Balthus
Balthus by Damian Pettigrew (1996)
Birth name	Balthasar Klossowski
Born	(1908-02-29)February 29, 1908 Paris, France
Died	February 18, 2001(2001-02-18) (aged 92) Rossinière, Switzerland
Nationality	French
Field	Painting, Drawing, Watercolor
Works	The Street (1933-35) The Mountain (1937) Nude Before a Mirror (1955)
Awards	Praemium Imperiale

Balthasar Klossowski (or Kłossowski) de Rola (February 29, 1908 in Paris – February 18, 2001 in Rossinière, Switzerland), best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist.

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. A telegram sent to the Tate Gallery as it prepared for its 1968 retrospective of his works read: "NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS. B."^[1]

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

In his formative years his art was sponsored by Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. His father, Erich Klossowski, a noted art historian who wrote a monograph on Daumier, and his mother Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro (known as the painter Baladine Klossowska) were part of the cultural elite in Paris. Balthus's older brother, Pierre Klossowski, was a philosopher and writer influenced by theology and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Among the visitors and friends of the Klossowskis were famous writers such as André Gide and Jean Cocteau, who found some inspiration for his novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929) in his visits to the family.

In 1921 Mitsou, a book which included forty drawings by Balthus, was published. It depicted the story of a young boy and his cat, with a preface by Balthus's mentor, Rilke. The theme of the story foreshadowed his life-long fascination with cats, which resurfaced with his self-portrait as The King of Cats (1935). In 1926 he visited Florence, copying frescos by Piero della Francesca, which inspired another early ambitious work by the young painter: the tempera wall paintings of the Protestant church of the Swiss village of Beatenberg (1927). From 1930 to 1932 he lived in Morocco, was drafted into the Moroccan infantry in Kenitra and Fes, worked as a secretary, and sketched his painting La Caserne (1933).

A young artist in Paris[link]

Moving in 1933 into his first Paris studio at the Rue de Furstemberg and later another at the Cour de Rohan, Balthus showed no interest in modernist styles such as Cubism. His paintings often depicted pubescent young girls in erotic and voyeuristic poses. One of the most notorious works from his first exhibition in Paris was The Guitar Lesson (1934), which caused controversy due to its sexually explicit depiction of a girl arched on her back over the lap of her female teacher, whose hands are positioned on the girl as for playing the guitar: one near her exposed crotch, another grasping her hair. Other important works from the same exhibition included La Rue^{[dead link]} (1933), La Toilette de Cathy (1933) and Alice dans le miroir (1933).^[2]

In 1937 he married Antoinette de Watteville, who was from an old and influential aristocratic family from Bern. He had met her as early as 1924, and she was the model for the aforementioned La Toilette and for a series of portraits. Balthus had two children from this marriage, Thaddeus and Stanislas (Stash) Klossowski, who recently published books on their father, including the letters by their parents.

Early on his work was admired by writers and fellow painters, especially by André Breton and Pablo Picasso. His circle of friends in Paris included the novelists Pierre Jean Jouve, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Joseph Breitbach, Pierre Leyris, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris and René Char, the photographer Man Ray, the playwright and actor Antonin Artaud, and the painters André Derain, Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti (one of the most faithful of his friends). In 1948, another friend, Albert Camus, asked him to design the sets and costumes for his play L'Etat de Siège (The State of Siege, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault). Balthus also designed the sets and costumes for Artaud's adaptation for Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci (1935), Ugo Betti's Delitto all'isola delle capre (Crime on Goat-Island, 1953) and Barrault's adaptation of Julius Caesar (1959–1960).

Champrovent to Chassy[link]

In 1940, with the invasion of France by German forces, Balthus fled with his wife Antoinette to Savoy to a farm in Champrovent near Aix-les-Bains, where he began work on two major paintings: Landscape near Champrovent (1942–1945) and The Living Room (1942). In 1942, he escaped from Nazi France to Switzerland, first to Bern and in 1945 to Geneva, where he made friends with the publisher Albert Skira as well as the writer and member of the French Resistance, André Malraux. Balthus returned to France in 1946 and a year later traveled with André Masson to Southern France, meeting figures such as Picasso and Jacques Lacan, who eventually became a collector of his work. With Adolphe Mouron Cassandre in 1950, Balthus designed stage decor for a production of Mozart's opera Così fan tutte in Aix-en-Provence. Three years later he moved into the Chateau de Chassy in the Morvan, living with his niece Frédérique Tison and finishing his large-scale masterpieces La Chambre (The Room 1952, possibly influenced by Pierre Klossowski's novels) and Le Passage du Commerce Saint-André (1954).

