It was the mid 1930s. Art was dominated by abstraction and surrealism. A young French painter of Polish origin then proposed something that caused shock and scandal even in the unbridled milieu of Parisian artists. It wasn't how he painted, but who.
Balthus was born Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola to a noble-Jewish family that fled Poland after the November Uprising.
He did not quite like his biography, so he did what any self-respecting artist did. He beautified her.
Biography for correction
For example, he often overlooked the fact that his mother was Jewish. He also claimed to be Lord Byron's great-uncle. Sometimes he also asked to hide his biography completely. Tate's Gallery was supposed to portray him simply as a "unknown painter".
The painter's self-portrait. Some might say:a self-portrait of a pedophile.
In fact, quite a lot is known. Both of Balthus' parents were painters, and he showed an extraordinary talent as a child. A friend of the house, writer Rainer Maria Rilke, has published a series of illustrations by eight-year-old Balthus for the adventures of the cat Mitsou, considered his debut.
However, it was not cats that made him famous, but naked girls painted in promiscuous poses. Are they really just his models?
A fan of lolita and Freud of painting
When 26-year-old Balthus opened his first exhibition in 1934, he shocked all of Paris.
In the Pierre gallery, canvases were hung, from which the viewer was looked at either partially naked or completely naked girls and teenagers stretched out on the beds, stretched out on the floor, getting ready to take a bath.
Few of Balthus's models were of legal age. However, he only saw true female beauty in children.
Dazzling bare crotches and breasts did not seem to notice the dangers of the world around them. Often they looked ahead with lazy cat eyes, pensive and somewhat provocative. It's hard to discern childish naivety or innocence in these looks.
Watching Balthus' paintings like Peace , Awakening or the famous Guitar Lesson it is hard to avoid the impression that the artist was obsessed with widely spread girl's thighs .
Critics quickly hailed him as the "Freud of Painting". But Balthus was shocking quite consciously - he knew that without a scandal he would not be "on the tongues" of all of Paris.
"The woman's body is finished, the secret has flown away"
Once, Balthus was asked directly why he prefers to paint children and young "lolita girls" instead of adult women. The artist replied that their shapes seemed more interesting to him because of their purity and innocence, while "the woman's body is finished, the secret has flown away". In his opinion, around the age of twelve, a woman's body begins to deform and no longer offers anything worth recording on canvas.
It's hard to resist the feeling that Balthus was obsessed with girly thighs.
He defended himself against accusations of pedophilia, claiming that the wrong interpretation lies in the eye of the beholder. Let's take a closer look at his preferences.
Artist or pedophile?
Where did Balthus' love for underage girls come from? He himself answered this question in one of the interviews. It's not Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll, as many believe, was shaped by his tastes but deeply ingrained memories.
"From my childhood and youth, I created a treasure for myself, from which I drew many topics," he said. When Balthus was still a child, he met his first wife. It was Antoinette de Watteville, known as Bébé, meaning "Baby," with whom he had a stormy romance.
It is very possible that Balthus slept with her brother as well who, unable to get over such a lack of exclusivity, shot himself with a pistol. In intimate correspondence, the painter constantly called Antoinette "a sweet little girl" even though she was already a grown woman.
Attention! Nice pictures on the next page. Enter at your own risk. This article has more than one page. Please select another one below to continue reading.Attention! You are not on the first page of the article. If you want to read from the beginning click here.
Could such a picture have been created in the 19th century?
After the wedding, he lived with her for a decade, they had two children. And when he was 50, the painter moved in with one of his young models, 16-year-old Frédérique Tison . All Paris was buzzing with gossip.
Another dimension between a teenager's thighs
The scandal turned out to be a recipe for success for Balthus. In the 70's he was famous and respected the most expensive living painter in the world.
In addition, at sixty he married a 25-year-old Japanese painting student, for whom he bought a historic wooden guesthouse with one hundred and thirteen windows at the Grand Chalet. They have daughters.
The famous "Guitar Lesson". Art or child pornography?
Even though more than half a century has passed, Balthus' paintings continue to shock. The artist's son stated in the introduction to the book about his father that the nymphet motif running through his work had nothing to do with an erotic obsession. "These girls," wrote Stanislas, "are merely archetypes belonging to another, higher dimension."
From Balthus' canvases, he looks at us closed in his world, dreamy, read, sensual, self-sufficient child who completely needs no care or protection of adults. Children here appear as happy as cats and live in their own world just like cats.
However, if we know that Balthus slept with at least one of his teenage models, and married two others, the question remains whether there is a much more grim story behind the disturbing stories of Balthus 'children recorded on Balthus' canvases ...
Buy the book much cheaper than others: