Source : http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/balthus.html
| "Balthazar
Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus, French painter. From a
highly cultivated family background, he began painting at the age of
sixteen. He met Rilke - who wrote the preface for a collection of his
drawings - and Bonnard , who was a strong influence on him up to 1930.
It was at this time that the characteristics of his style became fixed:
a convinced figurative artist and opposed to all forms of abstraction,
his draughtsmanship is incisive and of great precision. He produced
matte paintings, in muted tones, founded on strict observation and
internalization of things and people. In 1933, The Street caught the
attention of the Surrealists because of its strange, almost dreamlike
atmosphere: all the figures seem indifferent to one another and carve
up the space into a series of continuous private worlds. Even if he was
at that time associated with Artaud (he did the sets for his Cenci) and
with Giacometti , Balthus refused to call on an imaginary world in any
way. In fact his pre-war painting is closer to realism and Neue
Sachlichkeit, if not indeed to Courbet (The Mountain , 1937). After
1945, his painting became denser, while his subject-matter changed. The
nude made its appearance and, in particular, adolescent girls caught
sleeping or in equivocal private moments - half-way between innocence
and perversity. But the rigorous composition and slow execution
remained unchanged (Balthus would happily spend years on a single
canvas, and go on to produce variants). He kept too the love of his
craft, admiring Piero della Francesca and oriental painting, in which
he discovered examples of work concerned not with realistic
representation but with 'identification'. In his canvases, time is
frozen, the traffic of life is stilled, gestures are suspended before
they can declare their purpose: the scene is there to be uncovered by
anyone who can find mystery in the anodyne. 'We did not know how to see
reality and all the disturbing things our apartments, our loved ones
and our streets conceal,' wrote Albert Camus in 1949 in the preface to
one of Balthus's rare exhibitions. Yet the painter lamented the loss of
craft among his contemporaries - virtually the only exceptions being
Bonnard, Braque and Rouan (whom he had met, in fact, at the Villa
Medici, of which he was director from 1961 to 1977). He deplored, too,
the fact that painting so often became an occasion for discussion,
while for him it remained quite irreducible to any language." Source : http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/balthus.html |
|