Klossowski de rola balthasar

2001 · 85583 — New York: ECCO An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2001. First Edition Stated First Printing Stated. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xxvii 1 237 5 pages. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations some in color. Publisher's Note. A Note to the Reader by Alain Vircondelet. Foreword by Paul Lombard. Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates. DJ has a tear at the top front near the spine. This was originally published in French as Memoires de Balthus by Editions du Rocher. Balthasar Klossowski de Rola February 29 1908 - February 18 2001 known as Balthus was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls but also for the refined dreamlike quality of his imagery. Throughout his career Balthus rejected the usual conventions of the art world. He insisted that his paintings should be seen and not read about and he resisted any attempts made to build a biographical profile. Towards the end of his life he took part in a series of dialogues with the neurobiologist Semir Zeki conducted at his chalet at Rossinière Switzerland and at the Palazzo Farnese French Embassy in Rome. They were published in 1995 under the title La Qûete de l'essentiel and in it he gives some of his views on art painting and some painters. Balthus was one of the few living artists to be represented in the Louvre when his painting The Children 1937 was acquired from the private collection of Pablo Picasso. 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." ECCO [An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers] hardcover