<Archive Obituary> Balthus (February 18th 2001)
Bill Schenley
FROM: The New York Times (February 18th 2001)
By John Russell
Balthasar Klossowski, the painter internationally known as Balthus,
died yesterday at his chalet in La Rossiniere, Switzerland, near
Gstaad. He was 92.
For the last 30 years of his long life, Balthus was among the most
widely admired of European painters. He had excelled as a portraitist
(notably of his painter colleagues Andre Derain and Joan Miro), as a
painter of French landscapes in a tradition that went back to Nicolas
Poussin, and as someone who had given a whole new spin to the notion
of
Parisian townscape.
When painting still lifes, he could stress the violence implicit in
the
presence of hammer and knife among the apparatus of everyday
activities. (It was not for nothing that in Paris he was a close
friend
of Antonin Artaud, proponent of the "theater of cruelty.") He could
depict a game of cards as a pastime with overtones of desperation.
Balthus was also admired as a stage designer for Shakespeare's "As You
Like It," Shelley's "Cenci" (as adapted by Artaud), Albert Camus's
"Etat de Siege" and Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte."
In Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," he found inspiration in 1934
and
'35 for a long series of drawings, more than one of which rivaled the
singular mood of Bronte herself in its portrayal of a frenetic wooing
between young people.
But above all, Balthus was known for paintings of equivocal figure
subjects, very young women in poses or situations that were regarded
as
enigmatic or suggestive or both. Often these subjects were caught
between dream and waking. Sometimes there were more explicitly sexual
elements, and these caused a minor scandal as early as 1934, when he
had his first one-man show at the Galerie Pierre in Paris.
Though never wholly discarded, the element of erotic provocation
became
more oblique in his later work. ("I used to want to shock," he once
told a friend, "but now it bores me.") In 1955, he even agreed to tone
down an erotic incident in "The Street" (1933), a painting that had
been bought by James Thrall Soby, one of his earliest American
admirers, who later bequeathed it to the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan.
"I really don't understand why people see the paintings of girls as
Lolitas," he told the chief art critic of The New York Times, Michael
Kimmelman, in 1996. "My little model is absolutely untouchable to me.
Some American journalist said he found my work pornographic. What does
he mean? Everything now is pornographic. Advertising is pornographic.
You see a young woman putting on some beauty product who looks like
she's having an orgasm. I've never made anything pornographic. Except
perhaps 'The Guitar Lesson.' "
That large painting, exhibited in the 1934 show at the Galerie Pierre,
depicts a girl naked below the waist and slumped over the knees of a
bare-breasted woman, who evidently is her teacher. A guitar is on the
floor and a piano is in the background. But the figure of the girl, it
has been pointed out, most directly echoes the dead Christ in the
15th-century Avignon Pieta in the Louvre; it's a link, it has been
argued, that by its blasphemy heightens the shock.
"I absolutely never thought of that, never," Balthus protested in the
1996 interview. "I'm Catholic. I'm a member of the Order of St.
Maurice
and St. Lazare!"
Among painters, poets, novelists, theater people and fashionable
hostesses in Paris, Balthus never ceased to be admired as an artist
and
sought out as a companion. But after the scandal of 1934 he did not
have another exhibition in Paris until after World War II.
From his school days onward, Balthus was drawn to the apple-green
uplands of the Bernese Oberland. That fascination found apotheosis in
1937 in the large painting "The Mountain," which is now at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Against a jagged and rocky backdrop, three
young people, locked in daydreams of their own devising, act out their
notions of what life may have in store for them.
It was not in Paris but in New York, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in
1938, that Balthus showed his work in great strength and began to be
sought after by American collectors and museums. From 1938 to 1977,
his
eight exhibitions at the gallery were major events in the New York art
world, as were his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956 and
the major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984.
Balthus never came to the United States, and for most of his life he
lived either in Paris or in a succession of increasingly grand and
often remote country houses in France, Switzerland and Italy. Even in
Paris, he loved an august association and lived in a house in the Cour
de Rohan that was once described as "carved out of the huge vine-clad
masonry of Philippe-Auguste's fortifications."
A house that suited him very well was the Chateau de Chassy, in the
mountainous Morvan region in east-central France, where he lived from
1953 onward. In the paintings of that period, he brought a
contemplative majesty to both outdoor and indoor life. There is in the
big Chassy landscapes something of the four "Seasons" (in the Louvre)
in which Poussin commemorated the rightness of nature and the presence
in all natural things of a predestined order.
Balthus's basically reclusive way of life was transformed in 1961,
when
at the invitation of Andre Malraux, then France's minister of culture,
he became director of the French Academy in Rome.
Among his predecessors in the post were Ingres and Berlioz. One of the
great European town houses, the Villa Medici, went with the job. The
architecture had Michelangelesque echoes, but the interior had badly
deteriorated over generations of institutional use. During his 16
years
of residence, Balthus restored an uncluttered nobility to the interior
and made the 18-acre gardens look as they did when Velazquez painted
them.
In these restorations, almost as much as in the paintings on which he
was working at the same time, a creativity peculiar to himself was at
work.
