| ART “4” “2”-DAY
29 February |
| BIRTH: 1908 “BALTHUS” |
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Born on 29 February 1908: Balthasar
Klossowski de Rola “Balthus”, French count, a
painter, illustrator, and stage designer, who died, 354 days after his 23rd
birthday, on 18 February 2001. — Appreciated for many years by only a handful of collectors, and ostensibly out of step with the modern movement, Balthus’s classically inspired work won the recognition and admiration of a wider public only late in his career. Although he received no formal training, he came from a highly artistic family background. His father, Erich Klossowski [1875–1949], was a painter and art historian, born to an aristocratic family in East Prussia and the author of a book on Daumier; his brother, Pierre Klossowski [09 Aug 1905 – 13 Aug 2001], was to become a painter and writer; and his mother, Elizabeth Spiro “Baladine” [1886–1969], was also a painter. Beginning in 1919, she engaged, under the name of Baladine, in a long-lasting relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, providing etchings to accompany many of his poems. In this environment Balthus met the writers André Gide and Pierre-Jean Jouve, as well as Pierre Bonnard, who gave him his earliest guidance. Rilke also acted as Balthus’s mentor, writing the preface for the 13-year-old artist's album of drawings Mitsou (1921), the story of a cat in which narrative themes and stylistic traits of the later work are already apparent. — LINKS — Le Salon (1943, 113x147cm; 800x1028pix, 594kb _ ZOOM to 1785x2294pix, 3046kb) _ Although his first exhibition was in a Surrealist gallery and he had many friends among the Surrealists, Balthus never adopted the methods of Surrealism. He has no interest in visual puns, automatism, abstraction, or other facets of the Surrealist program. What he does share with Surrealism is an interest in eroticism as a central fact of psychic life. His constant theme is the self-absorbed, dawning sexuality of the virginal adolescent. — La Montagne (1937, 249x366cm) _ This is one of Balthus's most important early works. Completed three years after the artist's first one-man exhibition, at age twenty-six, this majestic panorama is also his largest canvas and one of the few that depicts figures in a landscape. First exhibited in 1939 with the title Été, it remains the only completed painting in a projected cycle of the four seasons. Painted in objective and exacting detail, the realistic figures and landscape seem at odds with the Surrealistically contrived narrative. Seven figures are located on an imaginary plateau near the top of the Niederhorn in the Bernese Oberland, a landscape familiar to Balthus since childhood. Either intentionally or unintentionally, the figures seem unaware of one another. Their gaze is trancelike and one young woman is actually asleep on the ground. While the connection between the figures is ambiguous, there is a direct correspondence between the shape and posture of each person and the surrounding mountain formations. As a young man Balthus made the obligatory trip to Italy and France to study the work of the Old Masters, including Piero della Francesca, Nicolas Poussin, and Gustave Courbet. In this masterwork of his early years, Balthus pays homage to the strong simplified forms of della Francesca and the cultivated awkwardness of the figures of Courbet. — Nude Before a Mirror (1955, 190.5 x 163.8 cm) _ Balthus has painted landscapes, portraits, and interiors, but the female sitter in various states—daydreaming, reclining, or sleeping, often nude or partly clothed, and typically charged with erotic content—is the subject most frequently in his oeuvre. "Nude in Front of a Mantel" is striking for the sculptural monumentality of the model, who seems to be carved from marble, and the soft silvery light that bathes the figure and fills the room — [In the Cards] (383x390pix, 32kb) |
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