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Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
ISBN: 1644230321
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
In his 1989 book on Balthus—the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century—Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years. Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport’s distinct reflections on Balthus’s paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer. Arguing that Balthus’s figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, “The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin’s naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus’s, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction.” Davenport’s critique helps us understand Balthus in our times—something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.
Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
ISBN: 1644230321
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 121
Get Book Here
Book Description
In his 1989 book on Balthus—the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century—Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years. Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport’s distinct reflections on Balthus’s paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer. Arguing that Balthus’s figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, “The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin’s naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus’s, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction.” Davenport’s critique helps us understand Balthus in our times—something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.
Author: Nicholas Fox Weber
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 038535276X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1047
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Book Description
The first full-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, stunned the art world. The seven canvases drew attention to his extraordinary technique -- a mix of tradition and imagination informed by the work of Piero della Francesca, Courbet, and Joseph Reinhardt, but unique to the twenty-six-year-old artist -- and to their provocative content; one of the paintings, The Guitar Lesson, was so powerful in its sadomasochistic imagery that it was deemed necessary to remove it from public display. Continuously since then, Balthus's work has provoked both great opprobrium and profound admiration -- as has the artist himself, whether collaborating with Antonin Artaud on his Theater of Cruelty, transforming the Villa Medici into the social center of Fellini's Rome in the 1950s, or competing for the artistic limelight with his friends Picasso and André Derain. The artist's complexities are clarified and his genius understood in a book that derives its particular immediacy from Weber's long and intense conversations with Balthus -- who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer -- as well as his interviews with the painter's closest friends, members of his family, and many of the subjects of his controversial canvases. Weber's critical and human grasp (he acutely analyzes the paintings in terms of both their aesthetic achievement and what they reveal of their maker's psyche), combined with his rich knowledge of Balthus's life and his insight into the ideas and forces that have helped to shape Balthus's work over the past seven decades, gives us a striking, illuminating portrait of one of the most admired and outrageous artists of our time.
Author: Sabine Rewald
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300197012
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Explores the origins and permutations of Balthus's obsessions with adolescents and felines, addresses the crucial influence of such key figures as poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and provides the recollections and comments of the girl models.
Author: Balthus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788434310537
Category : Female nude in art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Balthus
Publisher: Ecco
ISBN: 9780066212609
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The painter Balthus, whose tenacity and cultivated taste for secrecy have enveloped him in an aura of forbidding mystery, wrote this memoir at the end of his long life. A man who for decades opted to "give expression to the world" rather than to "express" himself speaks for the first and only time about his life, family, work, his theory of art and how it intersects with history, literature, and spirituality. Balthus was born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908 to Polish art historian Erich Klossowski and his wife, the painter Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro. The family lived in Germany, France, and Switzerland. In this memoir Balthus describes his childhood with his mother and her lover -- the poet Rainer Maria Rilke -- who became Balthus's own spiritual mentor. He evokes la vie de boheme in Paris during the 1920s, his friendships with Picasso, Derain, Artaud, Giacometti, Saint-Exupéry, René Char, Pierre Jean Jouve, and Albert Camus. He discusses his paintings, offers glimpses into his marriage, and expresses his passion for Chinese art and the Swiss chalets and Italian villas that he helped to restore. He recalls touching moments with his beloved daughter Harumi and the inspiration he drew from his cats. Also, in a kind of final lesson, Balthus shares his thoughts about painting and creation, denounces contemporary art as being illusory and deceitful, and talks candidly about his Catholic faith and how it inspired his work. "We are most charmed by the memoir's ease of expression, as if Balthus were confiding in us, as individuals," writes Joyce Carol Oates in her introduction to Vanished Splendors. "We are brought into a startling intimacy with genius."
Author: Sabine Rewald
Publisher: Schirmer/Mosel
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
"This volume appears on the occasion of the very first Balthus exhibition in Germany organized by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, presenting 76 paintings and drawings from Balthus's most creative years."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Virginie Monnie
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 9780810963948
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola), long considered one of the great figure painters of the twentieth century, has remained one of its most elusive creative spirits. Born into an aristocratic Polish family in 1908, Balthus grew up in the most cosmopolitan and cultivated circles of Geneva, Berlin, and finally Paris, where his artist parents settled in 1924. Attracted at an early age by the restraint and timelessness of the old masters, Balthus studied painting with Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Andre Derain. He was also fascinated by the work of the Surrealists, and he began to paint images of young girls in enigmatic settings suffused with an understated eroticism. While his calm, almost architectonic forms are reminiscent of Italian Renaissance art, the strange atmosphere of his paintings conveys a distinctly twentieth-century sensibility. The artist has remained silent on the underlying meanings of his images, and indeed has spent much of his life avoiding attention. Balthus's work was little recognized until the late 1960s, but his remarkable achievement finally received international acclaim in 1983, when a major retrospective exhibition opened at the Musee National d'Art Moderne-Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the City Museum, Tokyo. Still, the full extent of his output has not been known: nearly 100 paintings and numerous drawings, sketchbooks, and even sculptures have escaped notice. This monumental, lavishly illustrated volume, the outcome of years of study, reveals a surprisingly extensive oeuvre. An introductory essay by Jean Clair, curator of the landmark 1983 exhibition, defines the sometimesunexpected poetic, literary, and philosophical sources of Balthus's early inspiration. Then follows a full catalogue raisonne of Balthus's work by Virginie Monnier, published here in its original French. The catalogue includes all of the artist's 350 known paintings, nearly 1,000 previously unpublished drawings, and 50 sketch-books -- 2,100 works in all -- which enable us to understand his working methods and document the creation of most of his paintings. Long overdue, this comprehensive publication adds new luster to the reputation of an important and intriguing artist.
Author: Sabine Rewald
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 0810907380
Category : Art, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
This critical study of the life and work of the French artist Balthus serves as the catalogue of an exhibition held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris
Author: Alain Vircondelet
Publisher: Flammarion
ISBN: 9782080201607
Category : Cats
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Through the painter's works of art and personal photographs, we are given a glimpse into the intimate and wondrous sanctuary constructed by Balthus and his wife Setsuko at their home at the Grand Chalet, where cats roamed free, the trusted guardians of many secrets -- Back cover.
Author: Kishin Shinoyama
Publisher: Schirmer Mosel
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
Balthus (1908-2001) is one of the truly enigmatic personalities among the painters of the 20th century. This extraordinary illustrated volume is devoted to the early masterpieces and is published on the occasion of Balthus' centenary in February 2008.
