Balthus

"Balthus's most important works were created between 1932 and 1960, when he lived in Paris and in Chateau de Chassy; a dilapidated manor in Burgundy. This period started with a scandal: the large-format pictures shown at his first solo exhibition in the Paris Galerie Pierre in 1934 have seemingly familiar motifs - young women standing at windows, receiving music instruction or grooming themselves. But they are charged with an aggressive eroticism that shocked the viewers - and were meant to do so. In the following decades Balthus painted portraits of contemporaries, street scenes and landscapes, and time and again his favorite motif: young girls on the threshold of puberty, that erotic state of uncertainty between childhood and womanhood. Many of these works undisputedly belong to the catalogue of twentieth-century masterpieces." "This volume appears on the occasion of the very first Balthus exhibition in Germany organized by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, presenting 76 paintings and drawings from Balthus's most creative years."--Jacket.