Balthus.PALAZZO GRASSI Was the late Paris-born painter Balthus Balthus (Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) (bôl`thəs, băl`–), 1908–2001, Polish-French painter, b. Paris. Balthus is widely regarded as one of the most important figurative painters of the modern era. He began painting as a young man and had his first one-man show in 1934. just another Humbert Humbert driven by a single-minded obsession for posing Lolitas? This 250-work survey, organized by curator Jean Glair, reveals that the artist's undeniable predilection for fairy nymphets still left room for enigmatic landscapes, street scenes, society portraits, and theatrical drawings. An erudite old-schooler, Balthus associated with the likes of Giacometti and Artaud. But he also cultivated an ambivalent lifestyle as a reclusive aristocrat and snobbed his way into history. And not only art history art history, the study of works of art and architecture. In the mid-19th cent., art history was raised to the status of an academic discipline by the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt, who related art to its cultural environment, and the German idealists Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Wilhelm Worringer. The latter three saw art history as the analysis of forms and viewed art apart from any function it serves in expressing the spirit of its age., where he certainly deserves this timely second look: The comprehensive catalogue reviews both the work and the shady biography. Sept. 9-Jan. 6. |
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