On February 8th, the last great contemporary of Picasso and the Surrealists died: Balthus, alias Balthazar Klossowski, alias the Count de Rola - a spurious aristocratic title he adopted after the second World War.
Balthus was born on February 29th, 1908 to parents who were both painters and lived in extremely genteel poverty (they owned a Delacroix and a Cezanne, among other things). While conducting an affair with Balthus's mother, the poet Rainer Marie Rilke infused the boy with a sense of his genius, having helped to publish "Mitsou", a picture story about a boy and his lost cat, drawn by Balthus at the age of 12.
It is staggering that Balthus established such an Old Master reputation, having produced less than 200 oil paintings, all carefully contrived canvases on which he spent anything up to four years. He had his first exhibition in 1934 at the age of 26, showing just seven paintings at the Galerie Pierre (Pierre Loeb's gallery). Most of them are now regarded as classics. Yet some were so controversial, even by the psychoanalysis-obsessed Parisian standards of the time, that they disappeared into private ownership, rarely shown or even reproduced for decades.
One was La Rue, an arresting Parisian street scene, with its various vivid, doll-like characters frozen in a fugue-like moment, but with an explicit sexual assault which Balthus toned down for a New York exhibition in 1955. Another was Alice, a beautiful portrait of a powerful semi-naked woman, her eyeless mask contrasting with the erotic punch of her genitalia. (When Balthus fell out - as he invariably did with friends - with writer Pierre Jean Jouve, the latter gave Alice to a friend in Ireland who lent it, anonymously, to the Pompidou Centre for its Balthus retrospective in 1983).
But most infamous was The Guitar Lesson, a highly problematic piece which, violently aping a pieta, features an androgynous music teacher with angle-poised breasts yanking a dreaming pubescent girl by the pigtail across her lap. Her other hand finger-plucks the girl's inner thigh beneath her hairless pudenda - a clear, sado-masochistic image of dominance over a sexually awakening child.
There were a few unenthusiastic critiques of the show at the time, but it quickly admitted Balthus to the elite circle of Vicomte Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, patrons of Giacometti, Klee, Miro, Picasso (who bought Balthus's The Children in 1941), Braque, Cocteau, Chagall, Andre Masson, Ernst and Dali.
In 1935, Balthus designed the set for Le Cenci, which launched Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Although Artaud was 12 years older than Balthus, the pair were virtual doubles, and they cultivated the aura of fellow maudits a la Baudelaire and Rimbaud.
Although Balthus's snarling pictorial lust gradually diffused over the years into a haze of pigment and light, the naked nymphette remained his signature tune. Although he was bracketed with modernist painters like Dix and Schrimpf, he was more deeply rooted in his self-education at the Louvre, copying sensualists like Poussin and Courbet and, particularly, Pierodella Francesca, who himself buried vulvic imagery in representations of the Virgin.
Pictorially, Balthus created a cruel, sensuous, storybook world - not a million miles from John Tenniel's big-faced Alice in Wonderland illustrations - in which he styled himself the vainglorious "king of cats". His sullen girl-children sexually inflate into the self-contained universes of Balthus's mannerist interiors, with their weighted, brooding colours. Males, when present, are raw, forceful predators.
Although paintings like The Victim (1937) represent sexualised brutality, Balthus was horrified by the violence of war when, in 1939, he was mobilised to fight for France. According to himself, he was blown up - others say his health broke quickly - and he spent the war with his wife, the genuinely aristocratic Antoinette de Watteville, in Switzerland, where their two sons were born.
While war and Holocaust engulfed Europe, Balthus retreated into a bizarre fantasy world, producing breathtaking paintings such as the charged, bucolic Landscape at Champrovent (1943) and the deceptively calm interior, Les Beaux Jours (1945), in which another stylised nymphette with hiked-up skirt regards herself in a mirror as her bare-chested, Heathcliffian, servant places logs in a blazing fire which licks her limbs with its light.
After the war, Balthus and family returned to Paris, but within a year, Antoinette had gone back to Switzerland. Balthus became involved with Georges Bataille's 16-year-old daughter, Laurence, who became his main model and companion until 1953.
Nicholas Fox Weber's hefty 1999 biography punctures many of Balthus's myths and evasions - for example, over his brutality towards early models such as Elsa Henriquez, who posed for The Window (1933); or the overlapping series of young models and lovers, including his step-niece, Frederique Tison, who had been posing for him since she was 10.
AFTER a stint in a run-down rural chateau in the 1950s, Balthus moved to the Villa Medici in Rome in 1961, having been appointed director of the French academy by Andre Malraux, then Charles de Gaulle's minister for culture, which caused an uproar. His tenure spanned almost two decades. He renovated the villa, organised a high-profile exhibition of Courbet, and on occasion acted despotically towards staff. The era of his model being his mistress seemed to be over.
By now, his work had started to fetch huge prices, attracting major champions such as Fellini and David Bowie. He had completely reinvented himself as the Aryan aristocratic Count de Rola, a descendant of Lord Byron. More controversially, he denied his maternal grandfather, a Jewish cantor in Breslau - and even expressed anti-Semitism.
Balthus always denied, ludicrously, that there was anything erotic in his work. Over the years, Balthus's earlier flatchested nymphettes grew bud breasts yet remained without pubic hair. Their details receded into haze or shadows, and they lacked the raw psychological honesty of his earlier work.
For decades, Balthus exercised strict control over the use of his images. Indeed, although he denied it, he allowed Penguin to use his Girl With a Cat (1937) for the cover of Nabokov's novel, Lolita - a powerful image of a sullen girl-child, lolling with arms folded behind her head, displaying her underwear. He turned down, however, a request to use his more tame painting, The Window (1933), as a cover for John Banville's The Book of Evidence in 1989 - yet relented last year for the publication of Eclipsed. Meanwhile, a cursory Internet search for The Guitar Lesson found it on a queasy soft-porn site advertising prints and video products promising "school uniforms and panty peeps".
But over the last decade, as Balthus settled into extreme old age and the gentle handling of Setsuko, his Japanese wife of 30 years, 34 years his junior, perhaps he reckoned he had nothing more to lose or to fear.
In 1993, Weber reports, Balthus became almost blind and felt that Cat at the Mirror (1989-94) would be the last big canvas he would produce. Last year, however, two more canvasses appeared in London. One was an unrepentent nymph painting, which was shown at the National Gallery. Called A Midsummer Night's Dream - ostensibly after Poussin's Sleeping Nymph Surprised by Satyrs (1626-7) - the contours of the central luminous figure are indistinct as she reclines, a lute dangling from her hand, the white and red highlights on her legs like the first flush of a sexual dream. Although Balthus had long produced landscapes, the impressionistic blue-green nocturnal scene was, astonishingly, a new departure in his 90s.
Yet another piece turned up at the Royal Academy. Reclining Odalisque was more reminiscent of his awkward stylised works of the 1980s, in a blaze of burning yellow light.
When Paul O'Kelly of the Oisin Gallery approached Balthus last year, it appeared there was yet another new landscape (or "scenery", as Balthus called it) with an asking price of $1 million.
Although he died after a period of illness, it appears that Balthus continued until the end making his masterful, if often irresponsible, figurative paintings, suffused more and more with nostalgic sensuality than salacious menace.
