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The paintings of Balthus K(lossowski will be exhibited in the Massachusetts

Institute of Technolog 'a Hayden Gallery from February 10 through March 2.

Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, known as "Balthus, " has held only three

one-man shows in the United States since 1956. He is a notably slow and careful painter,

completing relatively few works in the course of a year. Putting his canvases aside for long

intervals, and destroying many, he constantly returns to those few he feels hold promise.

The M.I. T. show will be the first Balthus exhibit to be held anywhere since the artist's 1961

appointment by Andre Malraux as director of the French Academy in Rome.

The exhibit is a general retrospective one, including in the 23 works his

first large canvas, "La Rue" of 1929. "Les Quals, " another early.and famous work; "La

Montagne, " a large surrealistic landscape with figures; "Figure in Front of a Mantel, " on

loan from the Robert Lehman collection; and two of his most recent works, "The Fortune

Teller" and the whimsical "Boy with Pigeons" are also on exhibit.

Balthus Is a self-taught artist, He developed his technique by copying works

of the masters in the Louvre, and while in Italy, the frescoes of Massacio and Piero della

Francesca. He was surrounded by members of the Paris art world since childhood. Bonnard

(an early influence on the painter)$ Marquet, Derain, Roussel, and the poet Rilke were frequent visitors in his family home. Balthus' father, Eric Klossowski, was a noted painter and art historian of Honore Daumier.

Perhaps because of his broad and informal training, Balthus is an artist difficult to classify. Although he has been affected by many artists, he is different from all.

His early works show a variety of influence from Courbet to Seurat. His latest works are

-more-

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Balthus--2

stylized and monumental, painted with a solid handling of color and form reminiscent of the

early Renaissance frescoists. Traces of cubism are found in his shifting and often ambiguous

viewpoints. Hints of surrealism are seen in his dream-like compositions.

Balthus' subject matter is unusual, too. Although he paints many landscapes

and portraits, his favorite subject Is the loneliness and quick inventiveness of children.

Sensuous and introspective, the adolescents have the appearance of emotional recluses,

imprisoned by an unnaturalness they are only dimly aware of. Cut off from each other, and

from their elders, they seem trapped in the world of Victorian respectability that surrounds

them.

Hayden Gallery is located in the Library building (Building 14), and admissiop

is free to the public. Gallery hours are from 10 to 5 weekdays, and 1 to 5 week-ends.

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February 3, 1964.

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