Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola (also known as Balthus) is a controversial Polish-French artist noted for his inspiring paintings of youthful Lolita-type girls. His latter works specified him as a modern artist but also brought him notoriety. Throughout his career, he refused to label his work in any genre, insisting that it be handled as flesh/nudity rather than classified. Balthus specialized in figurative painting - however, he painted landscapes too. His prominent works include The Street (1933, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Guitar Lessons (1934, private collection).
Balthus, a self-taught artist, detested modern abstraction, instead delivering reference to artists such as Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Piero della Francesca (1483-1520).
Balthus is one of those artists who defies classification and labelization. He purposefully distanced himself from all subsequent aesthetic trends in order, as he once admitted, to attain everlasting reality. His painting was unaffected by the broad return to realism since he had always employed the style and techniques of the Old Masters to reflect reality. His seemingly inoffensive, typical bourgeois houses are the settings for showing an ambiguous universe populated by young adolescents in the midst of puberty, into which adults are forbidden to penetrate.
The Card Game,1948 - 1950, is Balthus's work that expresses the awakening of sexual consciousness in the most delicate and subtle way. When Balthus grew up, figurative painting was disappearing in mainstream. But he has spent his life on a project to restore visual poetry, convinced that the key to paint is "what you can see". He was distant in his interest from his contemporaries that he was told in lonely and tragic.
Baltis is passionately fond of picturing children and teenagers, especially young girls who are just budding to fancy their first love, because their images are innocent and virginal, and their mentality in youth is colorful, changeable, complex and subtle. In his writing, the white-clothed and fluttering boyhood that is deeply missed by everyone is particularly fascinating. Perhaps there is a hidden vibrancy of classical painting that he has carefully cared for.
Gazing at the painting's detail is a joy of losing track of time. Both character reach forward and retract their other hand. Under the table, the girl's small foot carefully stretched forward, and the angle of the boy's body revealed his secret: he also liked the girl in front of him.
The work transcends all the factors of painting criticism, such as meaning, color, sense of light, movement and static, and evokes the slightly cruel wordless feeling in the viewer's heart. Balthus establishes a psychological painting of supernatural impersonal emotions, deliberately probing the hidden in the depths of the human psyche, and what permeates the artwork is a layer of mysterious melancholy. Balthus's world is a flat, static, stretched functional view and invisible web that seems to be transcending the omnipresent time with an eternal existence.
Balthus' genre is more akin to "magical realism" or the "French Revolutionary" around the 20s-30s, but Balthus owned his self-unique style - let's call it - "Spatial Pornism," his paintings of females in various settings, revealing either naive, seductive, tranquil, or melancholy. After the 1950s, his colour palette became more delicate and realistic in geometric rules of classicism, as well as Cézanne's modelling traits were perfectly integrated beneath his brush. Balthus disliked or even condemned modern art and had extremely restricted for paintings' quality, with each piece taking a lengthy period, resulting in a tiny number of works.
It is easy to see why Balthus's art is controversial: children are associated with so-called "pornographic" components, making it improper for the layperson. Art does not hold any emotional or monetary worth, and the meaning of art is provided by the people and things who appreciate it. That is - if you see Balthus's paintings and feel erotic, it simply depicts how you feel, not how the wider audience feels. Balthus's purpose in selecting children as nudists is - not only to pursue art, but also to revive the Binary of sex and pornography.
"Spatial-Pornism" paintings are not daubed for children, but for those who feel sexual desire when they see children naked – do you have a sexual desire for children? In Balthus's world, children are not physically binary creatures (children are not allowed to have sexual relations with binary men and women), and if adults have sexual associations with non-binary creatures, what sexual orientation would be given to define?
Maja Turkowska
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Warsaw, Poland
Artpendix Press
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