Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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, enough of his work has been assembled at the Met to give ample grounds for judging a painter whose oeuvre has been fetishized and underrated to equally striking degrees...
...ostensible aim of his facade is to fade away, like the Cheshire cat (Balthus is fond of cats), and leave only the work, like the grin, hanging in the air. But the real result, of which Balthus must be meticulously aware, is to create a myth about himself: the painter as romantic hero, a Byronic creature with a secret wound and obscurely exalted origins...
Instead of accepting the glossy impact and impersonality of mass media at face value, Morley rants against them. That is the main difference between him and the Pop artists with whom he was associated in the 1960s. It was not obvious at once. When he first emerged as a painter, it was with images that looked utterly deadpan: paintings of ocean liners, enlarged from postcards and publicity brochures. But their method was peculiarly systematic, a parody of system, in fact. Squaring the postcard image up to canvas size, Morley would work on it patch by patch, sometimes upside down, stippling...