Balthus's lifelong fascination with the dark side of childhood resulted in his most iconic works: canvases depicting girls on the brink of puberty, hovering between innocence and knowledge. In these pictures, the artist mingled intuition into his young sitters' psyches with overt erotic desire and forbidding austerity. Balthus's portraits of a local young Parisienne named Th???r???se Blanchard, and his interior scenes featuring Th???r???se's various successors, are among the most powerful depictions of childhood and ...
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Balthus's lifelong fascination with the dark side of childhood resulted in his most iconic works: canvases depicting girls on the brink of puberty, hovering between innocence and knowledge. In these pictures, the artist mingled intuition into his young sitters' psyches with overt erotic desire and forbidding austerity. Balthus's portraits of a local young Parisienne named Th???r???se Blanchard, and his interior scenes featuring Th???r???se's various successors, are among the most powerful depictions of childhood and adolescence in the Western canon. Far from being mere pretty girls in frilly dresses, Balthus's subjects are self-possessed and self-absorbed individuals, with a palpable but mysterious interior life. Also present in many of the images are cryptic cats - often smiling, sometimes leering, and likely as not standing in for Balthus himself. Balthus: Cats and Girls focuses on the early decades of his career, from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Sabine Rewald draws on her extensive (and firsthand) knowledge of the artist, as well as on interviews with the models themselves, to explore the origins and permutations of his obsession with depicting adolescents. She addresses the crucial influence of such key figures as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, his mother's lover, who acted for a time as Balthus's surrogate father. And she includes the previously unknown voices of the girls, whose recollections provide a unique perspective to some of the most recognizable and potent images of the twentieth century.
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Add this copy of Balthus: Cats and Girls to cart. $50.00, very good condition, Sold by AARDVARK RARE BOOKS, ABAA rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Eugene, OR, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Near Fine / Near Fine. Quarto, 10.4 in. x 9.3 in., pp. ix, 166. Richly illustrated with color and black and white photographs of Balthus' art and life. Brown cloth boards with gilt title to spine. Protected in mylar. Balthus (born Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) (1908-2001) was a reclusive Polish-French 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. (from Gagosian).
Add this copy of Balthus: Cats and Girls to cart. $70.95, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Add this copy of Balthus: Cats and Girls to cart. $131.68, new condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Add this copy of Balthus: Cats and Girls to cart. $195.99, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Brownstown, MI, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Metropolitan Museum of Art New York.
