Balthus

Based on Wikipedia: Balthus

The Aristocrat Who Never Was

When Balthus died in 2001, Bono sang at his funeral. The President of France attended. So did supermodels and princes. It was a send-off befitting a count—which is exactly what Balthus had spent decades claiming to be, despite the fact that no one in his family had ever held such a title.

This small fabrication tells you almost everything you need to know about one of the twentieth century's most controversial painters: a man who insisted his work should be "seen and not read about," who rejected the conventions of the art world, and who spent a lifetime constructing an elaborate mythology around himself while producing images that continue to disturb and fascinate in equal measure.

His real name was Balthasar Klossowski. The aristocratic suffix "de Rola" was his own invention, borrowed from an old Polish coat of arms that his family may or may not have been entitled to use. He had it embroidered onto his kimonos in the style of Japanese family crests, a detail that perfectly captures his talent for aesthetic self-invention.

A Childhood Among Giants

Balthus was born in Paris on February 29, 1908—a leap year baby from the start. His parents were Prussian expatriates living in the French capital, and their apartment functioned as a kind of salon for the European avant-garde. The guest list reads like a syllabus for a course in early twentieth-century culture: the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the novelist André Gide, the filmmaker Jean Cocteau, the painters Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard.

Young Balthasar and his older brother Pierre had a Scottish nanny. Balthus would later claim that English was his first language, though his parents spoke German to each other. This was the first of many ways he would reshape his own origin story.

The idyll shattered in 1914. When the First World War began, the Klossowskis faced deportation as German citizens living in enemy France. They fled first to Switzerland, then to Berlin. By 1917, the parents had separated, and Balthus's mother moved with her two sons to a modest flat in Geneva.

A year later, something remarkable happened. Balthus's mother, known as Baladine, became the lover of Rainer Maria Rilke—one of the greatest poets of the German language and a man who would profoundly shape the young artist's life.

Mitsou: A Boy and His Cat

Rilke immediately recognized the thirteen-year-old's talent. In 1921, he helped Balthus publish his first work: a wordless picture-book called Mitsou, consisting of forty drawings with a preface by Rilke himself. The story follows a young boy who finds a cat, loves it, and then loses it. The images unfold in sequence like a silent film or an early graphic novel.

This little book established two themes that would haunt Balthus's entire career: an obsession with cats and a preoccupation with loss and disappearance. He would later be photographed countless times with felines, adopt "King of Cats" as an unofficial title, and paint cats into many of his most significant works.

The same Christmas that Mitsou made its modest splash, Baladine found herself financially destitute. She packed up her children and moved to Berlin to live with her brother. From aristocratic salon to straitened circumstances—another pattern that would repeat throughout Balthus's life, as he alternated between poverty and patronage.

Learning to See

In 1926, at eighteen, Balthus traveled to Florence. There he did what aspiring painters had done for centuries: he copied the old masters. But while most young artists in the 1920s were absorbing Cubism, Futurism, or some other variety of modernism, Balthus was studying frescos by Piero della Francesca—a painter who had been dead for more than four hundred years.

This was a deliberate rejection. The art world was rushing headlong into abstraction, fragmentation, and formal experiment. Balthus looked backward instead. He wanted to paint the human figure with the kind of stillness and mystery he found in Renaissance art, but to charge those figures with contemporary psychological intensity.

The following year, he put this training to use in an unlikely commission: wall paintings for a Protestant church in the Swiss village of Beatenberg. It was a strange debut for someone who would become notorious for erotic imagery, but it demonstrated his technical command and his connection to an older tradition of religious art.

Between 1930 and 1931, Balthus served in the French army in Morocco. He was drafted into the infantry, worked as a secretary, and made sketches that would later become paintings. The experience gave him little pleasure, but it was a passage into adulthood—and into French citizenship, which would matter enormously in the decades to come.

The Scandal of 1934

In 1933, Balthus took a studio in Paris on the Rue de Furstemberg, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The following year, he held his first exhibition at Galerie Pierre. It would make him famous—and infamous.

The centerpiece of the controversy was a painting called The Guitar Lesson. To describe it plainly: a young girl is arched backward over the lap of her female music teacher. The teacher's hands are positioned on the girl's body as if she were a guitar to be played. One hand grasps the girl's hair. The other hovers near her exposed genitals.

The painting was deliberately provocative, even sadistic. It drew on a long tradition of erotic art—images of music lessons had been a vehicle for sexual content since the Renaissance—but it pushed that tradition into territory that genuinely shocked viewers. The fact that the subject was a child made the transgression unmistakable.

Other works in the same exhibition were less explosive but equally strange: The Street, a scene of Parisian life rendered with dreamlike stillness; Cathy Dressing, showing a young woman being attended by a servant; Alice, another image of an adolescent girl in a pose that invited interpretation.

The scandal accomplished what scandals often accomplish for artists: it generated attention. Writers and painters rallied to Balthus's defense. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, admired him. So did Pablo Picasso, who would eventually own several of his works. His circle of friends in Paris expanded to include novelists, poets, playwrights, photographers, and fellow painters—a constellation of talent that included Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Antonin Artaud, and later Albert Camus.

