Balthus exists. That was the first news about him and it was written by a poet, Rainer Maria Rilke - as though there were something to doubt about this existence. As if one had to take precautions against the suspicion that he might just be a fictional character. In a way, that's what he is, a fictional character, a calculated, staged appearance, half enveloped in twilight. Rilke remarked about the boy, that he would become an "artist with talent, perhaps with genius." And that he might cast doubts on himself.

Balthus was born in 1908, in the midst of old Europe and he became one of its most characteristic creatures. He died, as befitted his social status, in an arisotcratic carved wooden house on the side of a mountain in shouting distance of the Swiss Alps in 2001. Balthus enjoyed, if not promoted, the uncertainty of his being. He liked to say that he was one of those feline types, like a character in a film who makes us shudder: a dark frontier runner between worlds who turned into a predator in his castle by night. Or was he thinking of the nymphs in his paintings who loll about like cats and wile away the afternoons in feline languour? Did he see them as his prey or his playmates, his sisters by night?

He styled himself as the "King of Cats," which is also the title of his only self-portrait. It shows a spoilt, imperious creature of the oldest, irresistible aristocracy, a "King of those regions that will remain forever unknown to my gloomy contemporaries," as the young painter once said of himself.

The cat has, of course, always been the heraldic animal of this prince, ever since Rilke added a preface to the little picture book Balthus made as a boy. It is the tale of the mysterious, seductive cat "Mitsou", which appears out of nowhere and disappears into nowhere. It is a creature one remembers as one might an apparition that appeared in a voluptuous Sunday afternoon dream. Hence the poet's reassuring words at the end of his short preface: not the cat, but Balthus exists.

Of course he existed: he was master of a number of castles in France and Switzerland. He claimed to possess an old European aristocratic title - Comte Balthazar Klossowski de Rola – to have relatives in the Scottish Highlands and to be a blood relative of the heroically beautiful and contemptuous Lord Byron - as though such things could be acquired like old manors. He knew how to pass himself off with the proud air of other-worldliness, a passionate charades player, who made his first appearace as the darkly wreckless rake Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights" and his last as a kind of samurai in Japanese knight's armour. Residing in his Swiss wooden castle, he presented himself to the bemused visitor like a dinosaur from lost worlds.

















Balthus, "Patience", 1943
© The Art Institute of Chicago/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2007

Balthus is the painter of terrible and sublime children who, like their feverish siblings in Jean Cocteau's masterpiece, "Les enfants terribles", inhabit their own in-between kingdom inaccessible to grown-ups where, as Cocteau wrote, they promptly "fall silent when adults approach" and where they "follow the rhythm of another world". Balthus is a painter of fine-limbed stretching nymphs and provocatively sensual Lolitas for whom the soft-focus, the chaise longue and the frilly blouse seem to have been invented. He is also the painter of cheaply perfumed infants of desire, who appealed so deliciously to the age of Bilitis, thanks to the active support of David Hamilton as Master of Ceremonies. Against today's backdrop of rampant child pornography they provoke nauseousness and incomprehension, more than anything else, at the shallowness and poor taste of this all too tackily decorated thrill.

But above all there is the painter Balthus who, as his friend Antonin Artaud once put it, used metallically harsh, razor sharp techniques a la Jacques-Louis David to 'crucify' reality and employed his brush to guillotine the metaphysical bombast of modernist painting which bloomed between Klee and Kandinsky. The Balthus of the 1930s, of the Paris years, painted scenes of mysterious trepidation: knives are pulled with a dangerous flash, said Albert Camus, but no blood is spilled. His characters are either perpetrators or victims or both, like David's dead Marat. Frozen figures hinting at smouldering drama in this magically fixed moment – a drama that cannot be seen, but is tangible nonetheless.















Balthus, "The Street", 1933, © 2006. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2007

He was the bold and pompous creator of some of the finest works of the 1930s, where Magical Realism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Classicism and Surrealism blend wonderfully. His work is now on show in Cologne, where some two dozen paintings consort with much a larger volume of drawings, spanning his entire career from its spectacular start to the gradual fading of his mastery in his changing country homes.

At the exhibition's centre, however, is the sturm und drang period of Balthus, the young player of heroes. It begins in 1934 with the legendary exhibition at Galerie Pierre in Paris, where the central and hallucinatory work - the one also shown Cologne - was the large format painting "The Street". This is followed by portraits from the mid to late 1930s, and the phenomenal portraits of the girl-next-door,Thérèse Blanchard, which launched the nymph phase and, fortunately, are far more Enfants Terribles than Bilitis. Only first-rate works are assembled here from the painter's mental cosmos: the painting of the "Blanchard children" for instance, which Picasso identified as a masterpiece and later went on to buy; "The Golden Days" which is the portrait of an era of lascivious temptation and bitter desire; and the "Nude with Cat" and spread legs who surrenders herself to the light of day as if it were some horny Greek good.




















Balthus, "Therese dreaming". © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2007, Photograph by Malcolm Varon, 1988

Visitors won't necessarily experience a conclusive, rigorous investigation into and categorisation of the Balthus mystique in Cologne; this still remains to be seen. But thanks to the expertise of curator Sabine Rewald, visitors can get a first-hand impression of the painter's mastery at the highest level. He wasn't just a rumour, he existed as a thorn in the side of the past century. As the king of cats: a bitterly cynical snob and a dissolutely dangerous beast of prey.


"Balthus - Time Suspended. Paintings and Drawings 1932 to 1960." 18 August to 4 November 2007 at Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

*

The article originally appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on August 21, 2007.

Manfred Schwarz is an art critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Translation: Claudia Kotte