Word: balthus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...past 30 years, Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, a French aristocrat of Polish extraction better known by his painting name of Balthus, has been one of the least available major artists in the world. The fame of a star painter, Marcel Duchamp once shrewdly observed, depends on an inflation of small anecdotes. About Balthus, none are in circulation. At 69 he has no public face. When André Malraux made him director of the French Academy in Rome-a post Balthus held for 16 years until his retirement a few months ago-Balthus kept fastidiously to himself even...
...this could be a recipe for oblivion. Privacy, however, is an ingredient of myth. Balthus is an artist's artist: there are perhaps three or four painters alive today whose work is a real addition to the great, tottering edifice of Western figure painting, and Balthus is their doyen. Under the dandy's glare all triviality withers; Balthus' peculiar position is in part the result of his steady refusal to be a man of his own time. Admittedly, his silent paintings, populated by cats and malignant-looking, narcissistic girls, offer their distant homages to surrealism. Balthus...
History-the sense of accumulated time bearing on an image-gives Balthus' painting its weight. There is no more cultivated artist alive; certainly none whose paintings disclose a more strictly developed taste. They are suffused with references to Balthus' two main sources, Courbet (whose stolid, gawky children are the great-grandmothers of Balthus' adolescents) and the early Italian Renaissance The profiles of his girls have the slightly awkward purity of quattrocento medallion portraits. Nude in Profile, 1977, displays her pubescent body with the columnar grace of a figure by Piero della Francesca; light flows around the shallow...
...more difficult to know what we are feeling: Balthus is a master of easing equivocation. His paintings are lifted by a tension between formality and obsessive eroticism. Balthus' nymphets, with their big heads, pale limbs and sidelong stares, are monsters in their way; they have the look of mutants, as young cicadas do when molting their husks. The most extreme case is Balthus' Guitar Lesson, 1934-one of the few masterpieces among erotic paintings made by Western artists in the past 50 years. But the suggestive mood pervades all his work except the landscapes. To encounter...
...would be hard to think of a less "American" painter than Bailey, 41, who teaches at Yale, where he had earlier studied under Josef Albers. Modest in scale and completely unrhetorical, his pictures seem European-the work, perhaps, of a less mature Balthus, minus the overtones of perverse eroticism. Their strength lies partly in the extreme discipline of organization that Bailey can muster. He is a perfectionist, so much so that the right hand of the girl in Listener had to be scraped off and repainted "about 100 times" before he was satisfied with it (perhaps he shouldn...