| book details |

Balthus: Cats and Girls

By (author) Sabine Rewald

| enquire |

| book description |

Balthusâ€™s lifelong fascination with the dark side of childhood resulted in his most iconic works: canvases depicting girls on the brink of puberty, hovering between innocence and knowledge. In these pictures, the artist mingled intuition into his young sittersâ€™ psyches with overt erotic desire and forbidding austerity. Balthusâ€™s portraits of a local young Parisienne named ThÃ©rÃ¨se Blanchard, and his interior scenes featuring ThÃ©rÃ¨seâ€™s various successors, are among the most powerful depictions of childhood and adolescence in the Western canon. Far from being mere pretty girls in frilly dresses, Balthusâ€™s subjects are self-possessed and self-absorbed individuals, with a palpable but mysterious interior life. Also present in many of the images are cryptic cats â€” often smiling, sometimes leering, and likely as not standing in for Balthus himself. Balthus: Cats and Girls focuses on the early decades of his career, from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Sabine Rewald draws on her extensive (and firsthand) knowledge of the artist, as well as on interviews with the models themselves, to explore the origins and permutations of his obsession with depicting adolescents. She addresses the crucial influence of such key figures as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, his motherâ€™s lover, who acted for a time as Balthusâ€™s surrogate father. And she includes the previously unknown voices of the girls, whose recollections provide a unique perspective to some of the most recognizable and potent images of the twentieth century.

| product details |

| other options |

| back |

| your trolley |

To view the items in your trolley please sign in.

| sign in |

| specials |

The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli
Paperback / softback
224 pages
was: R 295.95
now: R 265.95
Available from overseas. Usually dispatched in 3 to 6 weeks

Originally published in Italian: L'ordine del tempo (Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 2017).

| more |

| add to trolley |

The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future

Mustafa Suleyman
Paperback / softback
352 pages
was: R 295.95
now: R 265.95
Stock is usually dispatched in 6-12 days from date of order

| more |

| add to trolley |

Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics

Carlo Rovelli
Paperback / softback
208 pages
was: R 295.95
now: R 265.95
Available from overseas. Usually dispatched in 3 to 6 weeks

| more |

| add to trolley |