Balthus: A Biography - Hardcover

Weber, Nicholas Fox

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679407375 ISBN 13: 9780679407379

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

The first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliantly rendered, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art.

The story of Balthus's life has been shrouded by contradiction and hearsay, most of it his own invention; over the years he created for himself a persona of mystery, aristocracy, and glamour. Now, in Nicholas Fox Weber's superb biography, Balthus, the man and the artist, stands revealed as never before.

He was born in Paris in 1908 to Polish parents. At age twelve he first stepped into the spotlight with the publication of forty of his drawings illustrating a story about a cat by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was then Balthus's mother's lover and a crucial influence on the young boy. From that moment, Balthus has never been out of the public eye.

In 1934 his first exhibition, in Paris, stunned the art world. The seven canvases drew attention to his extraordinary technique -- a  mix of tradition and imagination informed by the work of Piero della Francesca, Courbet, and Joseph Reinhardt, but unique to the twenty-six-year-old artist -- and to their provocative content; one of the paintings, The Guitar Lesson, was so powerful in its sadomasochistic imagery that it was deemed necessary to remove it from public display.
Continuously since then, Balthus's work has provoked both great opprobrium and profound admiration -- as has the artist himself, whether collaborating with Antonin Artaud on his Theater of Cruelty, transforming the Villa Medici into the social center of Fellini's Rome in the 1950s, or competing for the artistic limelight with his friends Picasso and André Derain.

The artist's complexities are clarified and his genius understood in a book that derives its particular immediacy from Weber's long and intense conversations with Balthus -- who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer -- as well as his interviews with the painter's closest friends, members of his family, and many of the subjects of his controversial canvases.

Weber's critical and human grasp (he acutely analyzes the paintings in terms of both their aesthetic achievement and what they reveal of their maker's psyche), combined with his rich knowledge of Balthus's life and his insight into the ideas and forces that have helped to shape Balthus's work over the past seven decades, gives us a striking, illuminating portrait of one of the most admired and outrageous artists of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas Fox Weber was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from Columbia College and Yale University. He has curated retrospectives of the work of Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Leland Bell, and others, and has been for the past twenty-three years the director of the Josef Albers Foundation. He is the author of nine previous books, among them Patron Saints, Leland Bell, and The Art of Babar. He lives in Bethany, Connecticut, with his wife, the novelist Katharine Weber, and their two daughters.

From the Inside Flap

ll-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliantly rendered, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art.

The story of Balthus's life has been shrouded by contradiction and hearsay, most of it his own invention; over the years he created for himself a persona of mystery, aristocracy, and glamour. Now, in Nicholas Fox Weber's superb biography, Balthus, the man and the artist, stands revealed as never before.

He was born in Paris in 1908 to Polish parents. At age twelve he first stepped into the spotlight with the publication of forty of his drawings illustrating a story about a cat by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was then Balthus's mother's lover and a crucial influence on the young boy. From that moment, Balthus has never been out of the public eye.

In 1934 his first exhibition, in Paris, stu

Reviews

A highly regarded art historian (Patron Saints), Weber ingeniously structures his biography of 91-year-old Balthazar Klossowska, or Balthus, by draping his voluminous investigations over facts that emerged during his visit with the famously reclusive painter and his Japanese wife at their elegant Swiss chalet in 1991. A French citizen of Polish ancestry who has claimed descent from Polish nobility, the Romanovs and Lord Byron, Balthus survived a childhood of economic hardship and displacement with the help of his mother's lover, poet Ranier Maria Rilke. In his work, Balthus uses Old Master coloring to depict scenes in canvases whose atmospheric haze and violated figures (many of them highly eroticized adolescents) belie the compositions' sturdy grids. Weber explores Balthus's many influences, from the work of Piero della Francesca to psychoanalytic theory and his brother's fascination with the Marquis de Sade. Again and again, Weber insists that the artist articulate the intentions behind each and every element in his work. Of course, no painter could, and Balthus, whether from age, puckishness or the sincere conviction that his art must speak for itself, toys with Weber throughout their conversations. The friction between the two forces Weber to do his ownAat times heroicAresearch. Whether visiting a sex crimes unit in Manhattan, the New York apartment of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos or an acquaintance from Balthus's days as director of the French Academy in Rome, Weber assiduously records the evidence for his psychosexual view of Balthus's paintings. In the process, Weber does justice to both the artist and his art. If he occasionally adopts a gossipy tone, that's a minor flaw in a book that will remain a splendid account of a complex life and as fine an artist's biography as this season is likely to produce. 16 color plates not seen by PW; 116 b&w illus. First serial to the New Yorker. U.K rights, Weidenfeld &Nicholson. Reader Subscriptions Book Club selection. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With the artist's approval, Weber (Patron Saints) has created a portrait of the elusive and mysterious Balthus. Probing the inner man and his work, the author partially explains the mystique that has surrounded this critically acclaimed and self-invented painter whose surreal, sexually charged images are both disturbing and haunting. The artist would like to set the record straight for posterity, insisting that there is nothing psychological about his work, that he is merely painting everyday life. But through extensive meetings with Balthus over a period of years at his castle in Switzerland and a study of various documents, Weber interprets the myth and symbolic representations in the significant paintings, peeling away their meaning layer by layer to uncover the man who made them. More than official in tone (unlike prior biographers, such as Jean Leymarie) Weber is questioning, affectionate, and convincingAyet he seems to solve only half of the puzzle. While the length of this well-illustrated book may be a deterrent, it should create a buzz in art circles, keeping everyone guessingAwhich may have been Balthus's intention all along. Recommended for larger public libraries and all 20th-century art collections.AEllen Bates, New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction."
--  Oscar Wilde
i.
When Balthazar Klossowski turned six, he had a large birthday party in his family's apartment in Paris. Birthdays were a funny business for "Baltusz" -- as everyone called him. Since he had been born on February 29 in 1908, his family did not know precisely when to celebrate except on leap years. Nonetheless, as the boy anticipated his friends' arrival, he was in high spirits. He had a plan.