Later years[link]

As international fame grew with exhibitions in the gallery of Pierre Matisse (1938) and the Museum of Modern Art (1956) in New York City, he cultivated the image of himself as an enigma. In 1964, he moved to Rome where he presided over the Villa de Medici as director (appointed by the French Minister of Culture André Malraux) of the French Academy in Rome, and made friends with the filmmaker Federico Fellini and the painter Renato Guttuso.

In 1977 he moved to Rossinière, Switzerland. That he had a second, Japanese wife Setsuko Ideta whom he married in 1967 and was thirty-five years his junior, simply added to the air of mystery around him (he met her in Japan, during a diplomatic mission also initiated by Malraux). A son, Fumio, was born in 1968 but died two years later.

The photographers and friends Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck (Cartier-Bresson's wife), both portrayed the painter and his wife and their daughter Harumi (born 1973) in his Grand Chalet in Rossinière in 1999.

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.^[3][4]

Prime Ministers and rock stars alike attended the funeral of Balthus. Bono, lead-singer of U2, sang for the hundreds of mourners at the funeral, including the President of France, the Prince Sadruddhin Aga Khan, supermodel Elle McPherson, and Cartier-Bresson.

Style and themes[link]

Balthus's style is primarily classical. His work shows numerous influences, including the writings of Emily Brontë, the writings and photography of Lewis Carroll, and the paintings of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Simone Martini, Poussin, Jean Etienne Liotard, Joseph Reinhardt, Géricault, Ingres, Goya, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Courbet, Edgar Degas, Félix Vallotton and Paul Cézanne. Although his technique and compositions were inspired by pre-renaissance painters, there also are eerie intimations of contemporary surrealists like de Chirico. Painting the figure at a time when figurative art was largely ignored, he is widely recognised as an important 20th century artist.

Many of his paintings show young girls in an erotic context. Balthus insisted that his work was not erotic but that it recognized the discomforting facts of children's sexuality.

Ancestral debates[link]

Balthus's father, Erich, was born to a noble Polish family (szlachta) of the Rola coat of arms, that lived in Prussia. This was evidently the reason for his son Balthus, to add, later, "de Rola" to his family name Klossowski, which was in szlachta tradition (if he had lived in Poland, the arrangement of his last name would have been Rola-Kłossowski or Kłossowski h. Rola.) The artist was very conscious of his Polish ancestry and the Rola arms was embroidered onto many of his kimono, in the style of Japanese kamon.

According to most biographies, Balthus denied having any ethnic Jewish heritage, claiming that biographers had confused his mother's true ancestry. In Balthus: A Biography, Nicholas Fox Weber, who is Jewish, attempts to find common ground while interviewing the painter by bringing up a biographical note stating that his mother was Jewish. Balthus replied, "No, sir, that is incorrect," and explained: "One of my father's best friends was a painter called Eugen Spiro, who was the son of a cantor. My mother was also called Spiro, but came apparently from a Protestant family in the south of France. One of the Midi Spiros - one of the ancestors - went to Russia. They were likely of Greek origin. We called Eugen Spiro "Uncle" because of the close relationship, but he was not my real uncle. The Protestant Spiros are still in the south of France."^{[citation needed]}

Balthus continued by saying he did not think it was tasteful to forcefully correct these errors, given his many Jewish friends. Nicholas Fox Weber concludes in his biography that Balthus was lying about this "biographical error," though the exact reasoning behind this was never explained. Weber states that the name "Spiro" is only a Greek given name, though this is incorrect, as the personal name serves equally as a surname.^[5] Balthus consistently repeated that if he, in fact, was Jewish, he would have no problem with it. In support of Weber's view, Balthus did make dubious claims about his ancestry before, once claiming he was descended from Lord Byron on his father's side.^{[citation needed]}

