Balthus

I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.
—Balthus

Gagosian is pleased to present a career-spanning exhibition of Balthus’s paintings, drawings, and photography. Prepared in collaboration with the artist’s estate, it is the first exhibition of his work in Switzerland since 2008.

Balthus (born Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, 1908–2001) was a reclusive painter of charged and disquieting narrative scenes. Skirting avant-garde movements such as Surrealism, he cultivated a self-taught classicism in his representations of the physical and psychic struggles of adolescence. In his first gallery exhibition in 1934, his voyeuristic depictions of pubescent female subjects brooding with uneasy dreams scandalized Parisian audiences. In the sixty years that followed, his interior portraits, street scenes, and landscapes continued these enigmatic artistic investigations.

In this exhibition, Nu adossé (1939), an early work, follows an almost Poussin-esque order, the gentle curves of the figure juxtaposed with the angular bed frame. This play with domestic space continues in Study for Le Salon (1940–42). Revealing Balthus’s calculated decision-making, Study for Le Salon depicts three girls: one reading on the floor, one asleep on the couch, and one who appears to have just entered the room. However, both the standing girl and the doorway behind her are absent from the two final versions of Le Salon, the second of which—held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York—includes a white cat in her place. In another study, Étude de Nu (1957), a smiling girl stands with her hands folded lightly over her exposed belly, surrounded by strokes of gray-blue. And a later work, Odalisque allongée (1998–99), pushes familiar art-historical themes, such as pastoral romance and Orientalism, to a psychological precipice. Balthus’s odalisque is draped over the edge of a mattress, holding a mandolin. She looks away from the viewer in self-contained reverie.