Balthus : a biography / Nicholas Fox Weber.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weber, Nicholas Fox, 1947-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Balthus, 1908-2001.

Balthus.

Painters--France--Biography.

Painters.

France.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

viii, 644 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Knopf, 1999.

Summary:

A magnificent biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time, Balthus, the self-proclaimed Count de Rola, whose work is as widely collected and revered as it is dissected and psychoanalyzed for its shocking content.

The story of Balthus's life has always been cloaked in contradictions and hearsay, most originating from the masterful manipulations of the artist himself. Balthus's use of the media to color his life -- like his paintings -- in a mysterious, ambiguous light, comes into focus in Nicholas Fox Weber's fascinating biography, which serves not only as a revelation of the artist and the man, but of the tenuous and complicated relationship between the painter and his subjects.

Balthus was born in Paris in 1908 to Polish parents. He first stepped into the spotlight at the age of twelve with the publication of forty of his illustrations that told the story of a cat that ran away -- the text was written by Rainer Maria Rilke, then the lover of Balthus's mother, and a crucial influence on the young boy's growth and development as an artist and a man.

We see Balthus's collaboration with Antonin Artaud on his Theater of Cruelty, his friendships with Fellini, Camus, and James Bond creator Ian Fleming, and his complicated, competitive relationships with Picasso and Andre Derain.

Balthus's monumental portraits, a combination of traditional technique and an original vision, are highly sexualized, brilliantly rendered studies of adults and children, especially young girls, and are the stylistic descendants not of the impressionists, the cubists and expressionists that lived in his time, but of the classical work of Gustave Courbet and Piero della Francesca.Balthus's paintings are often filled with sado-masochistic overtones and sheer erotic force (an observation Balthus has always dismissed as ridiculous) and have evoked such intense shock in their viewers that many canvases have remained behind closed doors for decades to be seen by their owners alone.

And as we come to know Balthus the man, the oddly erotic, sado-masochistic construct is peeled away to disclose the vision of an artist who searches for truth through deceit, joy through pain, and whose life in many ways is his finest creation.

Contents:

Chapter 1 A Birthday 3

Chapter 2 Mitsou 19

Chapter 3 Transformation 56

Chapter 4 The Bomb 88

Chapter 5 Narcissus 95

Chapter 6 Piero 107

Chapter 7 Perambulations 130

Chapter 8 The Street 150

Chapter 9 The Piero of Paris 186

Chapter 10 The Guitar Lesson 205

Chapter 11 The Window 249

Chapter 12 Cathy Dressing 283

Chapter 13 Alice 302

Chapter 14 Derain 314

Chapter 15 Miro 347

Chapter 16 Surrealism A La Courbet 358

Chapter 17 The Children 374

Chapter 18 Therese 388

Chapter 19 Battlefields and Chateaux 402

Chapter 20 The Three Sisters 458

Chapter 21 An Obsession in Disguise 475

Chapter 22 The Villa Medici 491

Chapter 23 Rossiniere 550

Chapter 24 Cat at the Mirror 585.

Notes:

"This is a Borzoi book"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 605-621) and index.

ISBN:

0679407375

OCLC:

41476743