What Balthus Said About His Work

Throughout his life, Balthus maintained that his paintings of young girls were not erotic—or rather, that they simply acknowledged an uncomfortable truth about childhood sexuality that most people preferred to ignore. He insisted that viewers brought their own projections to the images, that what they saw reflected their own minds rather than his intentions.

This defense has never fully convinced his critics, and the debate continues to this day. In 2017, a petition circulated calling for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to remove his painting Thérèse Dreaming from display. The museum declined, citing its long-standing position against censorship. The work had previously been exhibited in Germany without incident.

The art critic Roberta Smith, writing in The New York Times in 2013, described Balthus's paintings of adolescent girls as "both alluring and disturbing"—a formulation that captures the uncomfortable position many viewers find themselves in. The paintings are undeniably beautiful in their technique. They are also undeniably troubling in their subject matter. Whether those two qualities can be separated remains an open question.

Marriage, War, and Escape

In 1937, Balthus married Antoinette de Watteville, a woman from an influential aristocratic family in Bern. He had met her more than a decade earlier, when she was still a teenager, and she had served as the model for several paintings, including Cathy Dressing. The marriage gave Balthus something he had always craved: genuine aristocratic connections to supplement his invented ones.

They had two sons: Stanislas, born in 1942, and Thaddeus, born in 1944. Stanislas—known as "Stash"—would later become a figure in the swinging London scene of the 1960s, his life a kind of extended improvisation on his father's themes of aristocracy and bohemianism.

But before any of that could unfold, there was a war to survive. When German forces invaded France in 1940, Balthus and Antoinette fled south to Savoy, to a farm in Champrovent near Aix-les-Bains. There, in relative isolation, he began work on two major paintings: Landscape near Champrovent and The Living Room. The first would take him three years to complete.

In 1942, the situation became untenable. The couple escaped from Occupied France into neutral Switzerland, first to Bern and then, in 1945, to Geneva. There Balthus befriended the publisher Albert Skira and reconnected with André Malraux, the novelist and adventurer who had joined the French Resistance.

Malraux would prove to be one of the most consequential relationships of Balthus's life—but that payoff lay years in the future. For now, Balthus was simply surviving, waiting for the war to end so he could return to Paris and resume his career.

The Director of the Villa Medici

Balthus returned to France in 1946. Over the next fifteen years, his reputation grew steadily. He exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York (though he never visited the United States), and in 1956, the Museum of Modern Art gave him his first major museum show. He moved into a château in the Morvan region of Burgundy, where he completed some of his most ambitious paintings.

Then, in 1961, came an appointment that surprised everyone. André Malraux, now the French Minister of Culture under Charles de Gaulle, named Balthus the director of the French Academy in Rome—the Villa Medici.

The French Academy in Rome is one of the most prestigious positions in the French cultural establishment. Founded in 1666 by Louis XIV, it provides fellowships to young French artists and maintains a magnificent Renaissance villa overlooking the city. The directorship is traditionally given to eminent cultural figures as a kind of capstone appointment.

For Balthus—a painter whose most famous work depicted a music teacher sexually abusing her student—to receive this honor was extraordinary. It demonstrated both Malraux's faith in him and the French establishment's capacity to separate artistic achievement from personal controversy.

Balthus threw himself into the role. He oversaw a major restoration of the villa, bringing it back to what he considered its proper grandeur. He became friends with the filmmaker Federico Fellini and the painter Renato Guttuso. He presided over the institution for nearly sixteen years, longer than almost any director before or since.

A Second Marriage

It was during his time in Rome that Balthus's life took another unexpected turn. In 1962, Malraux sent him on a diplomatic mission to Japan. There he met Setsuko Ideta, a young woman thirty-five years his junior. They married in 1967.

A Japanese wife added another layer to the mystery Balthus cultivated around himself. She would remain his companion for the rest of his life, bearing him a son, Fumio, in 1968. Tragically, Fumio died just two years later from Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic disorder most commonly found among Eastern European Jews—a detail that contradicted Balthus's elaborate fictions about his mother's aristocratic, non-Jewish ancestry.

In 1973, Setsuko gave birth to a daughter, Harumi. By then, Balthus had left Rome and settled into what would be his final home: a grand chalet in Rossinière, Switzerland.

The Myth-Maker

Throughout his life, Balthus spun stories about his origins that bore only passing resemblance to documented fact. His mother was alternately descended from Russian aristocrats, from wealthy Sephardic Jews, from Protestants in the south of France. His father's family supposedly belonged to the Polish petty nobility. He himself was a count—though no one could produce the documentation.

His biographer Nicholas Fox Weber spent years untangling these fabrications. Balthus's mother, Elisabeth Dorothée Spiro Klossowska, was in fact descended from Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to East Prussia. Her father was a cantor from a small town in what is now Belarus. There were no aristocrats, no connections to the Romanovs.