It was a cozy home full of art and books -- in a building on the Rue Boissonade, near the Boulevard Montparnasse in the fourteenth arrondissement. Baltusz's parents were both painters, his father an art historian as well, and along with Baladine's winsome watercolors and Erich's vigorous oils hung canvases by Cézanne and Delacroix, as well as a Géricault drawing and Japanese woodcuts. Baltusz's little friends entered dressed in their finery, in his eyes "all very beautiful with their white lace collars."
Once the nurses and governesses left the children on their own, the birthday boy took charge. Addressing the other youngsters, Baltusz announced that the time had come for them "to eat badly." There was a chocolate cake, and they all plunged in. Everyone got his collars and cuffs filthy with frosting. Everyone except for Baltusz, who remained spotless. When the nurses and governesses returned, all the other children were chastised or slapped, while Baltusz escaped punishment.

The story was told to me a lifetime later by the eighty-two-year-old Balthus -- the Count de Rola -- in the sitting room of his vast eighteenth-century chalet in a small French-speaking village in the Alps. "It's part of my bad side," he explained, referring to the way he had trapped others into temptation while keeping himself clean.

"A very naughty boy, and until now he has never changed," laughed his forty-eight-year-old Japanese-born wife, Setsuko, who had encouraged him to tell me the tale.

I had met both of them for the first time that afternoon. Balthus's reputation was that he loathed writers on art and would not grant interviews. In an era when many successful artists preen like movie stars, he has managed to give the impression that he prefers to live in isolation, as if the occasions when he has been quoted or photographed are accidental slips. In 1977, at the time of a rare Balthus show in New York -- the first in a decade -- Robert Hughes wrote of the artist in Time magazine that "at 69 he has no public face" and that there were no anecdotes about him in circulation, thanks to his own careful control. I had scant hope that he would alter his reclusive pose for me.

John Russell had begun his introduction to the catalog of the 1968 Balthus retrospective at the Tate Gallery with the statement, "What is private must remain so: that is Balthus' attitude, and it is at his insistence that this catalog contains no biographical matter. 'The best way to begin,' he said when apprised of our customs, 'is to say: "Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at the paintings." ' " That statement, often cited since, has become the gospel on the artist. It is especially provocative given the eroticism and deviltry and sinister overtones so many viewers see in his paintings of comatose teenagers and seemingly spent naked women.

When his major retrospective opened in Paris at the Centre Pompidou in 1983, critics in search of a lead on the work from Balthus himself could do no better than to fall back on his 1945 pronouncement, "I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art." The exhibition catalog, although rendered heavier than the combined volumes of the Paris phone book by its many essays and reproductions, presented no straightforward biographical data. It was pointed out that the largest book on Balthus, done with his cooperation, did not even provide his birth date. And the people in Balthus's constellation acted as if they had signed a secrecy oath. To a journalist from Le Monde, the artist's son Thadée declared politely that he would not speak about his father because his father did not want people to; moreover, he shared Balthus's view that to talk about painters was not to talk about paintings. Pierre Klossowski, the artist's brother, himself a famous writer and leading intellectual figure -- known for his lifelong devotion to the work of the Marquis de Sade -- explained that to discuss Balthus would give him migraines. Sylvia Bataille, an old friend who was the widow of Balthus's acquaintance the "excremental philosopher" Georges Bataille and the mother of one of Balthus's early mistresses, allowed that Balthus would never forgive her if she spoke. Other close acquaintances, expecting approaches because of the fanfare over the Pompidou show, disconnected their telephones.

