Balthazar Klossowski, Count de Rola, better known as the artist Balthus, who died on February 18th aged 92, was, arguably, the last great figurative painter of the 20th century. He was also one of its most enigmatic and controversial.
Self-invented and self-taught, he created a private and poetic universe which revolved around a few obsessively repeated themes: landscapes full of foreboding, portraits which laid bare the inner lives of their sitters, and, most notoriously, his favourite subject - the bodies of pubescent girls.
Some critics have dismissed these psychologically-charged tableaux - where young girls in various states of undress loll, dream and examine themselves in mirrors - as the prurient products of a perverted imagination; others see them as unique insights into the troubled territory of adolescence, and intimate studies of feminine reverie on a par with Degas or Vermeer.
Whatever the point of view, there is no disputing Balthus's extraordinary ability to conjure up ominous frozen psychodramas with an almost unbearably erotic and emotional intensity. His own statements - such as "Balthus is a painter about whom nothing is known" - only added to the mystery of his paintings and his persona; a desire to remain aloof and independent was crucial to every aspect of his existence.
Art and exile were built into the family history. Balthus's Polish father and Russian-Jewish mother had assumed German citizenship and settled in Paris, where their two sons, Pierre and Balthazar, were born. Both parents were artists and Balthus grew up surrounded by their friends, who included Bonnard and Matisse. When war broke out in 1914, the family became enemy aliens and settled in Geneva, where Balthus's mother became romantically involved with another exile, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
Rilke immediately recognised her younger son as a prodigy when he saw a series of ink drawings commemorating the boy's angora cat, and was so astonished by their skill and sophistication that he wrote a preface and had them published in 1920. At the age of 13, Balthus, the artist, was born.
Instead of attending art school, he bicycled to Arezzo to copy the works of Piero della Francesca. Throughout his career, the presence of the quattrocento masters remained a pervasive, albeit an unlikely one: whether in the monumental modelling of Balthus's chunky young girls, with their aloof smiling faces, or in his later - and only partially successful - use of the chalky-textured casein tempera.
These were spliced with a disparate range of influences, from Bonnard, Gustave Courbet and Seurat, to Poussin, John Tenniel and Wuthering Heights. One of Balthus's early masterpieces is the disquieting 1933 painting, Cathy Dressing. He may have been a loner and a non-joiner who stood apart from the artistic movements of his time, but this did not stop Balthus from winning the admiration of his contemporaries. His closest artist friend was the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, who shared his detachment from the outer world; one of the earliest Balthus paintings of adolescents, The Children (1937), was acquired by Picasso; while his portraits of a ferocious Derain, a child-like Miro and a boot-faced Vicomtesse de Noailles indicate an intimacy with uncomfortable areas of the sitters' psyches that is almost too revealing.
Balthus's first one-man show was held in Paris in 1934, but it was in America that his reputation was made - largely due to the efforts of the dealer Pierre Matisse and the pay-phone millionaire collector James Thrall Soby, who pushed for his first show in New York in 1956. His work broke the million-dollar barrier in 1984, the same year as his twin retrospectives in New York and Paris. In 1993, there was another retrospective in Lausanne, and in 1994 a major exhibition in Tokyo.
In the early 1960s, Balthus was made special adviser to Andre Malraux, the French minister of culture. Malraux made him the head of the Villa Medici, the French cultural centre in Rome, where Balthus lived until 1976.
As his international reputation burgeoned, however, he moved to the village of Rossiniere near Gstaad, Switzerland, where he lived a secluded life in an 18th-century mansion with his Japanese wife of over 30 years, Setsuko Ideta, and their daughter Harumi. (He also had two sons, Stanislaas and Thadde, from his first marriage to Antoinette de Wattenwyl.)
Although he shied away from publicity, Balthus allowed two major works to be published in tribute to him - Balthus: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Complete Works, and Balthus, a biography by Nicholas Fox Webber. To celebrate his last birthday, he threw an extravagant fancydress party, attended by Tony Curtis, Bono of U2 and a last remaining member of the Russian dynasty, Nicholas Romanov.
In spite of failing health, he painted every day in his studio."I am always eager not to tire the canvas," he once said. "So many painters today have found a trick. I have never been able to find one." Perhaps that was his secret.
Balthazar (Balthus) Klossowski, Count de Rola: born 1908; died, February 2001