Balthus (born 1908) was a French painter and stage designer who worked within the Western tradition of figure painting. He is best known for his paintings of everyday life invested with a sense of mystery, symbolism, and eroticism. Balthus was born...

FOR MUCH of his long life Balthus was a victim of nudgingly snide comments and inept professional art criticism, writes James Kirkup. He scorned being drawn into such cheap snap judgments of an innate purity of soul whose innocent eye informs all his work....

Nicholas Fox Weber Balthus: A Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 644 pages, $40 Nicholas Fox Weber adopts an interesting biographical technique for his hefty book on Balthus. He does not offer straight, researched reconstructions of the events, social circles, and physical environments of...

"Sublime" isn't an adjective that a critic should bandy about promiscuously. Used appropriately, it can describe the paintings of Fra Angelico and Vermeer, but the word is pretty much depleted thereafter. Having said that, there it is, "sublime," sitting atop the page of notes I...

The 1950’s were certainly not the best of times for a young artist to head to Paris. Europe was recovering from the devastation of the Second World War. From the standpoint of art, the vaunted School of Paris was, if not spent, then close to...