Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Balthus’s lifelong fascination with the dark side of childhood resulted in his most iconic works: canvases depicting girls on the brink of puberty hovering between innocence and knowledge. In these pictures painted in Paris the French countryside and Switzerland. the artist mingled intuition into his young sitters’ psyches with overt erotic desire and forbidding austerity. Balthus’s portraits of a young Parisienne from his neighborhood named Th?r?se Blanchard and his interior scenes featuring Th?r?se’s various successors are among the most powerful depictions of childhood and adolescence in the Western canon. Far from being mere pretty girls in frilly dresses. Balthus’s subjects are self-possessed and self-absorbed individuals. with a palpable but mysterious inner life. Also present in many of the images are cryptic cats-often smiling sometimes leering and likely as not standing in for Balthus himself. Balthus: Cats and Girls the first book devoted to this theme in the artist’s work focuses on the early decades of his career from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Sabine Rewald draws on her extensive (and firsthand) knowledge of the artist as well as on interviews with the models themselves to explore the origins and permutations of his obsession with depicting adolescents. She addresses the crucial influence of such key figures as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. his mother’s lover who acted for a time as Balthus’s surrogate father. And she includes the previously unknown voices of the girls whose recollections provide a unique perspective on some of the most recognizable and potent images of the twentieth century. (MP)