Balthus ; Drawings and Watercolors

Balthus ; Drawings and Watercolors PDF Author: Balthus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Balthus ; Drawings and Watercolors

Balthus ; Drawings and Watercolors PDF Author: Balthus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Balthus

Balthus PDF 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.

Balthus, the Drawings

Balthus, the Drawings PDF Author: Balthus
Publisher: Vilo Publishing
ISBN: 9782876602441
Category : Drawing, French
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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"Balthus' drawings include sketches, portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and nude studies"--Dustjacket

Vanished Splendors: A Memoir

Vanished Splendors: A Memoir PDF 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."

Balthus

Balthus PDF 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.

Cleopatra's Nose

Cleopatra's Nose PDF Author: Judith Thurman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429923008
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Cleopatra's Nose is an exuberant gathering of essays and profiles representing twenty years of Judith Thurman's celebrated writing, particularly her fascination with human vanity, femininity, and "women's work"—from haute couture to literature to commanding empires. The subjects are iconic (Jackie, the Brontës, Toni Morrison, Anne Frank) and multifarious (tofu and performance art, pornography and platform shoes, kimonos and bulimia); all inspire dazzling displays of craft, wit, penetration, and intelligence. Here we find explorations of voracity: hunger for sex, food, experience, and transcendence; see how writers from Flaubert to Nadine Gordimer have engaged with history; meet eminent Victorians and the greats of fashion. Whether reporting on hairstyles, strolling the halls of power, or deftly unpacking novels and their writers, Thurman never fails to provoke, inspire, captivate, and enlighten. Cleopatra's Nose is an embarrassment of riches from one of our great literary journalists.

Mitsou

Mitsou PDF Author: Balthus
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 0870993690
Category : Art, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Balthus

Balthus PDF Author: Balthus
Publisher: Little Brown
ISBN: 9780821215296
Category : Balthus, 1908-
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Mitsou

Mitsou PDF Author: Rilke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Balthus

Balthus PDF 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