Why did Balthus lie so persistently about his background? The obvious answer is social climbing: he wanted to belong to an aristocracy that would otherwise have excluded him. But there may have been something deeper at work. Balthus was a painter of dreams and mysteries, of figures suspended in psychological ambiguity. Perhaps he felt that his own origins should be equally indeterminate, equally open to interpretation.

He certainly resisted attempts to pin him down. When the Museum of Modern Art prepared a catalogue for his 1956 exhibition, he insisted that the biographical note read simply: "Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us look at the pictures."

The Work Itself

So let us look at the pictures. What did Balthus actually paint, beyond the notorious images of young girls?

He painted landscapes, some of them taking years to complete. He painted portraits, including several of his wife Antoinette. He painted street scenes, still lifes, and interiors. He designed sets and costumes for the theater, working on productions by Antonin Artaud, Albert Camus, and Jean-Louis Barrault.

His style was classical in technique but unsettling in atmosphere. He drew on a vast range of influences: the Renaissance masters Masaccio and Piero della Francesca; the French painters Poussin, Ingres, Courbet, and Cézanne; the Swiss painter Félix Vallotton, whose flat, enigmatic interiors anticipate Balthus's own. He admired the writings of Emily Brontë and the photography of Lewis Carroll—both of whom had their own complicated relationships with childhood and innocence.

What made his work distinctive was a quality of suspended time. His figures often seem frozen in mid-gesture, caught in moments of private reverie or mysterious ritual. The light is clear and even, almost Mediterranean, but the emotional atmosphere is heavy with unspoken implications. Something is about to happen, or has just happened, but we are never quite told what.

This dreamlike quality connects him to Surrealism, though he never formally joined the movement. Painters like Giorgio de Chirico used similar techniques to create images of metaphysical unease. But where de Chirico's empty plazas feel like abandoned stage sets, Balthus's interiors feel inhabited by presences just out of frame.

Influence and Legacy

Balthus influenced several generations of artists. The photographer Duane Michals borrowed his narrative sequencing. The Swiss painter Émile Chambon worked in a similar vein of figurative symbolism. The filmmaker Jacques Rivette, one of the central figures of the French New Wave, explicitly cited Balthus's drawings as an inspiration for his 1985 film Hurlevent, an adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

His work has also seeped into popular culture in unexpected ways. François Truffaut included a reproduction of one of his paintings in Bed and Board. Thomas Harris made him a cousin of Hannibal Lecter. Philip Pullman used his paintings as cover images for British editions of His Dark Materials. The actress Maya Hawke titled a song after Thérèse Dreaming. Multiple poets have written entire collections inspired by his work.

Balthus was one of the few living artists ever to have a painting acquired by the Louvre. The work, The Children, came from Pablo Picasso's private collection—a fitting provenance for someone who had spent his life among the giants of modern art while steadfastly refusing to paint like any of them.

The Last Years

In his final decades, Balthus retreated to his Swiss chalet. He granted few interviews and rarely exhibited new work. When visitors came—and many did, drawn by his reputation and his mystery—they found an elderly gentleman in Japanese robes, surrounded by cats, living in a kind of cultivated isolation.

Toward the end of his life, he participated in a series of dialogues with the neurobiologist Semir Zeki, discussing art, painting, and the nature of aesthetic experience. The conversations were published in 1995 as La Quête de l'essentiel—"The Quest for the Essential." It was a rare moment of public reflection from someone who had spent a lifetime insisting that his paintings should speak for themselves.

He died on February 18, 2001, eleven days before what would have been his ninety-third birthday. The funeral at Rossinière drew hundreds of mourners: Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer who had documented his final years; Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan; the supermodel Elle Macpherson; the President of France. And Bono, who sang for the crowd—an unlikely coda for a painter who had always positioned himself against popular culture.

His widow, Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, now heads the Balthus archives, which are housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne and available to scholars. The work remains, as Balthus always insisted it should: available to be seen, resistant to easy interpretation, beautiful and disturbing in equal measure.

The Uncomfortable Question

Any honest assessment of Balthus must eventually confront the obvious question: can we separate the art from its subject matter? His technical mastery is undeniable. His influence on subsequent artists is well documented. His place in the history of twentieth-century painting is secure.

But many of his most celebrated works depict children in poses that were clearly designed to provoke sexual response. His defenders argue that he was acknowledging a reality that polite society preferred to ignore. His critics argue that he was exploiting minors for artistic effect—and that the artistic effect was itself a kind of exploitation.

There is no resolution to this debate. Different viewers will draw their lines in different places. Some will find that the paintings' formal beauty transcends their troubling content. Others will find the content so troubling that no formal beauty can redeem it. Still others will hold both responses simultaneously, admiring and recoiling in the same moment.

Perhaps that ambivalence is the point. Balthus painted images that refuse to let us look away and refuse to let us feel comfortable looking. He created beauty that implicates the viewer. Whatever else one might say about his work, it does not permit indifference.

The past, as they say, is a foreign country. They do things differently there. But Balthus's paintings keep arriving from that country like dispatches from a place we recognize but cannot quite name—beautiful, disturbing, and impossible to forget.