Balthus (1908-2001)

 Balthus was born on February 29, 1908 in Paris into an artist family. Balthus' first published work was a collection of 40 drawings about his lost cat named Mitsou. The distinctive hallucinatory images of the French painter, who revived traditional genres of European painting such as landscape, still life, themed painting and portraiture in the 20th century, were sometimes described as surrealistic.

 Having opened his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1934, the artist devoted most of his time to creating quiet landscapes with mysterious poetic interiors that grew larger and larger. In these paintings, he often placed lonely, deceptively mature figures of young girls, but nude at a young age.

 Balthus became one of the artists who managed to see his works exhibited in the famous Louvre Museum in Paris while he was alive. French President Jacques Chirac, who praised Balthus as an admirable genius, declared that he was deeply saddened by the artist's death. Balthus, who is married to Setsuko of Japanese descent, has among his most famous works Street (1933), Mountain (1937), Cards (1943), Nude in Front of the Fireplace (1955) and Carders (1973). Pablo Picasso, an admirer of Balthus, who was friends with many French writers and intellectuals, bought the artist's painting Children (1937). Picasso said of Balthus, "So much better than young artists who do nothing but copy me. A real painter."

 The painter, whose real name is Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, was one of the artists who managed to see his works exhibited in the famous Louvre Museum in Paris while he was alive. A ARTICLE The death of the "Prince of Darkness" What does the death of Balthus, the last painter of the 20th century, mean? Balthus was a true legend. He was the son of a Polish nobleman, but was thought to be the illegitimate son of Rilke, who had an undeniable role in his upbringing.

 His childhood was spent in the intellectual circles of 1920-30''s Germany, Switzerland, but mostly Paris. Andre Gide was one of his supporters. The Europe of those years was shaken by the art movements that exploded one after the other. Picasso and Braque started cubism in 1915 and made a mess. The reality he lived in, the time-space sequence he used to understand and describe it, the optical world were too narrow for one. Einstein laid the foundations of relativism in science and Freud in consciousness. A new era was beginning.

 Balthus was never close to the ""vanguard" (avant-garde) art, where innovation means everything but at any cost. His painting began to feed off of the second great artistic breakthrough of the 20th century, surrealism. This was the essential quality that Balthus would follow to the end and always make him an extraordinary man. Balthus never forgot that there may be another dimension of the truth, that that dimension can be intertwined with the dark side of the human being. Moreover, while placing a metarealistic force, an imaginary expression in the background of his paintings, he did this with a different approach than Dali's and Magritte's.

 He never gravitated towards their symbolic expression of reality, which compelled the verbal but comprehensible meanings of the language. Balthus, like Chrico, to whom he was most close, used metarealism as an atmosphere, as a possibility to set the world of dreams in motion. Because what he wanted to do was different. Balthus was the name on another plane of '''evil''' which was the mainstay of Western art. Balthus was trying to give one of these real qualities of man, which is sometimes tried to be explained with a cheap word like "'perversion'', out of everyday things, and it was very, very disturbing for that reason. Starting from Lautreamont, passing through Sade, integrating with Poe and influencing all Metarealists, the '''pataphysic''' artists were also his starting point.

 For this reason, one of the most outstanding examples of literature, which Bataille called '''evil literature''' later on, will illustrate Wuthering Heights, '''the madman'' '''The Metarealistic Artaud''. He would be a close friend of ', but would gain his real fame by portraying the provocative sexuality of teenage girls. He was always in the position of a voyeur in his paintings. He was pushing the viewer to the same position, provoking him to look at an indecent image that he would be ashamed to see, forcing him to face himself. He resisted until the end. Then he would retire to the big house he had bought in Switzerland, where he would live his rumored secret life with his Japanese wife, whom he married as a child, and his daughter with him, and another girl he had used as a model as a child.

 It was the form he used to reflect this '''content''' that put Balthus ''' in the focus of modern painting. The classical world was indispensable to him. Starting from della Francesca, which he admired in his youth and copied out his works, he always used Renaissance painting's understanding of '''order'', sense of depth, complexity arising from simplicity. It was a contemporary extension of that great Renaissance painting that I could never finish my personal reckoning with.