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« Balthus est un peintre dont on ne sait rien. Et maintenant, regardons les peintures » (Balthus is a painter about whom we do not know anything. And now, let's look at the paintings) This is how Balthus describes himself when the Tate Gallery was asking elements for the catalogue of a Balthus exhibition in 1968.

Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, better known as Balthus, was born in Paris in 1908 but he grows up in Germany and Switzerland surrounded by artists, his family was close with Rainer Maria Rilke, his mother's lover, André Gide, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Albert Marquet, Wilhem Uhde...

In 1924 he comes back to Paris where he follows Bonnard's classes, and travels to Italy to copy the Renaissance's masters. His dream-like portraits of young girls in equivocal poses, at this complex time between childhood and puberty are his main subject. Those portraits can be found in major private and public collections including the Met, MoMA, Tate...

Picasso, who owned the artist’s work Les Enfants – Hubert et Thérèse Blanchard,1937 which he donated to the Louvre, praised Balthus as the one contemporary artist who wasn’t trying to copy him. “You’re the only painter of your generation who interests me,” Balthus recalls Picasso having told him. (quoted in Vanished Spendors: A Memoir, New York, 2001, pp. 9-10).