Balthus was a French painter, born Balthasar Klossowski in Paris in 1908, who died in Switzerland in 2001. He painted still, staged scenes of adolescent girls in bare rooms and refused all his life to say what they meant.
He is remembered as a painter out of step with his century, and as the center of a dispute that has never closed: are the pictures masterpieces, or pictures that should not be shown?
He asked the world to know nothing about him, and the world has argued about him ever since.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
In 1968 the Tate Gallery in London prepared a large exhibition of his work and asked him for a biography. Balthus sent back a telegram instead: "Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known." People have quoted the line ever since as a pose. It was also a rule, and he kept to it until his death.
The silence left the pictures to speak alone, and some of them were hard to look at. Thérèse Dreaming, painted in 1938, shows his neighbor's daughter Thérèse Blanchard, then about twelve or thirteen, in a pose many viewers find sexual.
In November 2017 a New York woman, Mia Merrill, started a petition asking the Metropolitan Museum of Art to take it down or add a caption. More than 8,700 people signed in five days.
The Met kept the painting on the wall. A spokesman said that "moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation." Balthus gave few answers. Asked about his work, he said that painting was a form of prayer. To see how one man could hang beside Piero della Francesca and be petitioned off a wall, the story has to start where he did, with a lost cat.
What You'll Discover
Who wrote the preface at thirteen.
What shocked Paris in 1934.
Which painting Picasso owned.
What a count did in Rome.
Why the girls still divide people.