Lot: 291
Balthus
1908 Paris - 2001 Rossinière/Schweiz
Étude pour "Portrait d'Hélène Anavi". 1952.
Pencil drawing, wiped.
Monnier/Clair D 687. On firm wove paper by Arches (with watermark), firmly laid on Japon. 75 x 53,5 cm (29,5 x 21 in), size of sheet.
Preliminary study for the oil painting "Portrait d'Hélène Anavi" from the same year (Monnier/Clair P 214).

PROVENANCE: Private ownership (acquired from the Balthus family in 2003).
Private collection South Germany.

Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus, was born in Paris in 1908; his father was the painter and distinguished art historian Erich Klossowski de Rola. In 1914 the family moved to Berlin, where Balthus’ mother separated from her husband and ultimately moved to Switzerland with her two sons, Balthazar and Pierre. Berlin, Paris and Switzerland would share the honours of being Balthus’ home country as long as he lived. Determined to become a painter, Balthus began at the age of sixteen to draw and copy the Old Masters in the Louvre. In 1925 he went to Italy, where he visited Florence, Arezzo and Siena, familiarizing himself with the works of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, which would exert a lasting formative influence on his own work. The magical remoteness typical of Quattrocento frescoes is also a salient characteristic of Balthus’ work. His 1930s works attest to the influence of both the Impressionists and Nabis. He had his first solo show in 1934, at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. Balthus himself described his figurative style of painting as “timeless realism”. During the Cubist and Constructivist decades, Balthus clung stubbornly to representational art, an attitude that left him an outsider in the Paris art scene of his day. In the 1940s, Balthus finally found the theme that would be most important in shaping his work for posterity: the eroticised representation of pubescent girls.

In his extensive œuvre, Balthus devoted his attention primarily to woman as childlike waif. Eroticism and salaciousness are blended with a virginal naif quality in a way that is almost oppressive. Balthus’s figures all elicit a vague horizon of expectations clothed in yearning coupled with sexual curiosity. The erotic component might seem to have been left out of our drawing; however, as we know Balthus, it is manifest in the apparent chastity. The dreamy abandonment of the subject in this drawing represents a deliberate contrast with the Existentialist Zeitgeist informing the genesis of the work. Hardly surprising, therefore, that the painting as ultimately executed shows an adult woman, whose forbidding facial features reveal nothing of the dreamy softness of our preliminary study for it. Hélène Anavi owned a large collection of Surrealist and post-war art works that was sold at auction in London in 1984.
Balthus’ narrative painting is distinguished by precise observation of his subject matter. It has assimilated influences from both Surrealism and New Objectivity yet cannot be assigned to any of the 20\up6 th -century figurative styles. In 1961 Balthus became director of the French Academy in Rome and retained the post until 1976. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for his life’s work in 1991. Balthus died in Switzerland in 2001. His work was honoured by a first grand retrospective in Germany at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2007. [KD].

In good condition. With slight horizontal crease mark, smoothed. Minimally and unevenly discolored. With isolated minor traces of rubbing.

EUR: 18.000 - 24.000 REGEL(7%)
US$: 24.552 - 32.736