It was in the hallowed studios in the gardens of the Villa Medici that
Balthus worked with a new medium (casein tempera on canvas) to produce
the series of endlessly worked and reworked figure paintings that won
him a whole new reputation. Many of them featured a young Japanese
woman, Setusuko Ideta, whom he had met in Japan in 1962 and wed in
1967
after his first marriage had ended in divorce. He would work on some
of
these paintings for 6, 7 or even 10 years.
Sometimes he would speak of them as "utter failures, without
exception"
that had been not so much "finished" as given up in despair. But like
his friend the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, he disliked
the
very notion of "finish" in art.
After leaving Rome in 1977, Balthus, his wife and their daughter,
Harumi, settled in a chalet near Gstaad. He is survived by his wife
and
daughter; two sons, Stanislas and Thaddeus, from his first marriage;
and a brother, Pierre Klossowski, a painter and writer.
At a time when the School of Paris was generally thought to be in
decline, Balthus kept his position as a major European artist.
Full-scale retrospectives were held at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs
in
Paris in 1966, at the Tate Gallery in London in 1968, at the Venice
Biennale in 1980 and at the Spoleto Festival in Italy in 1982. After
his work was exhibited in "A New Spirit in Painting" at the Royal
Academy in London 1981, Balthus was invited to become a foreign member
of the Academy. He had a major museum retrospective in Lausanne in
1993
and a lesser but significant exhibition of his drawings in Bern in
1994.
Balthasar Klossowski was the second son of Erich Klossowski, a
Polish-born art historian, painter and stage designer, and his wife,
Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro, a painter who exhibited under the name
Baladine. For political reasons, his family had left Poland in 1830
and
eventually settled in Breslau, acquiring German citizenship there.
Balthus's father made a name for himself in each of his activities,
especially as the author of a comprehensive study of the work of
Honore
Daumier. His maternal grandfather was a cantor in Breslau and composed
a great deal of music for religious services.
In 1903 the family moved to Paris, mixing freely and happily in the
worlds of painting, scholarship, poetry, theater and publishing there.
Balthus was born on Feb. 29, 1908. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once
told him that being born on leap day was like slipping through a crack
in time; it gave Balthus access to "a kingdom independent of all the
changes we undergo."
At the outbreak of World War I, the Klossowskis' status as enemy
aliens
caused them to move to Berlin, where they lived in straitened
circumstances. As of 1917, Balthus's parents lived apart, and Balthus
moved to Switzerland with his mother. They had a tiny apartment in
Geneva, and Balthus spent summers above the Lake of Thun in a
landscape
to which he always returned with great pleasure.
In 1919, Balthus's mother was befriended by Rilke, the foremost German
poet of the day. Until his death in 1926, Rilke had an intense and
continuous relationship with her and her two sons. In 1921, Rilke
wrote
a French text for the publication of "Mitsou," a book of 40 ink
drawings by the 13-year-old Balthus on the subject of a solitary
boyhood. In its way a trial run for ideas that were to haunt Balthus's
work for many years, the little book was described by the eminent
German publisher Kurt Wolff as "astounding and almost frightening."
It was also thanks largely to Rilke that when Balthus went to Paris at
the age of 16 in 1924, many doors were open to him. He was welcomed by
Andre Gide, the most influential writer of the day, and by Pierre
Bonnard, Albert Marquet and Maurice Denis among painters. When Rilke
came to Paris for five months in 1925, he dedicated his new poem,
"Narcisse," to Balthus. In 1926, with financial help from Rilke,
Balthus spent a year traveling in Italy, where he made copies and
sketches after Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, Masolino and others.
Thereafter he spent much of his time in Paris, where he became
friendly
with Braque, Derain and Giacometti among artists, with Pierre Jean
Jouve, Malraux and Paul Eluard among writers, and with Jean-Louis
Barrault, Madeleine Renaud and others in the theater.
Balthus married Antoinette de Watteville in Bern in 1937. In 1939, he
was called up for service in the French Army and served near
Saarbrucken before being discharged in December 1939. After the
collapse of France to German forces, he and his wife lived on a farm
in
the French Savoie until 1942, when they moved to Switzerland and lived
for some time in Fribourg.
While waiting to return to Paris at war's end, Balthus lived for some
time in the Villa Diodati, near Geneva, where Lord Byron had once
lived. Balthus liked to fantasize about a supposed family connection
between himself and Byron.
After the death of his father in 1949 and of his mother in 1969,
Balthus took advantage of what he believed to be his ancient and noble
Polish lineage and asked to be called the Comte de Rola.
Despite a lifelong horror of being photographed or interviewed, he
became more accessible in his later years, though still deeply
concerned with his privacy. He once said about himself, "Balthus is a
painter about whom nothing is known." The often-quoted statement
implied that whatever people thought they knew about him or his work
was wrong.
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Balthus paintings:
http://www.artic.edu/aic/rights/search/.portweb?quickfind=E09177&template=Preview&catalog=Sample
http://search.famsf.org:8080/search.shtml?keywords=balthus
http://hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/search.asp?Artist=Balthus&hasImage=1
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=705&searchid=7181&tabview=image
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/balthus.html