Word: balthus
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...Harvard’s own Carpenter Center. His “Le Corbusier: A Life” is the first-ever in-depth biography of the Swiss architect. As the Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Conn. and author of an acclaimed biography on Balthus, he is deeply interested in exploring the lives of the artists who create the masterpieces he loves. The Harvard Crimson: First of all, why Le Corbusier? What about his life or his art compelled you to write about him? Nicholas Fox Weber: Well, originally, it wasn?...
...severe. In conversation, he often looks to his wife for assistance, but he remains as feisty as ever. He hasn't lost his enthusiasm for painting, and is happy to talk about Picasso ("He was good until about 1905, then he squandered his talent") or contemporary artists he admires (Balthus, Sam Szafran, Avigdor Arikha). But turn to the subject of photography, and the man who defined "the decisive moment" - the instant when an image should be captured - professes his famous indifference. Truth be told, Cartier-Bresson has returned to his trademark Leica cameras for a couple of assignments...
...definitive influence on him, however, was the 15th century Italian painter Piero della Francesca, whose cycle of murals Legend of the True Cross Balthus saw on a visit to Italy in 1926. Piero's unique combination of physical intensity and complex, abstract formality seems to have shaped Balthus' deepest pictorial ambitions. But the streak of ambiguous desire he brought to his imagery of the nude was peculiar to Balthus, and it invested his work with a permanent scent of scandal...
From the 1950s on, he was routinely compared to Vladimir Nabokov because he was fascinated by the uninnocent sexuality of young girls. How many times has one heard Balthus' familiar images of pubescent females, naked in bare rooms or stretched catlike in the firelight, called nymphets or Lolitas? For his part, Balthus insisted that his nudes had no element of sexual provocation. They were just form, color and glimpses of domesticity. This was quite unpersuasive. Balthus' interiors can have a chilly and highly stage-managed perverseness, as in The Room, 1952-54, where the young girl sprawls on a chair...
...Balthus' talents did not run to avant-garde ambitions. He was entirely a figurative painter--there was no abstract phase to his work--and his reverence for past masters, from Piero and Poussin to Courbet and Manet, was so absolute that his work is a virtually seamless homage to them, not so much in subject matter as in studiously quoted poses and meticulously conscious structures. His power of organization was awesome; his spread of quotation, wide. What caused the individual citations to hang together, though, was his eye for nature. Nowhere is this clearer than in his huge composition...