Balthus: The Last Studies

L'Oeil de la Photographie

The Staff

Balthus – The Last Studies is an undisclosed corpus of nearly two thousand photographs produced during the last ten years of the painter’s life. They are the preliminary studies for his last three major paintings. His hands incapacitated by old age, Balthus resorted to the camera as a sort of prosthesis, at once eye, hand and pencil, thus reassuming the mysterious ritual of sketching, for him the one and only way to approach and define the mental image from which the painting’s composition would proceed. As a substitute for drawing, these never before seen photographs fully participate in the slow, painstaking practice which had been Balthus’s for nearly a century. As such, they give a major insight into the painter’s endless quest of beauty.

Tablet Magazine

Jeremy Sigler

I approached the gallery attendant at her desk to get the scoop and was handed a massive two-volume cloth-bound hardcover book in a gorgeous slipcase. I opened the first volume. All the Polaroids were right there. I realized instantly that the executors had not stopped at Gagosian, but had also taken their loot to Gerhard Steidl, the notorious German who is arguably the most exquisite of all art publishers (especially of photography) in the world, who had in turn enlisted the editorial rigor of Benoît Peverelli and Nicolas Pages, who laid the book out in what appears to be a carefully considered chronology of rhythmic multi-picture chords of imagery on each spread.