Word: balthus
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...Metropolitan, the problematic French painter Balthus...
...artists in our century have won worldwide fame by creating works whose best-known image is the child as sex object. One was the writer Vladimir Nabokov; the other is the painter Balthus. He is the antimodernist's modernist. His retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris this past winter drew large crowds, and in a March auction in London, one of his paintings went for more than $1 million...
...Paris show, with some additions and substitutions, has now come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City-without Balthus's full blessing, it would seem, since he was offended by the number of facts about his life given by Art Historian Sabine Rewald in her catalogue. Balthus hates any biographical disclosures to be made: the Paris catalogue did not even give his date of birth. "Just say," he told the art critic John Russell, who organized a Balthus retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1968, "that Balthus is a painter about whom nothing is known." However...
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...