According to Weber, Balthus would frequently add to the story of his mother's ancestry, saying that she was also related to the Romanov, Narischkin, and lesser known Raginet families among others, though conceding Balthus never claimed his mother's side was from a straight unmixed lineage. Despite the sensationalism with which Weber says he told these stories and the method in which Weber presents Balthus's claims, Balthus never saw himself as contradictory. The true extent of what Balthus was saying for artistic effect and what he was saying in earnest is unknown as he did not stick seriously to all his claims. Weber never interviewed Pierre Klossowski, the painter's brother, in order to confirm or deny their mother's ancestry. Weber did, however, present a quote by Baladine's lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in which Rilke states that the Spiros were descended from one of the richest Sephardic-Spanish families. In a seemingly conclusionary note, Weber writes: "The artist neglected, however, to tell me that, in the most miserable of ironies, Fumio (Balthus's son) suffered from Tay-Sachs disease."^{[citation needed]} Weber holds this up as evidence that Balthus was lying about not having Jewish ancestry, given Tay-Sachs is a heavily Ashkenazic-Jewish disease. This, of course, conflicts with Rilke's report of the Spiros being Sephardic, which Weber later says was a "Rilke embellishment" and also brings up the relevance of the preponderance of Japanese infantile Tay-Sachs, since Balthus's wife was Japanese.

Influence and legacy[link]

His work has strongly influenced several contemporary artists; among them Jan Saudek, Will Barnet, Duane Michals, John Currin, Eli Levin, Emile Chambon, Fred Bandekow and Elena Zolotnitsky.

He has also influenced the filmmaker Jacques Rivette of the French New Wave. His film Hurlevent (1985) was inspired by Balthus's drawings made at the beginning of the 1930s. As he says in an interview with Valerie Hazette: "Seeing as he's a bit of an eccentric and all that, I am very fond of Balthus (...) I was struck by the fact that Balthus enormously simplified the costumes and stripped away the imagery trappings (...)".

A reproduction of Balthus's Girl at a Window (a painting from 1957) prominently appeared in François Truffaut's film Domicile Conjugal (Bed & Board, 1970). The two principal characters, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his wife Christine (Claude Jade), are arguing. Christine takes down from the wall a small drawing of approximately 25 x 25 cm and gives it to her husband: Christine: "Here, take the small Balthus." Antoine: "Ah, the small Balthus. I offered it to you, it's yours, keep it."

Harold Budd's album The White Arcades features a track titled "Balthus Bemused by Color."

Robert Dassanowsky's book Telegrams from the Metropole: Selected Poems 1980-1998 includes a work titled "The Balthus Poem."

Christopher Hope, born 1944, wrote a novel, "My Chocolate Redeemer" around a painting by Balthus, "The Golden Days" (also 1944) which is featured on the book jacket.

Stephen Dobyns' book The Balthus Poems (Atheneum, 1982) describes individual paintings by Balthus in 32 narrative poems.

His widow, Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, heads the Balthus Foundation established in 1998.

Films on Balthus[link]

• Damian Pettigrew, Balthus Through the Looking Glass (72', Super 16, PLANETE/CNC/PROCIREP, 1996). Documentary on and with Balthus filmed at work in his studio and in conversation at his Rossinière chalet. Shot over a 12-month period in Switzerland, Italy, France and the Moors of England.

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Aubert, Raphaël (2005). Le Paradoxe Balthus. Paris: Éditions de la Différence
• Balthus (2001). Correspondance amoureuse avec Antoinette de Watteville: 1928-1937. Paris: Buchet/Chastel
• Clair, Jean and Virginie Monnier (2000). Balthus: Catalogue Raisonné of the Complete Works. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
• Davenport, Guy (1989). A Balthus Notebook. New York: Ecco Press
• Neret, Gilles (2003). Balthus. New York: Taschen
• Klossowski de Rola, Stanislas (1996). Balthus. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
• Roy, Claude (1996). Balthus. Paris: Gallimard
• Vircondelet, Alain (2001). Mémoires de Balthus. Monaco: Editions du Rocher
• Von Boehm, Gero (author) and Kishin Shinoyama (photographer) (2007). The Painter's House. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel
• Weber, Nicholas Fox (1999). Balthus, a Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf ISBN 0-679-40737-5

