Balthus

gigatos | January 31, 2022

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Summary

Balthus, pseudonym of Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola (Paris, February 29, 1908 – Rossinière, February 18, 2001), was a French painter of Polish origin.

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Style and Themes

Balthus” style proceeds from a classical and academic base; however, although his technique and compositional style are inspired by pre-Renaissance painters, references to the style of Giorgio de Chirico are also evident in his works. Balthus painted primarily the human figure at a time when figurative art was essentially ignored and neglected. He is now widely recognized as one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

Signs of numerous influences can be traced in his work, including the writings of Emily Brontë (in 1934 he illustrated the novel Wuthering Heights with pen-on-paper drawings), the writings and photographs of Lewis Carroll, 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. In music, his favorite composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Many of his paintings show adolescent girls portrayed in an erotic context. Balthus repeatedly claimed that his work had no pornographic intentions, but that it merely showed the existence of infantile sexuality, a reality that is difficult to accept and capable of making one feel uncomfortable.

Youth

During his formative years his artistic talent was supported by Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. His father, Erich Klossowski, a celebrated art historian (he wrote a monograph on Daumier), and his mother Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro (known as Baladine Klossowska) were part of the Parisian cultural elite, frequenting the circle of artists and intellectuals present in the Ville lumière at that time. His older brother, Pierre Klossowski, was a philosopher who dealt among other things with the theological thought and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Among the friends and acquaintances of the Klossowski family there were writers such as André Gide and Jean Cocteau, who drew inspiration for his novel The Terrible Boys.

In 1914, the Klossowski family, of German origin, underwent a great change when the beginning of the war forced them to leave Paris and move to Berlin. Following the separation of the Klossowskis, in 1917 the mother and her two sons Balthazar and Pierre settled in Switzerland, first in Bern and then in Geneva. It was in 1919 that Baladine, the mother, met the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke to whom she became deeply attached. Rilke”s presence will be of great importance in the destiny of the young Klossowski brothers. The Geneva period marks a certain stability in the life of Balthus, who begins to approach art with a series of ink drawings in which he illustrates a story depicting his cat Mitsou. Illustrations that in 1921 are published under the title Mitsou, with a preface written by the artist”s mentor, Rilke.

The story is about a boy and his cat. On the cover of the book appears for the first time the artist”s nickname by which Balthazar signed his works as a child. The plot of the book foreshadows his passion for cats, which would accompany him throughout his life and would resurface in his Self-Portrait. King of Cats of 1935.

In 1921 the family is forced to leave Geneva, for huge financial problems and moves back to Berlin. It is a troubled period for the young Balthus who will find gratification only in his mountain stays in Beatenberg where he entertains himself in the house of the sculptor Magrit Bay that introduces him to the theosophical doctrine and where he begins to participate in the theatrical activities of the sculptor.

Towards the end of 1922 Balthus returned to Berlin with the hope of enrolling in the School of Fine Arts. Instead, due to family instability, he spends the winter in the studio of his painter uncle Eugen Spiro, painting and elaborating theatrical sketches inspired by Chinese works. In 1924 Balthus then sixteen years old, following his older brother Pierre, returned to Paris. Thanks to the many acquaintances initiated by the family in the pre-war years and his passion for the theater, he follows the preparation of a series of avant-garde shows made by Count Etienne de Beaumont at the Théâtre de la Cigale. In the meantime it begins to attend also the lessons of drawing from the true with models that Pierre Bonnard holds to the Free Academy in rue de la Grande Chaumière. Bonnard influences a lot in the run and in the growth of the young artist that was developing in an interchange between poetry and painting. From the encounter created by Bonnard[Clarify: what does it mean to create an encounter?] it is suggested to Balthus to study and reproduce the seventeenth-century works of Nicolas Poussin in the Louvre. Balthus chose the painting depicting Echo and Narcissus, probably in response to the poem Narcisse that Rilke had composed in French for his favorite. The young painter and the poet continued and deepened their relationship through the correspondence they periodically exchanged and from which we can clearly perceive Rilke”s fascination with the young Balthus.

