Balthasar Klossowski (French: [klɔsɔfski]; February 29, 1908 – February 18, 2001), also known as Balthus (French: [baltys]), was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of young girls, and the dreamlike quality of his imagery.
Balthus rejected the usual conventions of the art world. Insisting that his paintings must be seen rather than read, he resisted attempts to build a biographical profile. Late in life, he was interviewed by neurobiologist Semir Zeki, in Rossinière, Switzerland, and at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. The interviews were published in 1995 under the title La Quête de l'essentiel. In these conversations, he discussed some of his views on art, painting, and his contemporaries.
Balthus, originally Balthasar Klossowski, was born in Paris in 1908 to the Prussian expatriates Erich Klossowski, a painter and art historian, and Elisabeth Dorothée Spiro Klossowska (known as Baladine Klossowska). The sobriquet "Balthus" was rooted in the artist's childhood nickname, which can be alternately spelled Baltus, Baltusz, Balthusz or Balthus.
His father Erich grew up in the town of Ragnit (now Neman) in East Prussia, currently part of Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. Balthus claimed that his father belonged to the former Polish petty nobility (the drobna szlachta) and that his family bore the Rola coat of arms. The artist later elaborated on his family background, opting to use the surname "Klossowski de Rola", and adding the term "count" to this title. Balthus had the Rola arms embroidered onto many of his kimonos, in the style of a Japanese kamon.
Baladine was descended from Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to East Prussia. In the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1984 Balthus exhibition, she was described as the daughter of a cantor from Korelitz in Novogrudok district in the Russian Empire. However, Balthus told his biographer Nicholas Fox Weber that this was erroneous, and that his mother came "apparently from a Protestant family in the south of France". According to Weber, however, this was false. In fact, Balthus would often embellish the story of his mother's ancestry, saying that she was also related to the Romanovs and the Narischkins. In another confabulatory twist, Weber reports that Baladine's lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, had said that the Spiros were descended from one of the richest families of Sephardic Jews, that is that they were of Spanish, not Eastern European origin. Weber also doubted this story, noting that Balthus's son Fumio, born in the late 1960s, had Tay–Sachs disease, a genetic disorder commonly associated with Eastern European Jewish populations.
Balthus's older brother Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) became a noted writer and philosopher.
The Klossowski children grew up in an artistic environment, with frequent visits to their household by famous artists and writers, including Rainer Maria Rilke, André Gide (who mentored Pierre), and Jean Cocteau (who would depict the family in scenes of his 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles). The artists Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard were also visitors. The children had a Scottish nanny, and Balthus would later say that his first language was English, although his parents spoke German to one another.
Overall, Balthus had an idyllic memory of his childhood years, which were disrupted when, shortly after the First World War began in 1914, the family was forced to leave Paris in order to avoid deportation due to their German citizenship. They settled first in Switzerland and later in Berlin.
In 1917 his parents separated, and his mother moved with the two boys to Geneva. They lived in a modest flat at 11, rue Pré-Jérôme. About a year later his mother became the lover of Rilke. Rilke was very impressed with the young Balthus’ artistic talent, and helped him to publish his first work in 1921 at the age of 13. This was a wordless novel titled Mitsou, which included forty drawings by Balthus and a preface by Rilke. The comic-book-style pictures depict the story of a young boy who loses his beloved cat. The themes of the story foreshadowed Balthus's lifelong fascination with cats, along with a feeling of loss or disappearance.
Because of financial difficulties, Baladine moved with her children to her brother's house in Berlin in 1921.
In 1926, Balthus visited Florence, where he copied many frescos by the Renaissance master Piero della Francesca. This inspired an early work of his: the tempera wall paintings of the Protestant church of the Swiss village of Beatenberg which he created in 1927.
From 1930 to 1931, Balthus served in the French army in Morocco. He was drafted into the Moroccan infantry in Kenitra and Fes, worked as a secretary, and sketched his painting La Caserne (1933).
In 1933, he moved to Paris, taking a studio in the Rue de Furstemberg. Later he would move to another studio at the nearby Cour de Rohan. Balthus showed limited engagement with modernist styles such as Cubism. His paintings were realistic but introverted, in the manner of the second generation of Surrealist painters such as Salvador Dalí, who often used realistic techniques to depict psychological motifs or dream images. Balthus frequently depicted adolescent subjects in compositions that have been described as erotic or voyeuristic by critics. One of the most notorious works from his first exhibition in Paris was The Guitar Lesson (1934), which caused controversy due to its sadistic and sexually explicit imagery. The painting depicts a young girl arched on her back over the lap of her female teacher, whose hands are positioned on the girl as if to play her like a guitar: one hand near her exposed vulva, and the other hand grasping her hair. Viewers were troubled not only by the painting's eroticism, but also by a suspicion of blasphemy in the composition's similarity to that of a famous French religious work, the Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. Other works from the same exhibition included The Street (1933), Cathy Dressing (1933) and Alice (1933).
Early on his work was admired by writers and fellow painters, especially by André Breton and Pablo Picasso. His circle of friends in Paris included the novelists Pierre Jean Jouve, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Joseph Breitbach, Pierre Leyris, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris and René Char, the photographer Man Ray, the playwright and actor Antonin Artaud, and the painters André Derain, Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti (one of the most faithful of his friends). In 1948, another friend, Albert Camus, asked him to design the sets and costumes for his play L'État de Siège (The State of Siege, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault). Balthus also designed the sets and costumes for Artaud's adaptation for Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci (1935), Ugo Betti's Delitto all'isola delle capre (Crime on Goat-Island, 1953) and Barrault's adaptation of Julius Caesar (1959–1960).
In 1937 he married Antoinette de Watteville, who was from an aristocratic family from Bern. He had met her as early as 1924, and she was the model for the aforementioned Cathy Dressing and for a series of portraits. Balthus had two children from this marriage, Stanislas (born 1942) and Thaddeus Klossowski (born 1944), who recently published books on their father, including the letters by their parents. Stanislas, known as "Stash", became a figure in swinging London and Paris in the 1960s.
In 1940, with the invasion of France by German forces, Balthus fled with his wife Antoinette to Savoy to a farm in Champrovent near Aix-les-Bains, where he began work on two major paintings: Landscape near Champrovent (1942–1945) and The Living Room (1942). In 1942, he escaped from Occupied France to Switzerland, first to Bern and in 1945 to Geneva, where he became a friend of the publisher Albert Skira as well as the writer and member of the French Resistance, André Malraux. Balthus returned to France in 1946 and a year later traveled with André Masson to Southern France, meeting figures such as Picasso and Jacques Lacan, who eventually became a collector of his work. With Adolphe Mouron Cassandre in 1950, Balthus designed stage decor for a production of Mozart's opera Così fan tutte in Aix-en-Provence. Three years later he moved into the Chateau de Chassy in the Morvan, living with his step-niece Frédérique Tison and finishing his large-scale paintings La Chambre (The Room 1952, possibly influenced by Pierre Klossowski's novels) and Le Passage du Commerce Saint-André (1954).