A Famous French Painter Balthus

Balthus was a French painter. His primitive name was Balthasar Klossowski. He was his pseudonym used after attending art. He once was referred to as “the greatest painter of the 20th century” by Picasso. He was born in a Polish noble family. His parents both had made many achievements in arts. His father Erich was an art historian and painter, his Jewish mother was a painter. His brother who was 3 years older than him became a famous surrealist novelist, critic and painter.

As a painter, he received great artistic edification since he was very young. Symbolism painter Pierre, Fauvist master Matisse and musician Stravinsky and other celebrities in the Paris Art World were guests of his family in his childhood. They often came to his home and communicated with his parents about arts.

Due to the advantaged and unique growth environment, Balthus had a wide range of interests about arts from childhood, especially had a strong fascination with painting. He published a set of comic book which created according to the Chinese stories at 13. Albeit it could not be called excellent works, but his singular temperaments of becoming a great painter had been fully revealed.

He was a lonely but very wealthy painter. Most time of his whole life, he lived in a mountain village in Alpine Valleys in the western Switzerland. He and his Japanese wife had a reclusive and solitary life, with a complicated and confusing layer of mysterious color. The personality traits of Balthus were reflected in his art works clearly. He was good at revealing the mental activities of the people at ordinary life scenes. Paranoid psychological from the childhood was often reflected in his paintings.

Girl At The Window
Girl At The Window

His works were indifferent, sly or crafty, which seemed to contain inexplicable senses of thinking. This kind of thinking was extremely profound and also integrated with poetic lyrical atmosphere. The more objective impact was no one could tell the creative intentions of the painter. He held his first art exhibition in Pierre Paris in 1934 and received extensive attentions of the art world immediately. It seems that he was obsessed with such theme that the young girls closing to puberty, the heart evoked the desires for opposite sex, sex means seemed like the half-awake state. Since then, he established a supernatural, impersonal emotional psychological of painting which probing deeply of human minds deliberately. There was a blurred melancholy diffusing in the pictures.

Although Balthus never had received official education, the traditional classicism painting had profound impacts on him. No matter the appearances or the layouts of his works all reflected deep classical brands. The Saint Andre cross appeared in his paintings with the form of deformational body. The head,

feet, knees and elbows of the model formed the unique visual mode. That was probably a concept that image extended to space unlimited This concept of unlimited space and time was not created by Balthus, it could be traced back to the variant art of Baroque era. But we can not sure that whether Balthus got references from it or not.