A Retrospective Balthus (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum)

(Translated by Google Translate)

This year, one of the exhibition that was most looking forward to.

Speaking of Balthus, absolutely, image of painter, which drew a picture erotic girl is strong.

Work called Therese, that dream is just such a work. The couch in the room, causing the front side of the body, a girl sitting, with one's feet splayed out innocently, white underwear are excluded.

In this picture, by not being shown in the small child? I thought it was, but the children of elementary school students about also was visiting the venue. Something like a board to write the picture in the magic pen, are available at the entrance, it seems can if they wish and use it to replicate the painting of Balthus.

Well, looking at the Therese Dreaming, the pose of Therese also, it can be seen that the composition has been devised.

To the left, there is a shelf and chair, and sheets pot is drawn on top of the shelf, it also looks like a parody of Still Life by Cezanne. In the lower right corner of the screen, cat of one animal is drinking water in the dish.

Even from the only picture of this one, a complex view of the world of this artist can be read.

Depicting the same girl, a beautiful day people. In front of the fireplace, girl sitting on the couch, is watched by the beauty of herself in the mirror.

If you are flowing from the upper left to the lower right of the screen, just the line of the body of the girl, is divided into two the configuration of the screen. On the right, a man is Kube fire in fireplace, window, desk, white basin of the above are depicted on the left side.

This painting is also in the works, such as the flood of symbols like, if you immerse yourself in this picture, you will be able to read a lot of things from there.

Among them, pose the girl is a concern. While straighten the body, and make a left knee, and is stretched Daranto under the right hand. It has become a strange geometric patterns as a whole.

Even if I put the portrait of other Balthus, pose of a person, many feel uncomfortable somewhere both, strange pose.

Well, I thought the venue, and not only this painting, landscape painting was often unexpectedly. Left Paris after World War II, and live in the rural town of chassis of the Champagne region, and then Balthus, and began to draw better landscapes.

Work was painted in 1960, of a large landscape, a tree is drawn with a touch planar, the composition a Cezanne basis.

The work depicts the landscape of the village visited in the 1990s in his later years, of landscape, of Monte Cal Ventura head and Russia, brush strokes has become more simple.

Cats, themes drawn Balthus prefer. At the age of 11, to create a story that the main character of the cat honey, it also drew the picture.

It's that cat in the portrait, to appear as a supporting player in many cases, but in the work called cat, the Mediterranean, the cat has jumped to the hero.

I'm sitting cat to the apron to the terrace by the sea. From the sea, fish while drawing a rainbow, and that, flying to the dish in front of the cat, painting, such as the fairy tale like. An image of pedophile painter, it's work as far removed about.

The Balthus, about work on the theme of cat girls and often, that it is the pure, cat, girl, has been cited as the reason that, you do not flatter anyone.

Also, that was telling, not the artist, a painter drawing a picture simply, as, like a craftsman, of himself.

Balthus, admits that aiming to be a topic at the beginning, made ​​a work of erotic girl.

Painter indicating that by theme about this painter, depicted there, the work is that, being treated as would also be rare.

It seems work of Balthus, as questioning, that of seeing the picture, or mean what kind of thing.