Balthus - Softcover

Klossowski De Rola, Stanislas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810921197 ISBN 13: 9780810921191

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 2002

Synopsis

With the death of Balthus in February 2001, the world lost one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. Born into an aristocratic Polish family in 1908, Balthus grew up amid the most cultivated and artistic circles of Geneva, Berlin, and Paris. Brilliantly precocious, he developed early his dual fascinations with the East and with Europe's old masters - inspirations that show in the poise and peculiar timelessness of his paintings. But his work is also suffused with an eroticism and a sense of mystery that betray more modern influences.
Balthus was an artist of unflinching integrity. Out of step with the modern movement, he pursued his artistic vision in relative obscurity, hailed by only a tiny group of connoisseurs, until the 1960s. By the mid-1980s his work had achieved international renown, but he remained acutely wary of public scrutiny. He believed passionately that his paintings were to be looked at, not read about, or read into. As a result the enigmatic aura of his art came to envelop the man himself - even when, in his later years, he finally let down his guard and allowed journalists and scholars into his magnificent chalet home at Rossiniere in the Swiss Alps.
Following his father's death, Stanislas Klossowski de Rola has written a new introduction to this book, which presents Balthus's most important paintings. New to this expanded edition are Balthus's last painting, The Waiting, and the controversial Guitar Lesson from 1934. Rare photographs show the young Balthus in his studio, while more recent images by the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the artist's friend, complete this tribute to one of the great artists of recent times.

About this title

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0810921197
• ISBN 13: 9780810921191
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 157