Balthus (ICON EDITIONS) - Hardcover

De Rola, Stanislas Klossowski

3.56

9 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0064312755 ISBN 13: 9780064312752

Publisher: Icon, 1983

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A selection of the paintings of Balthus is accompanied by a brief analysis of his artistic style

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About the Author:

Olivier Zahm is the cofounder and editor in chief of Purple Fashion. He is an accomplished photographer and has curated exhibitions at art institutions worldwide.

Internationally exhibited Japanese painter Setsuko Klossowska de Rola is the widow of Balthus and the honorary president of the Balthus Foundation.

From Booklist:

Balthus is almost as famous for his reclusiveness and reluctance to divulge personal information as for his provocative paintings of young women, a fact his eldest son addresses with some pique in his introduction to this superb volume, the most extensive collection of his father's lustrous and enigmatic work yet published. Klossowski de Rola defends Balthus' insistence on privacy, then offers a few tantalizing biographical facts and a set of striking photographs of the artist. Readers are free, then, to study and interpret Balthus' intriguing, unsettling, brilliantly stylized, richly textured, and strongly composed street scenes, portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. His most famous paintings date from the 1930s and 1940s and feature, in his son's words, "languid adolescent" girls, images Klossowski de Rola insists are "untouchable archetypes of purity," but which are clearly erotic works of the highest order. Balthus, nearly 90 and still working, is a profoundly sensual painter, both in his handling of paint and in his subject matter. What's "pure" and magnificent here is the artist's sense of eroticism and immense talent. Donna Seaman

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