D a l ke y a r c h i v e p r ess
Balthus
A Biography Nicholas Fox Weber With a New Preface by the Author
This is the first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time: the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola, whose brilliant, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art.
“Nicholas Fox Weber explores Balthus’s many
“A book that often reads like an update of one of those late novels of Henry James—as adapted, say, by Vladimir Nabokov—in which the narrator finds all appearances to be
influences, from the work of Piero della Francesca
deceptive and every revelation is
to psychoanalytic theory and his brother’s fascination
calculated to raise more questions
with the Marquis de Sade. . . . A splendid account
than it answers.”
of a complex life and as fine an artist’s biography
—Wall Street Journal
as this season is likely to produce.” —Publishers Weekly Nicholas Fox Weber
“Probing the inner man and his work, the author partially explains the
is the executive director of the Josef and
Anna Albers Foundation and has written extensively about artists, as well as curated many major exhibitions and retrospectives of their work. A graduate of Columbia College and Yale University, he is the author of
mystique that has surrounded this critically acclaimed and self-invented painter whose surreal, sexually
fourteen books, including The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modern-
charged images are both disturbing
ism; Le Corbusier: A Life; The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sew-
and haunting.”
ing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud; Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a
for sale throughout the world
Balthus’s complexities are clarified and his genius understood in this book, which derives its immediacy from Nicholas Fox Weber’s long and intense conversations with Balthus himself—who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer—as well as Weber’s interviews with the artist’s closest associates. This biography was first published by Knopf in 1999 and is now available for the first time from Dalkey Archive Press.
—Library Journal
New Art, 1928–1943; The Art of Babar, and The Drawings of Josef Albers. Weber is currently at work on a biography of Piet Mondrian.
$24.95t / £17.00 paper 978-1-56478-992-1 A p r i l 656 pages / 116 b&w and 16 color illustrations B i o gr a p h y / Art H i sto r y A m e r i c a n L i t e r at u r e S e r i e s
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