Balthus, born Balthasar Klossowski, in 1908, was sixty-two when we met, some forty years ago. I had never known a great artist, and he looked the part, especially in paint-splattered trousers and a ...

I stumbled into a secret the other day. Or at least I think I did. I cannot be absolutely sure. I had gone to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to look at ...

The Mountain, the twelve-foot-wide painting by Balthus in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the most disquieting visions of summer ever committed to canvas, a pastoral ...

The French painter Balthus—best known for his portraits of young girls oozing with sexual innuendo—is an artist that elicits radical responses: some love him for his long-lasting talent and staunch ...

In a 1968 retrospective of his work at the Tate Gallery, the Polish-French modern artist Balthus once prepared a biography for his influential paintings that read: “Balthus is a painter of whom ...

The paintings of the Polish-French artist known as Balthus “speak directly to the rotten part of the heart,” said Christian Viveros-Fauné in The Village Voice. Visitors to the Met get only a coy, ...

Like everyone else who has ever commented on his art, Balthus (1908-2001) returns repeatedly in his memoir to the question of his work's erotic content. A self-taught painter who considered Piero ...

Nicholas Fox Weber is the author of "Balthus: A Biography" and "Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art, 1928-1943." He is writing a biography of Le Corbusier. The mystique of the ...

If current trends continue, in just a few years all of contemporary culture will be nothing but an unending stream of cat pictures. Newspapers desperate to survive will publish only adorable kitten ...

Two years ago, a provocative painting by Balthus stirred up a controversy that extended well beyond the art world. Now, a painting from the same series is expected to sell for as much as $18 million ...

NEW YORK — “I used to want to shock, but now it bores me,” wrote the painter Balthus in 1955. He was referring to the work presented in his first gallery show in 1934, in Paris — a highly charged ...