The French painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, 1908-2001) was known throughout his life as something of an oddity and exception who stood apart from his own times. After a childhood in Paris, a series of moves necessitated by the First World War – fi rst to Berlin and then Switzerland, followed by stays in France, North Africa and Italy – all contributed to his outsider status. His exceptional paintings, featuring motifs inspired no less by storybooks, fairy tales and the masters of the Renaissance than by a provocative eroticism, resist categorisation under any of the contemporary art movements.

Balthus created his major works over the years from the 1930s to the 1960s while living in Paris and Chassy. The beginning of this period was marked by the scandal occasioned by his fi rst exhibition in 1934 at Galerie Pierre in Paris. He presented a series of large canvases such as La Rue (The Street), La Leçon de guitare (The Guitar Lesson) or La Fenêtre (The Window), all depicting traditional motifs that are, as such, fairly innocuous. But the pointed eroticism in his paintings caused shock and consternation, just as Balthus had intended. Over the following decades Balthus portrayed his contemporaries, painted landscapes and streetscapes, and returned time and again to young girls on the threshold of adulthood.