But Balthus had readily acceded to my request that I come see him about the book I wished to write about him. On that first occasion, as we sat side by side on an eighteenth-century sofa, he was gracious and compliant, answering all of my questions and offering numerous anecdotes. Although he had forbidden my turning on a tape recorder, he had sanctioned my use of notebook and pen, and voiced no objection to my writing continuously. The story of his sixth birthday party, told with a great grin on his face, seemed, however, clearly a warning. Balthus could manage to get everyone else in trouble while keeping only himself above the fray, and he delighted in doing so.

ii.
Initially Balthus failed to answer the letter I sent him from Connecticut saying I had been asked to write a book on him and would like to meet him. So, having learned his phone number from Swiss information -- it was listed under "Klossowski" -- I steeled up the nerve to dial it early one morning about a month before that first visit in 1990. When someone with a gravelly yet tremulous voice answered the phone in slow and refined cadence, I asked, in my best high-school French, "Est-ce que je peux parler avec le Comte de Rola?"

"C'est lui-même!" the voice bellowed back authoritatively.

From then on, this man of such terrifying reputation, so ferocious in his portrait photos, was the height of graciousness. First he suggested that we switch to English. This, he offered, was his first language; he was one-quarter Scottish, he told me, and as a child had had a Scottish nanny. He readily granted my request that I be allowed to call on him. Solicitous about my travel plans, he scheduled a Monday morning three weeks hence that suited me well. The count gave me meticulous instructions on how to change to the small mountain train in Lausanne. He wondered if I knew his part of Switzerland, and seemed particularly pleased when I said that when I was in college I had dated a girl in Gstaad, only half an hour away; like a concerned older relative, he asked me her family name. He did not know these people, but when I explained that they could hardly ever use their large Gstaad chalet anymore because they now had to spend over half their time in another canton for tax purposes, he chuckled knowingly.

I arrived in Rossinière on the afternoon prior to our scheduled rendezvous. Walking through the village to the one pension that was open in a season suitable for neither hiking nor skiing, I was struck by the resemblance of everything around me to certain Balthus paintings. People in this mountain hamlet were walking through the small town square and talking in the sole café as if they had been absorbed in the same routine forever. This seemed a place where time had been frozen -- not out of nostalgia or the deliberate veneration of an earlier epoch, but because modern madness had not crept in. Every poster and vista bespoke childhood pleasures -- chocolate and snow. There was something magical in the atmosphere, yet also inaccessible, the people remote in a particularly Swiss way.

It seemed as if everything was fitting in place. But when, as instructed, I phoned on the morning of our appointed visit, Balthus was irritated. He could not understand who I was. He then explained in a laughing voice that he had hearing problems and needed to install an instrument "like a small shrimp" -- pronounced scha-rimpp, the intonations of Breslau tinging the more dominant London cadences -- into his ear. Then, with a return to emphatically British pronunciation, he declared that I should come in the afternoon. He greatly looked forward to meeting me "at last" -- these last two words uttered in a dramatic adagio.

I should have no trouble finding the house, Balthus assured me. "It is the biggest house in the village, the largest chalet in all of Switzerland," he said with a hint of boastful little boy in his voice.

When I arrived at Le Grand Chalet, it seemed, indeed, the size of one of the Alps surrounding it. I was let in by a uniformed butler. But then there was further confusion. No one seemed to know where the count was, and as I sat alone in the large living room
-- looking intently at a framed photo of the thirteen-year-old Balthus between his mother and Rainer Maria Rilke, who was her lover at the time -- I heard a lot of running around, followed by a prolonged silence. This lasted nearly half an hour.

Finally Balthus entered. The gaunt figure in a Japanese vest, flannel shirt, and baggy tweed pants limped on his cane. It was he who began the conversation. "So here I am: a disabled old man," he uttered with a smile, sounding like a Shakespearean actor playing Lear at the end. I protested that he looked fit and healthy. He politely contradicted me, insisting, "No. That is the truth." The brief exchange seemed to set the tone of our encounter: there was to be no glossing. Balthus insisted on candor and honesty, and he would be the one to have the first and last word.

We talked i...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679407375
• ISBN 13: 9780679407379
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 656