Balthasar Klossowski (1908 – 2001), also known as Balthus, 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 was a reclusive painter of charged and disquieting narrative scenes. Skirting avant-garde movements such as Surrealism, he appropriated the techniques of such antecedents as Piero della Francesca and Gustave Courbet to depict the physical and psychic struggles of adolescence. Casting viewers as voyeurs of brooding pubescent female subjects, he scandalized audiences with his first gallery exhibition, at Galerie Pierre, Paris, in 1934. In the sixty years that followed, Balthus cultivated a self-taught classicism—evident in the subject matter and technique of his interior portraits, street scenes, and landscapes—that ultimately served as a framework for more enigmatic and subversive artistic investigations.
Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) was born in Paris. His first major museum exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1956. Other important exhibitions include Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; A Retrospective Exhibition, Tate, London; 39th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 1980; Balthus in Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1980; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Ar, 1984; Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1993; Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1995; Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2001; Time Suspended: Paintings and Drawings, 1932–1960, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2007;
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.
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| Balthasar Klossowski |
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| La Toilette de Cathy, 1933 |
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| La Fenêtre, 1933 |
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| La Caserne, 1933 |
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| Étude pour "le Rêve I", 1935 |
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| Lady Abdy, 1935 |
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| Le Roi des chats, 1935 |
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| Summertime, 1935 |
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| Les Enfants Blanchard, 1937 |
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| Nature Morte, 1937 |
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| La victime, 1938 |
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| Thérèse rêvant, 1938 |
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| Thérèse, 1938 |
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| Thérèse sur une banquette, 1939 |
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| Nature morte avec un personnage, 1940 |
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| Solitaire, 1943 |
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| Les Beaux Jours, 1944-45 |
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| Le Jeu de Cartes, 1948-50 |
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| Colette assise, 1954 |
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| Les Trois Sœurs, 1954 |
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| Le Rêve I, 1955 |
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| Le Fruit d'or, 1956 |
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| The Moth, 1960 |
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| Portrait d'Alice, 1962 |
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| Katia reading, 1974 |
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| Nude in Profile, 1975 |
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| Nude at Rest, 1977 |
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| Montecalvello, 1979 |
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| Odalisque allongée |
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