Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola), long considered one of the great figure painters of the twentieth century, has remained one of its most elusive creative spirits. Born into an aristocratic Polish family in 1908, Balthus grew up in the most cosmopolitan and cultivated circles of Geneva, Berlin, and finally Paris, where his artist parents settled in 1924. Attracted at an early age by the restraint and timelessness of the old masters, Balthus studied painting with Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Andre Derain. He was also fascinated by the work of the Surrealists, and he began to paint images of young girls in enigmatic settings suffused with an understated eroticism. While his calm, almost architectonic forms are reminiscent of Italian Renaissance art, the strange atmosphere of his paintings conveys a distinctly twentieth-century sensibility. The artist has remained silent on the underlying meanings of his images, and indeed has spent much of his life avoiding attention. Balthus's work was little recognized until the late 1960s, but his remarkable achievement finally received international acclaim in 1983, when a major retrospective exhibition opened at the Musee National d'Art Moderne-Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the City Museum, Tokyo. Still, the full extent of his output has not been known: nearly 100 paintings and numerous drawings, sketchbooks, and even sculptures have escaped notice. This monumental, lavishly illustrated volume, the outcome of years of study, reveals a surprisingly extensive oeuvre. An introductory essay by Jean Clair, curator of the landmark 1983 exhibition, defines the sometimesunexpected poetic, literary, and philosophical sources of Balthus's early inspiration. Then follows a full catalogue raisonne of Balthus's work by Virginie Monnier, published here in its original French. The catalogue includes all of the artist's 350 known paintings, nearly 1,000 previously unpublished drawings, and 50 sketch-books -- 2,100 works in all -- which enable us to understand his working methods and document the creation of most of his paintings. Long overdue, this comprehensive publication adds new luster to the reputation of an important and intriguing artist.

Explores the origins and permutations of Balthus's obsessions with adolescents and felines, addresses the crucial influence of such key figures as poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and provides the recollections and comments of the girl models.

Realist of the unreal French-German painter Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908-2001), known as Balthus, shocked the Parisian art world in 1934 with his dreamy, sensual, Neo-Classical portraits of nymphets at a time when Surrealism and abstraction were de rigueur. As a provocateur, Balthus was often scorned; as an artist, he was widely embraced as a prodigy. In response to critics of his realist style, Balthus said: "The real isn't what you think you see. One can be a realist of the unreal and a figurative painter of the invisible." His erotic, poetic paintings live on as examples of the best figurative work of the modern era. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Mieke Bal analysis is focused in the eerie sense of very real and very unreal that the paintings emanate. She considers this the heart of Balthus work. It invites viewers in and repels them at the same time. We get access to a world all his own, but are not told what is there to see.Thus, the works labor against assumptions of representation and appropriation. The means of this labor figuration is indispensable for the effet.Although figurativity is supposedly the royal road to realism, in Balthus s case it is not at all. Bal argues that the paintings draw the viewer into a world we honw not to exist.This canny fictionality makes allegations of erotic appropriation naive and censoring.Reducing Balthus s work to the paintings of nude adolescent girls is, moreover, ignoring his many works that are not in the least focused on this theme. Color, space, genres or history are some of the key concepts that the author put in the center of Balthus work. 130 illustrations

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition Gorey's Worlds, organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art."

Desire and Avoidance in Art argues that while early developmental traumas can produce life-long creative endeavors with striking aesthetic results, they may also, for the male artist, result in destructive relations with women. Brink introduces the scheme of personality formation - as found in the work on infant and child development of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Mary Main, Patricia Crittenden, Allen N. Schore, and others - to explore a new venture in psychobiography. He effectively uses the concept of «anxious attachment» to describe mother-infant/child relations and their sequelae. Using pertinent developmental data found in each artist's childhood, Andrew Brink accounts for the anxious-avoidant attachment style (or, in Crittenden's terminology, the Anxious/Controlling style) from which these artists suffered. He aims to explain why partnerships with women are sometimes hazardous and frequently tragic for male artists by referencing various feminist writers. Based on their viewpoints, Brink extracts psychodynamic explanations that are largely based on what the artists' imagery reveals. Furthermore, he explains how the attachment theory of attraction-avoidance is shown to supplement and enrich other ways of understanding chronically tense relations between the sexes. Brink focuses his attention on artists such as Picasso, Bellmer, Balthus, and Cornell, who are culturally powerful and often stimulate discussion about misogynic figures within a social context.