Between 1924 and 1925 Balthus”s works depict the soft body of a slender model; in parallel with these nudes, he executed scenes set in the gardens of the Luxembourg where he spent many hours each day with his sketchbook.In the spring of 1925 Balthus went to Provence with his mother, where the influence of Cézanne was apparent in his works during his stay. The spiritual encounter between the master”s painting and the young artist was probably induced by Rilke, his mentor, a great admirer of Cézanne”s painting.

On July 8, 1926 Balthus is in Switzerland at Rilke”s last residence, the first stop of a journey that will take him to Italy. The poet, by now ill, manages to finance a study trip for Balthus who has long been fascinated by the works of Piero della Francesca. Balthus travels to Italy, visiting first Florence and then Arezzo. He visits the Uffizi Gallery, the church of Santa Maria del Carmine where he studies the frescoes of Masolino and Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, and the masterpieces of the Florentine fifteenth century are revealed to his eyes while he makes copies and studies of some frescoes of the cycle of the History of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. These works inspire him then another of his first works of a certain importance: the tempera wall paintings of the Protestant church of the Swiss village of Beatenberg (1927).

In 1926 Rilke, to whom the artist was deeply attached, died. Perhaps attracted by the atmospheres of childhood that the poet himself had elected as one of the main themes from which to draw inspiration, Balthus focuses on exploring that period of life through painting, as a mythical era in which everything is becoming, dream and fantasy. In 1928-29 he went to Switzerland to Zurich and Berlin where he held his first solo exhibition.

From 1930 to 1932 is in Morocco where he served in an infantry unit in Kenitra and Fez, working as a secretary and sketches the painting The Barracks (1933). It then returns to Switzerland in 1932 and knows some surrealists: Breton, Éluard, Giacometti. The knowledge of this new movement born in Paris in the immediate post-war period had developed through the posters designed by André Breton between 1925 and 1930. Some aspects of Surrealist consciousness coincide with the development of Balthus” research that stand out through the fundamental activity of the child. In the work of Balthus, the suspension of time and dream are found in the works that the artist performs in the first half of the 1930s.

A young artist in Paris

In 1933, he moved into his first Parisian studio on Rue de Furstemberg and designed a series of canvases with surrealist elements. In his studio on Rue Furstenberg, the 25-year-old painter was visited by intellectuals and artists who were curious about the work of this young man, praised by figures such as André Derain, who was helping and advising Balthus at the time.

André Breton and Paul Éluard, as a surrealist delegation, also visit the atelier, but they are disappointed by Balthus” paintings that they consider trivially realistic. In the surrealist group there is also the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who in the following years will become one of the privileged interlocutors of Balthus.

In the spring of 1934 Pierre Loeb organized the first solo exhibition of Balthus in Paris, on the occasion of which he exhibited La Rue (the work represents a landscape in which the characters move in a hypnotic and fixed way, whose composition is built on a mathematical basis derived from the study of Renaissance proportions. La Toilette de Cathy, La fenetre, Alice and La leçon de guitare are also exhibited.

Artaud, a well-known surrealist writer, reviewed the exhibition, which also caused a certain scandal for the painting considered scabrous Guitar Lesson in which a woman appears to be sexually molesting a little girl.

In the works presented in those years, Balthus shows no interest in modernist styles such as Cubism, but demonstrates an independence that will also increasingly set him against Surrealism. Resolutely figurative, his paintings present intimate and unusual scenes in which the characters seem to be folded and suspended in a dreamlike atmosphere.

The love affair with Antoinette is stormy and leads him, after yet another breakup, to attempt suicide, which Antonin Artaud will remember in the song entitled La misère peintre in which he says he found Balthus lying helpless.

Artaud asks Balthus to design the scenes and costumes of The Cenci, in 1935. In 1935, Balthus moves to another studio in the Cour de Rohan where he will primarily paint portraits on commission.

