Word: balthus
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There is, of course, no question which treatment he prefers. For 16 years Balthus was director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici in Rome: never a sinecure for the meek, and perhaps not since Ingres's day held by a more indurated snob than Balthus. One can follow his appetite for grandeur as the name evolves: plain Balthasar Klossowski to start, then Balthasar de Klossowski, then Klossowski de Rola, and now, in his eighth decade, the "Comte de Rola." The fact that he has been able to fend off inquiry about his origins for so long...
...facts of Balthus's Me, as related by Rewald, are interesting but far from sensational. The big secret turns out merely to be that he is part Jewish. Balthus was born in , Paris in 1908 to East European emigre parents, s both artists. They raised him in a cultivated milieu that included the poet 1 Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom his mother was infatuated and who became a surrogate father to the boy after the Klossowskis separated...
Living in genteel poverty-"Russian pathos," Rilke called it-Balthus and his mother limped from one exile to another: Berlin, Geneva, Berlin again, and finally, in 1924, back to Paris...
...formal art education began in Paris in the early '20s. Balthus shied away from politico-aesthetic groups like the surrealists. After such a childhood, who needed the insecurities of the avantgarde? Instead he settled down to study the fathers: Poussin and Courbet in France and, supreme among the Italians, Piero della Francesca. The clarity and density of Piero's figures, their presence as signs in geometrically ordered space-that was what impressed Balthus. He also made designs for the stage, which in turn influenced his painting. Theater-plus-Piero gave the cues to The Street, 1933, an exceedingly...
...cast of characters is mixed. The man in white might be a baker, or perhaps Christ carrying the lignum crucis; the two boys are Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the twins from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. It did not escape Balthus that Carroll had a thing about little girls: Tweedledum is molesting Alice. Most of the themes of Balthus's mature work are announced in this strikingly precocious painting: the rigorous yet mysterious space, the haughtily erudite quotations from high art, the choice of sex object, the theatricalization of rape...