Word: balthus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...creativity in biography stems from the problem of entertaining the reader. If the reader wants to relive the life of John Glenn, why not let the reader relive an embellished life of Reagan, in a sense more complete and enticing than the real thing. Does it really matter what Balthus was really like? At least we can relive the life of some character named Balthus. After all, there's a reason that non-fiction works are protected from having to compete with fiction on the bestseller lists. People read fiction...
...course, an incomplete portrayal of a subject can easily be construed as an unfair one, and it is this implicit danger that no doubt often encourages the reader hungry for intrigue or second-hand gossip to purchase a biography. Such is potentially the case in Nicholas Fox Weber's Balthus...
...Balthus is the biography of the mysterious subject, "a painter of whom nothing is known." These figures are always attractive to biographers, who feel that they get to reveal the figure behind the curtain. Balthus was an enigmatic contemporary artist most noted for his highly sexualized portraits of young girls. His paintings, which often featured sadomasochistic imagery, were deemed so scandalous during their debut in 1934 that one was removed from its public display in Paris...
...While Fox Weber initially worked with Balthus on the book, he writes that "to keep my freedom once I realized I was writing about someone as unscrupulous as he is brilliant, almost as talented at lying as he is at painting--I pretty much stopped meeting with Balthus." It is interesting that although the biography is technically Fox Weber's work, this seems somehow scandalous. Fox Weber is the artist here, right...
...exaggerations of Balthus could very well be his own fictions, but it could also be the case that the "real" Balthus was simply not living up to the thrilling figure that Weber had imagined him to be. Throughout the book, Weber relies on analysis of Balthus' paintings as practically his only source in constructing his life, which provides the reader with only a weak characterization and superficial understanding of Balthus. Unfortunately, Weber appears to take to heart the epigraph from Oscar Wilde that appears at the beginning of the first chapter: "I treated art as the supreme reality and life...