Balthus

Starred review from October 4, 1999
A highly regarded art historian (Patron Saints), Weber ingeniously structures his biography of 91-year-old Balthazar Klossowska, or Balthus, by draping his voluminous investigations over facts that emerged during his visit with the famously reclusive painter and his Japanese wife at their elegant Swiss chalet in 1991. A French citizen of Polish ancestry who has claimed descent from Polish nobility, the Romanovs and Lord Byron, Balthus survived a childhood of economic hardship and displacement with the help of his mother's lover, poet Ranier Maria Rilke. In his work, Balthus uses Old Master coloring to depict scenes in canvases whose atmospheric haze and violated figures (many of them highly eroticized adolescents) belie the compositions' sturdy grids. Weber explores Balthus's many influences, from the work of Piero della Francesca to psychoanalytic theory and his brother's fascination with the Marquis de Sade. Again and again, Weber insists that the artist articulate the intentions behind each and every element in his work. Of course, no painter could, and Balthus, whether from age, puckishness or the sincere conviction that his art must speak for itself, toys with Weber throughout their conversations. The friction between the two forces Weber to do his own--at times heroic--research. Whether visiting a sex crimes unit in Manhattan, the New York apartment of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos or an acquaintance from Balthus's days as director of the French Academy in Rome, Weber assiduously records the evidence for his psychosexual view of Balthus's paintings. In the process, Weber does justice to both the artist and his art. If he occasionally adopts a gossipy tone, that's a minor flaw in a book that will remain a splendid account of a complex life and as fine an artist's biography as this season is likely to produce. 16 color plates not seen by PW; 116 b&w illus. First serial to the New Yorker. U.K rights, Weidenfeld nicholson. Reader Subscriptions Book Club selection.

Starred review from November 1, 1999
With the artist's approval, Weber (Patron Saints) has created a portrait of the elusive and mysterious Balthus. Probing the inner man and his work, the author partially explains the mystique that has surrounded this critically acclaimed and self-invented painter whose surreal, sexually charged images are both disturbing and haunting. The artist would like to set the record straight for posterity, insisting that there is nothing psychological about his work, that he is merely painting everyday life. But through extensive meetings with Balthus over a period of years at his castle in Switzerland and a study of various documents, Weber interprets the myth and symbolic representations in the significant paintings, peeling away their meaning layer by layer to uncover the man who made them. More than official in tone (unlike prior biographers, such as Jean Leymarie) Weber is questioning, affectionate, and convincing--yet he seems to solve only half of the puzzle. While the length of this well-illustrated book may be a deterrent, it should create a buzz in art circles, keeping everyone guessing--which may have been Balthus's intention all along. Recommended for larger public libraries and all 20th-century art collections.--Ellen Bates, New York

Copyright 1999 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 1999
%% This is a multi-book review: SEE also the title "Rembrandt's Eyes." %% Three astute biographies define the temperaments, visions, and milieus of one indisputable master and two controversial modern painters.Both Claridge and Weber have written the first comprehensive biographies of twentieth-century artists infamous for denying their Jewish blood and other truths about their lives, and living flamboyantly as aristocrats. Lempicka and Balthus were each profoundly influenced by Italian Renaissance painters, and each painted unnervingly erotic portraits. But while Balthus' reputation has ascended, Lempicka, dubbed an art deco painter, has been all but forgotten. Claridge tells the remarkable story of Lempicka's life, and suggests why an artist of her originality and technical mastery has been denied her rightful place in the modernist pantheon. Born to wealth in Moscow around 1895, Lempicka, beautiful and headstrong, might not have become an artist if the Bolsheviks hadn't forced her and her husband and young daughter from their home. They fled to Paris, and Lempicka began painting portraits of Europe's elite and her most radical and arresting works: boldly composed, highly sexual female nudes. Choosing to live in Hollywood when she emigrated to America in the 1940s, she was consequently ignored by the powerful New York critics, who never understood, as Claridge does, just how serious an artist this fashionable, sensuous, and pioneering woman truly was.Weber, author of "Patron Saints" (1992), was surprised that the notoriously elusive Balthus was willing to speak with him, but he soon realized that the octogenarian painter had an agenda, and much of the excitement of Weber's vigorous, in-depth biography is attributable to his struggle to deflect his charming subject's wily lies. The most outrageous of Balthus' claims was his repeated denial of any erotic content in his highly provocative paintings of adolescent girls. He also refused to discuss his relationship with his mother and her lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Determined to learn the truth about the man through the study of his enigmatic work, Weber parses his emulation of Piero della Francesca, and, more daringly, interprets the "intertwining of ecstasy and torment" expressed in his transfixed and strangely distorted female figures. By the end of his discerning and compelling narrative, Weber has succeeded in unmasking Balthus without in any way compromising the dark enchantment of his work.Schama's immense, luxurious, and richly contextual portrait of Rembrandt is not strictly a biography. Instead, like his groundbreaking "Landscape and Memory" (1995), it is a creative synthesis of history, aesthetics, and spirituality. Erudite and loquacious, he writes at length about Dutch history; Rembrandt's first patron, Constantijn Huygens; and the artist they both sought to best, Peter Paul Reubens. When Schama does zoom in on Rembrandt himself, he makes great use of the artist's self-portraits, focusing, as the title suggests, on his eyes, both as subjects emblematic of his vocation and as organs of perception. Light was a paradoxical subject for Rembrandt, who was "fixated" on the conflict between loving the clarity of light in the visible world and fearing "inner blindness," or the inability to perceive the light of God. Schama chronicles the ups and downs of Rembrandt's life in vivid detail, and engages so passionately and brilliantly with his paintings and their startling departures from tradition, Rembrandt and his masterpieces seem to be reborn. ((Reviewed October 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)