Description"Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible." -Balthus One of the last great 20th-century masters, Balthus pursued a path that ran exactly contrary to that of the modernist avant-gardes with which he was contemporary.
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..
He was raised in an exceptionally artistic milieu, with visitors to his household including Rilke (who became his mother\'s lover), Andr Gide, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard.
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus (1908-2001), was born in Paris to Polish expatriate parents.
It commences with the monumental masterpiece Passage du Commerce-Saint-Andr (1952-54), in which Balthus\' intensive study of the dimensions of space and time and their relationship to figure and object is especially apparent.
This volume, published for a retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, gathers around 50 key paintings from all phases of this legendary artist\'s career.
At once quiet and intriguing, his paintings unite colliding contrasts, combining reality and dream, eroticism and innocence, practicality and mystery, the familiar and the uncanny in unique ways.
Description"Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible." -Balthus One of the last great 20th-century masters, Balthus pursued a path that ran exactly contrary to that of the modernist avant-gardes with which he was contemporary
