Word: balthus
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...would be hard to make a case for Balthus, who died last week at his chalet in Switzerland at the august age of 92, as one of the great artists of the 20th century. He knew many of them and swam in the same water as they did, but he was not a giant fish like Picasso, Matisse or even his friend from early days in Paris, Joan Miro. Nevertheless he was a good artist, very good at times, though his later work fell far short of his best, most of which was done in the 1930s...
...genealogical fiction. His father Erich Klossowski was both a painter and an art historian; his mother Elizabeth Spiro was a painter who liked to be known as Baladine and had a long, intense friendship with one of Germany's greatest modern poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, who became young Balthus' mentor. Thus from childhood Balthasar Klossowski, to give his actual name, was steeped in an artistic milieu, and he grew up with a considerable sense of himself as a prodigy. But young Balthus never enrolled at an art school: he learned from impassioned study and much copying of museum...
...DIED. BALTHUS, 92, reclusive French-born artist, considered one of the finest realist painters of the 20th century; in Rossiniere, Switzerland. Born Balthazar Klossowski de Rola to a Polish family living in Paris, Balthus was best known for his provocative portrayals of adolescent girls. He was one of the few artists to exhibit his work at the Louvre while still alive...
...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...
...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...