The URL internet
address of this Balthus page is:
http://larspinky.angelfire.com/balthus.html
as mentioned at PAT Dr Thibault Special4u Special4u
BALTHUS, Baltusz Klossowski de Rola,
a
French painter, 1908-2001
Texts and
pictures 2009 retrieved from:
The New York Museum of Modern Art
Balthus (Baltusz Klossowski de Rola)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balthus
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&um=1&sa=1&q=Balthus+&aq=f&oq=&aqi=&start=0
http://www.rue89.com/2008/06/25/balthus-l-erotisme-pour-faire-sursauter-les-pantins
Since 1933
by Balthus,
"Guitar Lesson" 1934 at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balthus
“André Derain” 1936,
About Balthus (Baltusz Klossowski de Rola)
by Jean Clair at Grove Art Online
© 2009
Oxford University Press
Source: Oxford Art Online
French
painter, illustrator and stage designer 1908-2001.
Appreciated
for many years by only a handful of collectors,
and
ostensibly out of step with the modern movement,
Balthus’
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
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 André 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.
After
living in
there he
studied Old Master
paintings in the Louvre,
particularly
those of Poussin. In 1926 he
went to Tuscany to study the
frescoes of Piero della Francesca.
Apart from
a cycle of religious paintings in tempera
(1927)
for the
works are
Parisian scenes, which betray influences not only
from Old
Masters but also from his friends Pierre Bonnard and
The
culminating work of this first period is The
Street
(1933;
of the Quattrocento is blended
with memories of the
illustrations
for the children’s story Struwwelpeter by
Heinrich
Hoffmann, and those
for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in
Wonderland by John
Tenniel.
In April
1934 Balthus exhibited a group of erotic paintings,
including Cathy
Dressing (1933; Paris, Pompidou),
based on
illustrations he had done in 1933 for Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering
Heights, and the Guitar
Lesson (1934; priv. col.,
see 1983
exh. cat., p. 343), at Pierre Loeb’s Galerie Pierre.
Their
unusual character and overt sexuality, allied to the
fact that
Loeb was then representing the Surrealists,
and
that the
exhibition was enthusiastically reviewed by
Antonin Artaud, created
the false myth of Balthus as a
Surrealist.
Through
Artaud, Balthus became involved with stage design
(Artaud’s
Les Cenci, adapted from P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley,
and Stendhal, Folies-Wagram,
1935), an activity crowned by
his sets
for a production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte
at
Aix-en-Provence in
1950.
During
this period Balthus also established himself as an
outstanding
portrait painter with penetrating studies
of André Derain
(1936
(1937–8
while
continuing to explore a troubling eroticism in
pictures
of childhood and puberty such as
(1938;
private col, see 1983 catalogue, no. 52),
http://www.rue89.com/2008/06/25/balthus-l-erotisme-pour-faire-sursauter-les-pantins,
and at Google
images),
(1937,
Louvre) once owned by Picasso, and
The
Salon (1941–3
In the
mid-1930s Balthus returned to his earlier interest
in
landscape, notably in The
Mountain (Summer)
(1937
Conceived
in homage to Poussin,
and especially Courbet,
this
represents memories of the mountainous terrain near
Berne in which he had lived as a
child and to which he was
to return
in 1977.
His
interest in landscape was further confirmed when he
took refuge
from the war at Champrovent
in Savoie and
matured
after his move c. 1954–5 to the château de Chassy
in the
romantic Morvan mountains in Burgundy.
The period
at Chassy is distinguished by a marked
lightening
of the palette, dryness of the paint surface,
occasionally
mannered systematic brushwork and
conspicuous
lack of depth, as in
Large Landscape with Trees (the Triangular Field)
(1955; H.
Gomès priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., p. 181).
In 1950,
while still living in
paintings
that rank as masterpieces:
The Room (1952–4; priv. col.,
see 1983 exh. cat., p. 171)
and Passage du Commerce-St-André (1952–4; priv. col.,
see 1983
exh. cat., p. 175).
The
claustrophobic atmosphere of the former, full of
intrigue
and anxiety, could be taken as an illustration
of
Artaud’s concept of the Theatre of Cruelty, although
in mood it
is also reminiscent of Henry Füseli.
The other
is a companion piece to his earlier painting
The Street. Taking as its setting
a pedestrian alley
near where
Balthus lived in
the Cour
de Rohan near the Odéon), it is also an
allegory
of the ages of man, and a comment on history,
particularly
on the French Revolutionary events with
which this
street was closely associated.
In 1961
André Malraux, then French Minister of Culture,
appointed
Balthus as Director of the Académie de France
in the
Villa Medici,
This
brought about an abrupt change of direction in his
work, as
his energies became directed by his taste for
the
theatre and for history.
He
supervised the restoration of the Villa Medici,
rediscovering
ancient frescoes, and replanted the
gardens in
their old splendour.
His few paintings
from this period, such as the
Turkish Room (1966; Paris,
Pompidou), and some
from later
years, as in the Painter and his Model
(1981;
Paris, Pompidou), are set in and around the villa.
They
betray a final influence, that of Japanese art,
confirmed
by a trip to
his second
wife.
From Grove
Art Online
© 2009
Oxford University Press
The
Though set
in a real place—the rue Bourbon-le-Château,
Part of
the work's tension comes from the diversity in the traditions it fuses. Its
receding architectural perspective emulates Renaissance geometry, for Balthus
much admired Quattrocento artists, particularly Piero della Francesca. But
another, quite different influence links him to his Surrealist peers: long
after painting The Street, he
would still say that he had never stopped seeing things as he saw them in
childhood. He well knew children's books such as Lewis Carroll's
"Alice" stories, with their illustrations by John Tenniel, and, indeed,
the girl caught in the tussle has been said to be Alice herself; the youth in
the center resembles Tweedledum or Tweedledee; and the man with the plank could
be Carroll's carpenter, without his walrus companion-though his simultaneous
resemblance to a figure in Piero's Discovery
and Proving of the True Cross, at Arezzo (c. 1455), suggests a different
symbolic register.
Works:
Balthus
(Baltusz Klossowski de Rola) [13]
About:
Balthus (Baltusz Klossowski de Rola)
Department:
Painting
and Sculpture [1971]
Classification:
Painting
[1207]
Date: 1933
