Balthus

Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, the Franco-Polish artist better known as Balthus, was a modern realist painter of narrative scenes, landscapes and portraits, notorious for his suggestive paintings of adolescent girls in reverie.

The subversive, dreamlike bent of his work is closely allied to Surrealism. While he lived in Paris in the reign of the avant-garde movement and held his breakout exhibition in 1934 at a Surrealist stronghold, Balthus wasn’t part of the group or any other early 20th-century ‘-ism’, pursuing instead a version of Quattrocento classicism.

Born in Paris in 1908, Balthus was the younger son of Prussian-Polish art critic Erich Klossowski and Prussian artist Baladine, whose friends included Pierre Bonnard, André Derain and André Gide. He also claimed ancestry with Lord Byron and that his Polish lineage gave him the title ‘Count de Rola’.

When World War I broke out in 1914, the Klossowskis became enemy aliens, settling in Berlin then Geneva, where Baladine became romantically involved with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who in 1921 arranged for drawings made by the 11-year-old Balthus to be published and contributed the book’s foreword.

Returning to Paris in 1924, Balthus took free sketching classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and copied paintings in the Louvre — those by Nicolas Poussin especially. Gustave Courbet was also an influence. In Italy the following year, Balthus fell for the frescoes of Masaccio, Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca, whose pale powdery surfaces he sought to replicate.

In 1933 a series of drawings based on Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights inspired a large painting of himself as Heathcliff watching Cathy dress. La Toilette de Cathy featured in his breakout exhibition at Galerie Pierre, along with Guitar Lesson (1934), a painting so controversial that it was placed behind curtains. In the picture, a half-naked girl is spread over the knees of a woman in the manner of a pietà. The show made Balthus famous, though he later tired of the scandal, maintaining that pornographic readings of his work were the fault of the viewer.

In 1936, Balthus met 11-year-old Thérèse Blanchard. The ten paintings he made capturing her on the cusp of adolescence are considered his finest work, if also problematic. In 2017, more than 8,000 people petitioned the Metropolitan Museum in New York to remove Thérèse Dreaming (1938) — in which 13-year-old Thérèse exposes her underwear, eyes closed — from display. In 2019, Thérèse sur une banquette achieved a record price for the artist when it sold for US$19 million at Christie’s New York.

In 1937 Balthus married Antoinette de Watteville, who had modelled for paintings including La Toilette (1933). After Balthus was demobilised in the World War II, they relocated to Savoie, then Switzerland. In 1945 they separated and Balthus returned to Paris, but in 1953, he left again for the Château de Chassy in Burgundy, where he focused on landscape painting and was joined by the daughter of his brother's wife, Frédérique Tison, who became his muse and mistress. In 1956, his first major museum show was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1961 the French Minister of Culture André Malraux appointed Balthus director of the Académie de France at the Villa Medici in Rome, where he returned to painting the figure. On an official mission to Japan in 1962, Balthus met and soon married Setsuko Ideta, a 19-year-old student acting as his translator. They spent his final years living reclusively in a grand 18th-century chalet in Switzerland, where Balthus died at 92 in 2001.