Balthus | Great Artist | Art | Famous

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Balthasar Klossowski (or Kłossowski) de Rola (February 29, 1908 – February 18, 2001), best known as Balthus, was a Polish-French modern artist.

Throughout his career, Balthus rejected the usual conventions of the art world. He insisted that his paintings should be seen and not read about, and he resisted any attempts made to build a biographical profile. A telegram sent to the Tate Gallery as it prepared for its 1968 retrospective of his works read: "NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS. B."

Born in Paris, in his formative years his art was sponsored by Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Pierre Matisse. His father, Erich Klossowski, a noted art historian who wrote a monograph on Daumier, and his Jewish 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, the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) who at the time was his mother's lover. The theme of the story foreshadowed his lifelong 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).

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-Étienne 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.

Balthus's father, Erich, was born to a family supposedly belonging to the former Polish petty nobility (drobna szlachta), bearing the Rola coat of arms and living in the Prussian part of today's Poland. This (largely undocumented) family background prompted 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.[citation needed]

In the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1984 Balthus exhibition, Balthus' mother, Baladine Spiro, was described as the daughter of a cantor from Kovelitz in Novgorod in the Russian Empire.Balthus told his biographer Nicholas Fox Weber that this was erroneous, and that his mother came "apparently from a Protestant family in the south of France".[page 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. Weber quoted Baladine's lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who stated that the Spiros were descended from one of the richest Sephardic-Spanish families. Weber wrote: "The artist neglected, however, to tell me that, in the most miserable of ironies, Fumio (Balthus's son) suffered from Tay-Sachs disease." Weber presented this as evidence that Balthus was lying about not having Jewish ancestry, given Tay-Sachs is a heavily Ashkenazic-Jewish disease. This conflicts with Rilke's report of the Spiros being Sephardic, which Weber later said was a "Rilke embellishment" and also brings up the relevance of the preponderance of Japanese infantile Tay-Sachs,[citation needed] since Balthus's wife was Japanese.


Source : WikiPedia