- Balthus: Cats and GirlsOur PickBy Sabine Rewald
- Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (Balthus), 1908-2001: The King of Cats (Taschen Basic Art)By Gilles Neret
- Balthus: A BiographyBy Nicholas Fox Weber
- BalthusBy Stanislas Klossowski De Rola (Balthus' son)
Important Art by Balthus
The Street (1933)
In this scene of urban life, a tableau featuring a larger group of individuals than the more intimate couples or single individuals he usually painted - can be seen as his setting in the modern era the sort of outdoor group scenes rendered allegorically by early painters such as Brueghel and Bosch. He updates this depiction of shared - or parallel -- sociality by combining the enigmatic affects, stiff postures and heightened atmosphere of Surrealism with a classical composing of figures in architectural space. For the latter, he draws on some of the techniques established in Renaissance-era painting, with carefully laid out proportions for each element, and the foreshortening of the individual figures at their different degrees of depth in a vanishing perspective for the viewer. He offers a more refined take on some of the ambiguous portraiture than his German contemporary Otto Dix produced around this same time, or the group tableaus in modern spaces that Max Beckmann was also rendering.
Guitar Lesson (1934)
This is a prime example of how his symbolic works triggered discomfort in some viewers, and it is a prototypical - if not the ultimate - example of his use of young girls in his paintings. With the exposed lower body of a prepubescent girl and hints of a sexual dalliance with the woman on whose lap she lays, this piece was first displayed at one of his early Paris shows, but hasn't been exhibited in public since it was last shown in New York in 1977.
While the title quite literally can refer to the guitar in the foreground of the composition, he is using it in a more symbolic way - the sitting woman has her arms and hands positioned as though playing a guitar; here, though, the guitar is the body of a young girl. This work also comments on roles of authority and dominance; the young girl is submissively draped over the woman's lap, and her face and limp arms imply little agency, though the girl's hand reaching up to hold on to the somewhat disheveled woman's exposed breast suggests an ambiguity of both pleasure seeking and a more conventional succor of daughter from mother in the image. Conversely, the seated woman is in control of the entire situation, and her face and downward gaze imply dominance over the limp girl.
Here, even the draped pose of this painting references historical works that preceded it; the lifeless body of the girl in the lap of a woman mimics the many versions of the Pieta. While Michelangelo's Virgin Mary looks down lovingly at her dead son, the woman in this painting has a less emotional, more studied gaze, more predatory than loving. Similarly, Christ's lifeless face is shown looking upward, towards a symbolic father/heaven, while Balthus's girl looks out to nowhere, uncertainly lost in the ambiguity of the situation.
Reflecting on the fact that Balthus was raised in a creative household, it is not surprising perhaps that he might challenge the limits of customary moral acceptability through a traditional, figurative genre. As New Yorker magazine art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes: "Balthus sticks us with a moral conundrum, because he can. His elegantly nuanced violations of taboo won for his conservatively figurative art enthusiastic esteem in the largely Surrealist, devoutly libertine Parisian avant-garde of the nineteen-thirties, and secured him a lasting place as one of the 20th century’s greats."
Summertime (1935)
This is one of his earliest works, hinting at a later use of landscape in his paintings, and it is a prime example of how the subject was far less important to him than the scene. While the woman in the foreground is ostensibly asleep, she has her cane draped over herself, hinting at either injury or a need for protection while she rests. The landscape is clearly the focus of this work, yet it is interesting to consider how he uses the natural features of mountains, valleys, and hills to mimic the curves of the sleeping woman's body. The rolling hill in the foreground has a soft mound of flora at its peak, and behind it jagged mountains meet in soft, split valleys.
One thing to note in relation to the work's title is that while summertime is hinted at in the lush greenery and clear sky, there is also a somewhat desolate darkness to the scene represented in the work that is opposed to the sunnier climate usually associated with the season. Though the woman is able to nap outdoors, she nonetheless presents an enervated, pathetic figure in her posture, and with her use of her cane as an oddly rigid and uncomforting swaddling, rather more a potential instrument that could be deployed quickly as possible weapon of protection if needed.
Influences and Connections

- Man Ray
- Pablo Picasso
- Alberto Giacometti
- Joan Miró
- Antonin Artaud
- Pablo Picasso
- Man Ray
- Joan Miró
- Antonin Artaud