Balthus is 90 this year, and apparently still paints every day, even though his famous touch is inevitably faltering. Probably a solid majority of critics would vote him to be the greatest living painter, though his world fame is relatively recent. For decades he was usually out of step - a figurative artist when abstract art was dominant, and then a painter in an era when conceptual and installationist styles ruled and painting per se was viewed as old hat, whether abstract or figurative. Balthus never bothered much about fashion; he has gone his own path with a kind of serene arrogance which is characteristic of him.
He was born Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, of a Polish family domiciled in France. Balthus himself is entirely French by culture and outlook, but he insisted on reviving the lapsed family title of Count - thereby earning himself the ridicule and resentment of some old friends. Patrician, reserved, suavely ironic and reputedly "difficult", he is rather an enigmatic personality who shuns crowds and now lives in Switzerland with his second wife, a Japanese and a talented painter in her own right.
Balthus was an artist from his early teens. His mother, who had separated from his art-historian father, was for a time the mistress of the poet Rilke, and he in turn encouraged the boy and recognised his gifts. From the start Balthus (he did not yet call himself that) was befriended and advised by older artists including Derain and Bonnard. He grew up in the milieu of the School of Paris during its great days and mixed in its bohemian life, though always maintaining a certain reserve and hauteur. In the years after the second World War he virtually vanished into the French countryside, living in a draughty, ramshackle chateau with only a succession of teenage girls as companions, and painting steadily in seeming indifference to the official art world. Fame came rather late; well into the 1950s, art dealers still found his pictures slow to sell.
Balthus is a deliberate worker and a technical perfectionist, who believes that many or most modern painters are inferior craftsmen using inadequate materials. His output, predictably, is not large numerically and leading museums of the world compete for his paintings. They have a dreamlike tempo and a faint flavour of surrealism, as well as echoes of the Old Masters whom Balthus loves, but their aura is entirely modern and sometimes unsettling.
He has painted street scenes, landscape, still life, people in interiors, with equal mastery but his most characteristic pictures show young girls absorbed in what seems to be a kind of pubescent dream state. These girls are at once erotic and ethereal, intimate and remote - almost as if they contained the contrasting emotional worlds of Lewis Carroll and Baudelaire.