Balthus: A Biography - Hardcover

Weber, Nicholas Fox

 
9780679407379: Balthus: A Biography
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0679407375 ISBN 13: 9780679407379
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Dozens of illustrations and reproductions complement a full-scale biography of one of the most enigmatic artists of the twentieth century, describing his youth in France, the evolution of his art, and his elusive private life. 20,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nicholas Fox Weber was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from Columbia College and Yale University. He has curated retrospectives of the work of Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Leland Bell, and others, and has been for the past twenty-three years the director of the Josef Albers Foundation. He is the author of nine previous books, among them Patron Saints, Leland Bell, and The Art of Babar. He lives in Bethany, Connecticut, with his wife, the novelist Katharine Weber, and their two daughters.

Aus dem Klappentext

ll-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliantly rendered, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art.

The story of Balthus's life has been shrouded by contradiction and hearsay, most of it his own invention; over the years he created for himself a persona of mystery, aristocracy, and glamour. Now, in Nicholas Fox Weber's superb biography, Balthus, the man and the artist, stands revealed as never before.

He was born in Paris in 1908 to Polish parents. At age twelve he first stepped into the spotlight with the publication of forty of his drawings illustrating a story about a cat by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was then Balthus's mother's lover and a crucial influence on the young boy. From that moment, Balthus has never been out of the public eye.

In 1934 his first exhibition, in Paris, stu

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

"I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction."
--  Oscar Wilde
i.
When Balthazar Klossowski turned six, he had a large birthday party in his family's apartment in Paris. Birthdays were a funny business for "Baltusz" -- as everyone called him. Since he had been born on February 29 in 1908, his family did not know precisely when to celebrate except on leap years. Nonetheless, as the boy anticipated his friends' arrival, he was in high spirits. He had a plan.

It was a cozy home full of art and books -- in a building on the Rue Boissonade, near the Boulevard Montparnasse in the fourteenth arrondissement. Baltusz's parents were both painters, his father an art historian as well, and along with Baladine's winsome watercolors and Erich's vigorous oils hung canvases by Cézanne and Delacroix, as well as a Géricault drawing and Japanese woodcuts. Baltusz's little friends entered dressed in their finery, in his eyes "all very beautiful with their white lace collars."
Once the nurses and governesses left the children on their own, the birthday boy took charge. Addressing the other youngsters, Baltusz announced that the time had come for them "to eat badly." There was a chocolate cake, and they all plunged in. Everyone got his collars and cuffs filthy with frosting. Everyone except for Baltusz, who remained spotless. When the nurses and governesses returned, all the other children were chastised or slapped, while Baltusz escaped punishment.

The story was told to me a lifetime later by the eighty-two-year-old Balthus -- the Count de Rola -- in the sitting room of his vast eighteenth-century chalet in a small French-speaking village in the Alps. "It's part of my bad side," he explained, referring to the way he had trapped others into temptation while keeping himself clean.

"A very naughty boy, and until now he has never changed," laughed his forty-eight-year-old Japanese-born wife, Setsuko, who had encouraged him to tell me the tale.

I had met both of them for the first time that afternoon. Balthus's reputation was that he loathed writers on art and would not grant interviews. In an era when many successful artists preen like movie stars, he has managed to give the impression that he prefers to live in isolation, as if the occasions when he has been quoted or photographed are accidental slips. In 1977, at the time of a rare Balthus show in New York -- the first in a decade -- Robert Hughes wrote of the artist in Time magazine that "at 69 he has no public face" and that there were no anecdotes about him in circulation, thanks to his own careful control. I had scant hope that he would alter his reclusive pose for me.

John Russell had begun his introduction to the catalog of the 1968 Balthus retrospective at the Tate Gallery with the statement, "What is private must remain so: that is Balthus' attitude, and it is at his insistence that this catalog contains no biographical matter. 'The best way to begin,' he said when apprised of our customs, 'is to say: "Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at the paintings." ' " That statement, often cited since, has become the gospel on the artist. It is especially provocative given the eroticism and deviltry and sinister overtones so many viewers see in his paintings of comatose teenagers and seemingly spent naked women.

When his major retrospective opened in Paris at the Centre Pompidou in 1983, critics in search of a lead on the work from Balthus himself could do no better than to fall back on his 1945 pronouncement, "I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art." The exhibition catalog, although rendered heavier than the combined volumes of the Paris phone book by its many essays and reproductions, presented no straightforward biographical data. It was pointed out that the largest book on Balthus, done with his cooperation, did not even provide his birth date. And the people in Balthus's constellation acted as if they had signed a secrecy oath. To a journalist from Le Monde, the artist's son Thadée declared politely that he would not speak about his father because his father did not want people to; moreover, he shared Balthus's view that to talk about painters was not to talk about paintings. Pierre Klossowski, the artist's brother, himself a famous writer and leading intellectual figure -- known for his lifelong devotion to the work of the Marquis de Sade -- explained that to discuss Balthus would give him migraines. Sylvia Bataille, an old friend who was the widow of Balthus's acquaintance the "excremental philosopher" Georges Bataille and the mother of one of Balthus's early mistresses, allowed that Balthus would never forgive her if she spoke. Other close acquaintances, expecting approaches because of the fanfare over the Pompidou show, disconnected their telephones.

But Balthus had readily acceded to my request that I come see him about the book I wished to write about him. On that first occasion, as we sat side by side on an eighteenth-century sofa, he was gracious and compliant, answering all of my questions and offering numerous anecdotes. Although he had forbidden my turning on a tape recorder, he had sanctioned my use of notebook and pen, and voiced no objection to my writing continuously. The story of his sixth birthday party, told with a great grin on his face, seemed, however, clearly a warning. Balthus could manage to get everyone else in trouble while keeping only himself above the fray, and he delighted in doing so.

ii.
Initially Balthus failed to answer the letter I sent him from Connecticut saying I had been asked to write a book on him and would like to meet him. So, having learned his phone number from Swiss information -- it was listed under "Klossowski" -- I steeled up the nerve to dial it early one morning about a month before that first visit in 1990. When someone with a gravelly yet tremulous voice answered the phone in slow and refined cadence, I asked, in my best high-school French, "Est-ce que je peux parler avec le Comte de Rola?"

"C'est lui-même!" the voice bellowed back authoritatively.

From then on, this man of such terrifying reputation, so ferocious in his portrait photos, was the height of graciousness. First he suggested that we switch to English. This, he offered, was his first language; he was one-quarter Scottish, he told me, and as a child had had a Scottish nanny. He readily granted my request that I be allowed to call on him. Solicitous about my travel plans, he scheduled a Monday morning three weeks hence that suited me well. The count gave me meticulous instructions on how to change to the small mountain train in Lausanne. He wondered if I knew his part of Switzerland, and seemed particularly pleased when I said that when I was in college I had dated a girl in Gstaad, only half an hour away; like a concerned older relative, he asked me her family name. He did not know these people, but when I explained that they could hardly ever use their large Gstaad chalet anymore because they now had to spend over half their time in another canton for tax purposes, he chuckled knowingly.

I arrived in Rossinière on the afternoon prior to our scheduled rendezvous. Walking through the village to the one pension that was open in a season suitable for neither hiking nor skiing, I was struck by the resemblance of everything around me to certain Balthus paintings. People in this mountain hamlet were walking through the small town square and talking in the sole café as if they had been absorbed in the same routine forever. This seemed a place where time had been frozen -- not out of nostalgia or the deliberate veneration of an earlier epoch, but...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0679407375
ISBN 13 
9780679407379
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
644
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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