The New Yorker, September 6, 1999 P. 34
INVESTIGATIONS about the painter Balthus, Balthasar Klossowski... He was born February 29, 1908... Writer tells about calling Balthus in Switzerland in 1990, and fixed a date for a visit... Three weeks later, he arrived at Le Grand Chalet, which was built between 1752 and 1756, and contains forty-five rooms... Balthus and his wife Setsuko bought it in the late seventies... Describes the opulent setting... His art, he maintained, had been misunderstood: it was neither graphic nor mysterious. Above all, it was not autobiographical... Balthus is one of the great loners of twentieth-century art; he belongs to no school, no “ism,” but his own. Beginning with his first solo exhibition, in 1934, in Paris, he has produced a rigorously controlled number of pictures, including landscapes, portraits, and tableaux of figures seized by sexual urges. It was not until after the Second World War that he began referring to himself as Le Comte de Rola. Throughout Balthus’s life, he has come up with some fantastic stories about his ancestry, and he has been remarkably successful in persuading the world of their validity. Cyril Connolly was one of several writers who declared Balthus to be a direct descendant of Lord Byron. Balthus has also convinced a number of journalists that he descends from the Romanovs and, through Stanislaw, the last King of Poland, from the royal Polish family of Poniatowski. It has been reported that he is the illegitimate son of Rilke, who carried on a long-term affair with the artist's mother... Balthus’s first one-man show, in 1934, at the Galerie Pierre, a small showplace for Surrealism and other contemporary movements, was a succes de scandale. Four of the seven paintings on public display depicted sexual subject matter with more explicitness than even the most sophisticated gallery-goers were accustomed to... Describes "Alice," "The Window," "Cathy Dressing," "The Street," and the infamous "The Guitar Lesson."... Writer was later allowed to view the painting on the condition that he not name the current owner or the painting's location... “The Guitar Lesson” was on an upper floor of an apartment building on Fifth Avenue, later revealed to be the home of Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos... In one of our conversations, Balthus said that he was sorry he had ever painted “The Guitar Lesson.” It had generated too many misconceptions, he explained. In any case, he now regarded it as more of a youthful prank than a serious work of art. However, the more I looked at “The Guitar Lesson,” the more I came to see it as perhaps the most self-revealing—if enigmatic— work in Balthus’s long career....