External links[link]

• La Fondation Balthus
• Balthus at the Museum of Modern Art
• Ten Dreams Galleries
• Balthus Through the Looking Glass at the Internet Movie Database
• On Jacques Rivette's Wuthering Heights and Balthus's influence
• Balthus Obituaries

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2011)

Harold Budd
Harold Budd in Japan Photo: Masao Nakagami
Background information
Born	(1936-05-24) May 24, 1936 (age 76) Los Angeles, CaliforniaUnited States
Genres	Ambient, drone
Occupations	Musician, composer, poet, professor
Instruments	Piano, guitar
Years active	1962–present
Labels	Opal Records, Land Records, Darla Records, Samadhi Sound, New World Records, All Saints Records, E.G. Records, 4AD

Harold Budd (born May 24, 1936) is an American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet. Born in Los Angeles, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires.^{[citation needed]}

Education and academic career[link]

Budd's career as a composer began in 1962. In the following years, he gained a notable reputation in the local avant-garde community.^{[citation needed]} In 1966 he graduated from the University of Southern California (having studied under Ingolf Dahl) with a degree in musical composition. As he progressed, his compositions became increasingly minimal. Among his more experimental works were two drone music pieces, "Coeur d'Orr" and "The Oak of the Golden Dreams". After composing a long-form gong solo titled "Lirio", he felt he had reached the limits of his experiments in minimalism and the avant-garde. He retired temporarily from composition in 1970 and began a teaching career at the California Institute of the Arts.^{[citation needed]}

"The road from my first colored graph piece in 1962 to my renunciation of composing in 1970 to my resurfacing as a composer in 1972 was a process of trying out an idea and when it was obviously successful abandoning it. The early graph piece was followed by the Rothko orchestra work, the pieces for Source Magazine, the Feldman-derived chamber works, the pieces typed out or written in longhand, the out-and-out conceptual works among other things, and the model drone works (which include the sax and organ "Coeur d'Orr" and "The Oak of the Golden Dreams", the latter based on the Balinese "Slendro" scale which scale I used again 18 years later on "The Real Dream of Sails").^{[1][citation needed]}

"In 1970 with the "Candy-Apple Revision" (unspecified D-flat major) and "Lirio" (solo gong "for a long duration") I realized I had minimalized myself out of a career. It had taken ten years to reduce my language to zero but I loved the process of seeing it occur and not knowing when the end would come. By then I had opted out of avant-garde music generally; it seemed self-congratulatory and risk-free and my solution as to what to do next was to do nothing, to stop completely."

"I resurfaced as an artist in 1972 with "Madrigals of the Rose Angel", the first of what would be a cycle of works under the collective title The Pavilion of Dreams. Madrigals refused to accommodate or even acknowledge any issues in new music. The entire aesthetic was an existential prettiness; not the Platonic "to Kalon", but simply pretty: mindless, shallow and utterly devastating. Female chorus, harp and percussion seemed like a beautiful start. Its first performance was at a Franciscan church in California conducted by Daniel Lentz." ^{[2][citation needed]}

Composer and recording artist[link]

Two years later, while still retaining his teaching career, he resurfaced as a composer. Spanning from 1972-1975 he created four individual works under the collective title "The Pavilion of Dreams". The style of these works was an unusual blend of popular jazz and the avant-garde. In 1976 he resigned from the institute and began recording his new compositions, produced by British ambient pioneer Brian Eno.^{[citation needed]} Two years later, Harold Budd's debut album The Pavilion of Dreams was released.

Since then he has developed a style of ambient music. His two collaborations with Brian Eno, The Plateaux of Mirror and The Pearl, established his trademark atmospheric piano style. On Lovely Thunder he introduced subtle electronic textures. His thematic 2000 release The Room saw a return to a more minimalist approach. In 2003, Daniel Lanois, the renowned producer of U2 and Bob Dylan, and occasional collaborator of Brian Eno, recorded an impromptu performance of Harold playing the piano in his Los Angeles living room, unaware, and thus realized the album La Bella Vista.

