Island, 1953) and Barrault's adaptation of Julius Caesar (1959-1960).

Champrovent to Chassy

In 1940, with the invasion of France by German forces, Balthus fled with his wife Antoinette to Savoy to a farm in Champrovent near Aix-les-Bains, where he began work on two major paintings: Landscape near Champrovent (1942-1945) and The Living Room (1942). In 1942, he escaped from Nazi France to Switzerland, first to Bern and in 1945 to Geneva, where he made friends with the publisher Albert Skira as well as the writer and member of the French Resistance, André Malraux. Balthus returned to France in 1946 and a year later traveled with André Masson to Southern France, meeting figures such as Picasso and Jacques Lacan, who eventually became a collector of his work. With Adolphe Mouron Cassandre in 1950, Balthus designed stage decor for a production of Mozart's opera Così fan tutte in Aix-en-Provence. Three years later he moved into the Chateau de Chassy in the Morvan, living with his niece Frédérique Tison and finishing his large-scale masterpieces La Chambre (The Room 1952, possibly influenced by Pierre Klossowski's novels) and Le Passage du Commerce Saint-André (1954).

Later life and work

As international fame grew with exhibitions in the gallery of Pierre Matisse (1938) and the Museum of Modern Art (1956) in New York City, he cultivated the image of himself as an enigma. In 1964, he moved to Rome where he presided over the Villa de Medici as director (appointed by the French Minister of Culture André Malraux) of the French Academy in Rome, and made friends with the filmmaker Federico Fellini and the painter Renato Guttuso.

In 1977 he moved to Rossinière, Switzerland. That he had a second, Japanese wife Setsuko Ideta whom he married in 1967 and was thirty-five years his junior, simply added to the air of mystery around him (he met her in Japan, during a diplomatic mission also initiated by Malraux). A son, Fumio, was born in 1968 but died two years later.

The photographers and friends Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck (Cartier-Bresson's wife), both portrayed the painter and his wife and their daughter Harumi (born 1973) in his Grand Chalet in Rossinière in 1999.

Balthus was one of the few living artists to be represented in the Louvre, when his painting The Children (1937) was acquired from the private collection of Pablo Picasso.^[3]^[4]

Prime Ministers and rock stars alike attended the funeral of Balthus. Bono, lead-singer of U2, sang for the hundreds of mourners at the funeral, including the President of France, the Prince Sadruddhin Aga Khan, supermodel Elle McPherson, and Cartier-Bresson.

Style and themes

Balthus's style is primarily classical. His work shows numerous influences, including the writings of Emily Brontë, the writings and photography of Lewis Carroll, and the paintings of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Simone Martini, Poussin, Jean Etienne Liotard, Joseph Reinhardt, Géricault, Ingres, Goya, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Courbet, Edgar Degas, Félix Vallotton and Paul Cézanne. Although his technique and compositions were inspired by pre-renaissance painters, there also are eerie intimations of contemporary surrealists like de Chirico. Painting the figure at a time when figurative art was largely ignored, he is widely recognised as an important 20th century artist.

Many of his paintings show young girls in an erotic context. Balthus insisted that his work was not erotic but that it recognized the discomforting facts of children's sexuality. His favourite composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Ancestral debates

Balthus's father, Erich, was born to a noble Polish family (szlachta) of the Rola coat-of-arms, that lived in Prussia. This was evidently the reason for his son Balthus, to add, later, "de Rola" to his family name Klossowski, which was in szlachta tradition (if he had lived in Poland, the arrangement of his last name would have been Rola-Kłossowski or Kłossowski h. Rola.) The artist was very conscious of his Polish ancestry and the Rola arms was embroidered onto many of his kimono, in the style of Japanese kamon.

According to most biographies, Balthus denied having any ethnic Jewish heritage, claiming that biographers had confused his mother's true ancestry. In Balthus: A Biography, Nicholas Fox Weber, who is Jewish, attempts to find common ground while interviewing the painter by bringing up a biographical note stating that his mother was Jewish. Balthus replied, "No, sir, that is incorrect," and explained: "One of my father's best friends was a painter called Eugen Spiro, who was the son of a cantor. My mother was also called Spiro, but came apparently from a Protestant family in the south of France. One of the Midi Spiros - one of the ancestors - went to Russia. They were likely of Greek origin. We called Eugen Spiro "Uncle" because of the close relationship, but he was not my real uncle. The Protestant Spiros are still in the south of France."^{[citation needed]}

Balthus continued by saying he did not think it was tasteful to forcefully correct these errors, given his many Jewish friends. Nicholas Fox Weber concludes in his biography that Balthus was lying about this "biographical error," though the exact reasoning behind this was never explained. Weber states that the name "Spiro" is only a Greek given name, though this is incorrect, as the personal name serves equally as a surname. ^[5] Balthus consistently repeated that if he, in fact, was Jewish, he would have no problem with it. In support of Weber's view, Balthus did make dubious claims about his ancestry before, once claiming he was descended from Lord Byron on his father's side.^{[citation needed]}