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From Champrovent to Chassy

In 1940 due to the invasion of France by the German army Balthus is forced to join the troops on the Alsatian front. His stay in the army will last a few months: seriously injured, he was discharged and with his wife took refuge in Savoy, in a farm Champrovent, near Aix-les-Bains and where he began to work on two of his most important paintings, Paysage de Champrovent (1942-1945) and The Living Room (1942). In 1942 he fled from France, now subjugated to the Nazis, sheltering in Switzerland, first in Bern and then in 1945 in Geneva, where he befriended the publisher Albert Skira and the writer and member of the French resistance André Malraux.

He returned to France in 1946 and the following year, with André Masson, embarked on a journey to the south of the country, meeting people such as Picasso and Jacques Lacan, who ended up becoming a collector of his works.In 1950, together with Cassandre, Balthus designed the sets for a production of Mozart”s opera Così fan tutte in Aix-en-Provence.

In 1951 he is in Italy, invited by the Caetani family. He went to Rome and in the medieval village of Sermoneta met Elektra Prekas a young Greek girl who attended secretly during the discovery of the Italian landscape. From their relationship was born their son Andros.

Three years later he went to live at Chassy Castle on the Morvan, where he cohabited with his niece Frédérique Tison and put the finishing touches on his masterpieces La Chambre (1952, probably influenced by his brother Pierre”s stories) and Le Passage du Commerce Saint-André (1954).

Old age

As his international fame grew, in part due to his solo exhibitions at Pierre Matisse”s gallery in New York (1938), Balthus made sure to disseminate an enigmatic and elusive image of himself.

In 1964 he is in Rome where he works at Villa Medici as director of the Academy of France in Rome, appointed by André Malraux, French Minister of Culture. He makes friends with the director Federico Fellini and the painter Renato Guttuso. The fact of having married Setsuko Ideta, 35 years younger than him, in 1967 (met during a diplomatic mission to Japan organized by Malraux) adds further mystery around his figure. The couple has two children: Fumio, born in 1968 and died only two years later, and Harumi born in 1973.

In 1977, he settled in Rossinière, Switzerland. Photographers and friends Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck (Cartier-Bresson”s wife) both portrayed the artist with his wife and daughter at their chalet in Rossinière in 1999.

In 1980 they come exposed 26 its paintings to the Biennal exhibition of Venice. They come organized its retrospectives to the Museè National D” Art Modern-Centre Georges Pompidou of Paris, to the Metropolitan Museum of New York and to the museum of Kyoto. In 1998 he was proclaimed “Doctor Honoris causa” at the University of Wroclaw.

In 2001 Balthus finished his last painting, entitled The Waiting, and died in Switzerland on February 18. At the funeral of Balthus, attended by many well-known faces of politics of art and entertainment. During the funeral, Bono, lead singer of U2, sang for the hundreds of people present, including President Chirac of France. His widow, Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, heads the Balthus Foundation, created in 1998.

Balthus was the only artist to have seen, while still alive, some of his works included in the Louvre”s collection: the canvases came from Picasso”s private collection that had been donated to the museum.

The debate on its origins

Balthus” father, Erich, belonged to a Polish noble family (szlachta) of the Rola lineage, originally from Prussia. This was evidently the reason why some time later his son Balthus added “de Rola” to his own surname, Klossowski, according to szlachta tradition; had he lived in Poland the formulation of his surname would have been Rola-Kłossowski or Kłossowski h. Rola. The artist had a deep awareness of his Polish origins and had the Rola coat of arms embroidered into many of his kimonos.

Balthus went on to say that he thought it was not elegant to correct these errors anyway, since he had many friends of the Jewish religion. Nicholas Fox Weber in the biography concludes that regarding this “biographical error” Balthus was lying, although the reason remains unknown. Weber states that the name “Spiro” in Greek is only a first name, but this is incorrect, as proper names can also function as surnames. Balthus always repeated that in fact, had he been a Jew, he would have had no problem saying it. In support of Weber”s thesis is the fact that the artist in the past had made very dubious claims about his origins, once claiming to be descended from Lord Byron from his father”s line.

In Germany in February 2014 an exhibition of personal shots of the author performed on underage models, organized by the Museum Folkwang in Essen, was canceled by the same museum following allegations by the weekly Die Zeit, according to which this exhibition would have had a pedophile content: the museum said it had given up the exhibition fearing legal repercussions.

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