His album Avalon Sutra from 2004 was billed as "Harold Budd's Last Recorded Work" by the record label Samadhi Sound. Their press release continued: "Avalon Sutra brings to a conclusion thirty years of sustained musical activity. Asked for his reasons, Budd says only that he feels that he has said what he has to say. With characteristic humility, he concludes, "I don’t mind disappearing!"^{[citation needed]} A special celebration concert featuring Budd and guest-starring many of the musicians he had worked with throughout his career was presented at Brighton Dome in May 2005, also billed as being Budd's last public performance. In spite of this, Budd's soundtrack to the film Mysterious Skin (a collaboration with Robin Guthrie) and Music for 'Fragments from the Inside' (with Eraldo Bernocchi) were both released in 2005.

David Sylvian's independent record label Samadhisound released Perhaps in February 2007, a live recording of Budd's improvised performance in tribute to his late friend (and associate teacher at the then newly formed California Institute of Arts) James Tenney. Recorded at CalArts on December 6, the album is only available as a digital download.

Samadhisound released a podcast of Harold Budd in conversation with Akira Rabelais in April 2007. In this (Samadhisound Podcast #2), Harold said although he had believed at the time of recording Avalon Sutra that it would be his last album, he no longer felt that way. "It was a time in my life when things weren't just falling together for me, and I thought that I was just going to let it all slide ... and I was sincere about it but if I had been more conscious of my real feelings and had explored my inner sanctum more I would've seen that it was a preposterous thing to do ... I was dreadfully lonely; I was living alone in the desert and had been for too long, really, and I felt that isolation very severely after a while, and it's probably a version of self-pity, I'm sorry to say, to have publicly said something like that, but there it is, I said it, turns out I wasn't telling the truth - I didn't know it at the time."

Darla Records released two CDs by Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd in June 2007, After the Night Falls and Before the Day Breaks. Recorded in Spring 2006, each features nine tracks with linked titles, e.g. "How Distant Your Heart"/"How Close Your Soul" and "I Returned Her Glance"/"And Then I Turned Away".

In October 2008, a collaboration with Clive Wright entitled Song for Lost Blossoms was released by Darla Records. It includes recordings that were done live and in-studio at different locations, including both artists' homes. The album features some of their work done together between 2004 and 2006. A second collaborative effort with Wright, Candylion followed in 2009, again on Darla Records.

It was announced that Harold Budd will appear as one of the featured composer/performers at San Francisco's Other Minds festival in March, 2012.^[3]

Discography[link]

Studio albums

• The Oak of the Golden Dreams / Coeur D'Orr (1971), Advance Recordings
• The Pavilion of Dreams (1978), E.G. - Produced by Brian Eno
• Abandoned Cities (1984), Cantil
• Lovely Thunder (1986), E.G. - Produced by Michael Hoenig
• The White Arcades (1988), Opal - Produced by Brian Eno
• By the Dawn's Early Light (1991), Opal - With Bill Nelson
• She is a Phantom (1994), New Albion - With Zeitgeist
• Luxa (1996), All Saints
• The Room (2000), Atlantic
• La Bella Vista (2003), Shout Factory
• Avalon Sutra / As Long as I Can Hold My Breath (2005), Samadhi Sound - Produced by Harold Budd
• Perhaps (2007), Samadhi Sound
• In The Mist (2011), Darla

See also[link]

• Electronic music
• Ambient music
• Brian Eno

References[link]

External links[link]

• Harold Budd Home page
• New Albion Records Harold Budd page
• Samadhisound Harold Budd page
• Ambience for the Masses Harold Budd page
• Harold Budd: American Vision article from Sound On Sound magazine
• soundNET Concert Archives A rare live performance of works by Harold Budd (September 18, 2004) [streaming Quicktime audio]
• Somnambule Review of Harold Budd "Farewell Concert" at Brighton Dome (May 21, 2005)
• Harold Budd: Harold in May article from The Independent (May 8, 2005)