According to Weber, Balthus would frequently add to the story of his mother's ancestry, saying that she was also related to the Romanov, Narischkin, and lesser known Raginet families among others, though conceding Balthus never claimed his mother's side was from a straight unmixed lineage. Despite the sensationalism with which Weber says he told these stories and the method in which Weber presents Balthus's claims, Balthus never saw himself as contradictory. The true extent of what Balthus was saying for artistic effect and what he was saying in earnest is unknown as he did not stick seriously to all his claims. Weber never interviewed Pierre Klossowski, the painter's brother, in order to confirm or deny their mother's ancestry. Weber did, however, present a quote by Baladine's lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in which Rilke states that the Spiros were descended from one of the richest Sephardic-Spanish families. In a seemingly conclusionary note, Weber writes: "The artist neglected, however, to tell me that, in the most miserable of ironies, Fumio (Balthus's son) suffered from Tay-Sachs disease."^{[citation needed]} Weber holds this up as evidence that Balthus was lying about not having Jewish ancestry, given Tay-Sachs is a heavily Ashkenazic-Jewish disease. This, of course, conflicts with Rilke's report of the Spiros being Sephardic, which Weber later says was a "Rilke embellishment" and also brings up the relevance of the preponderance of Japanese infantile Tay-Sachs, since Balthus's wife was Japanese.

Nude with arms raised, oil on canvas, 1951 by Balthus

Influence and legacy

His work has strongly influenced several contemporary artists; among them Jan Saudek, Will Barnet, Duane Michals, John Currin, Eli Levin, Emile Chambon and Elena Zolotnitsky.

He has also influenced the filmmaker Jacques Rivette of the French New Wave. His film Hurlevent (1985) was inspired by Balthus's drawings made at the beginning of the 1930s. As he says in an interview with Valerie Hazette: "Seeing as he's a bit of an eccentric and all that, I am very fond of Balthus (...) I was struck by the fact that Balthus enormously simplified the costumes and stripped away the imagery trappings (...)".

A reproduction of Balthus's Girl at a Window (a painting from 1957) prominently appeared in François Truffaut's film Domicile Conjugal (Bed & Board, 1970). The two principal characters, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his wife Christine (Claude Jade), are arguing. Christine takes down from the wall a small drawing of approximately 25 x 25 cm and gives it to her husband: Christine: "Here, take the small Balthus." Antoine: "Ah, the small Balthus. I offered it to you, it's yours, keep it."

In the third book of the Hannibal Lecter Series (Hannibal), it is implied that the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter is a distant cousin of Balthus.

Harold Budd's album The White Arcades features a track titled "Balthus Bemused by Color."

Robert Dassanowsky's book Telegrams from the Metropole: Selected Poems 1980-1998 includes a work titled "The Balthus Poem."

Christopher Hope, born 1944, wrote a novel, "My Chocolate Redeemer" around a painting by Balthus, "The Golden Days" (also 1944) which is featured on the book jacket.

Stephen Dobyns' book The Balthus Poems (Atheneum, 1982) describes individual paintings by Balthus in 32 narrative poems.

His widow, Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, heads the Balthus Foundation established in 1998.

Films on Balthus

Damian Pettigrew, Balthus Through the Looking Glass (72', Super 16, PLANETE/CNC/PROCIREP, 1996). Major documentary on and with Balthus filmed at work in his studio and in conversation at his Rossinière chalet. Shot over a 12-month period in Switzerland, Italy, France and the Moors of England. Won UNESCO Grand Prize, Lausanne International Art Festival Best Photography Prize including Official Selection 8th International VUE SUR LES DOCS Marseille. Collector's Edition ARTE DVD.

References

^ Klossowski de Rola, 18
^ Balthus lessons - five controversial works by the French artist Art in America, Sept, 1997 by Sabine Rewald
^ [1] Los Angeles Times 19 February 2001
^ [2] Telegraph.co.uk 19 Jun 2001
^ Behind the Name: S

Bibliography

Aubert, Raphaël (2005). Le Paradoxe Balthus. Paris: Éditions de la Différence
Balthus (2001). Correspondance amoureuse avec Antoinette de Watteville: 1928-1937. Paris: Buchet/Chastel
Clair, Jean and Virginie Monnier (2000). Balthus: Catalogue Raisonné of the Complete Works. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Davenport, Guy (1989). A Balthus Notebook. New York: Ecco Press
Neret, Gilles (2003). Balthus. New York: Taschen
Klossowski de Rola, Stanislas (1996). Balthus. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Roy, Claude (1996). Balthus. Paris: Gallimard
Vircondelet, Alain (2001). Mémoires de Balthus. Monaco: Editions du Rocher
Von Boehm, Gero (author) and Kishin Shinoyama (photographer) (2007). The Painter's House. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel
Weber, Nicholas Fox (1999). Balthus, a Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf ISBN 0-679-40737-5

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Preceded by Jacques Ibert	Director of the French Academy in Rome 1961–1977	Succeeded by Jean Leymarie

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	Museum of Modern Art: Balthus - At the Pompidou (1983 Visual Arts Film)
	Balthus: Through the Looking Glass (1997 Visual Arts Film)
	Pierre Klossowski

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Balthus
Balthus by Damian Pettigrew (1996)
Birth name	Balthasar Klossowski
Born	February 29, 1908(1908-02-29) Paris, France
Died	February 18, 2001 (aged 92) Rossinière, Switzerland
Nationality	French
Field	Painting, Drawing, Watercolor
Works	The Street (1933-35) The Mountain (1937) Nude Before a Mirror (1955)
Awards	Praemium Imperiale