Search Results

“... Balthus first attracted notice early in 1934 with a small exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. Several of the works he showed – The Street, The Window and Alice – seem as startling now as they must have done then. This Catalogue raisonné, published not long before the artist’s death earlier this year, enables us to determine the unremarkable ingredients that so surprisingly and so explosively combined to make these paintings possible ...”

“... of girl sigh like men.            Forgeries sigh twice. Balthus sighs and lies about it, claiming it was Byron’s sigh.         A sigh may come too late.                Is it better than screaming.                   Give me all your sighs for four or five ...”

“... about the exercise of power and its abuse, and about subterranean aspects of human relationships. Balthus gave us the male view of pubescent girls trapped in closed rooms; Rego seems to be offering their obverse. Her women will escape. Balthus made the best illustrations for Wuthering Heights that I know of, but Rego’s ...”

“... Eardley studied briefly with James Cowie, whose painting of two schoolgirls (more Jean Brodie than Balthus, but with a bit of both) is tightly composed and painted – the opposite in handling and drawing of Eardley’s child portraits. It is not surprising that she argued with him. But to think of the contrast between them as a commentary on aspects of ...”

“... crisis of the visual and the verbal’ in Abstract Expressionism – and he is very good on Balthus and Bacon, bringing writers, Artaud, Bataille and Eliot, into close conjunction with the ...”

“... table, the soft lights, the fine wines and delicate food, the expensively simple furniture, the Balthus drawing and the Giacometti figurine, the leather-bound books, the white-clad maid, the Glenn Gould tape playing softly in the background – all the rich, muted, exquisitely tasteful life that she had assembled for them. Yes, he fitted ill, here; he had ...”

“... his mother a Visconti. (In a bizarre aside, we are told later that he is a cousin of the painter Balthus.) The parents were killed by retreating German soldiers; his sister, Mischa, was killed and eaten by Nazi troops who had previously done the same to a young deer – hence Dr Lecter’s anti-deer-hunter thing; hence also his cannibalism. All this ...”

“... Switzerland of lofty mental Alps and political neutrality. She keeps company with Nabokov and Balthus there, and meanwhile, in the real Türler shop on Paradeplatz in Zurich, one can view the famous Cosmos Clock, which houses a mechanism that rotates the firmament once every 25,794 years, the period known as one ‘Platonic year’. Guest has had the ...”

“... to take the cigar from his lips, Parisian streets humming behind his leatherclad bulk (1963). Balthus in 1990 holds a porcelain coffee-cup near his quizzical face as he regards us with his back to the light, the shape of his head inviting comparison with the tallboy behind it. There seems to be a preponderance of old and ageing people in the selection ...”

“... the whole story, with the parents never suspecting that their daughter is like a child in a Balthus painting or a Lorca poem. This is transgression at a high pitch, so uncomfortable though so unarguable as a literary performance that the temptation is to declare it unforgettable then forget it. This isn’t quite Surrealism, since the emphasis is on an ...”

“... a rich Greek painter named Yannis; and the successful pursuit of the eccentric, reclusive painter Balthus. The effect of putting Aids in the background of a cops-and-robbers tale of the art world is to make it all the more menacing. At the end of a long paragraph the narrator mentions he’s in a café where he’s served by a new waiter: He kept glancing ...”

“... one of his early experiments, usually called the ‘Hampstead nude’, was ‘a bit inspired by Balthus, whom I then very much admired’. There is certainly a similarity: a pale-skinned, naked young girl sitting on a wooden chair in a slightly shabby floral Victorian bedroom, watchfully doing the photographer’s bidding. The room seems too small for ...”

“... Gorky and the Pasternak family, Ellen Key and Klara Liebknecht, Paula Modersohn-Becker, the young Balthus and his mother, Baladine Klossowska (with whom, though she came from Breslau, he corresponded in French), Lord Kitchener and Walther Rathenau, Alexander Zaharov and Marianne Mitford, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Mann, the philosopher Georg ...”