The greatest living painter?

THE greatest living painter? Until recently some people would have said Francis Bacon, but he is dead. De Kooning? Apart from being an Alzheimer sufferer in his old age, he has lost some artistic status in the past decade; the edifice has begun to show some cracks. If a poll were to be held of critics, curators and collectors (not to say painters) the majority choice would probably be Balthus, who will be 89 on February 28th. He was actually born on February 29th in a leap year (1908) but the next leap year is not until 2000, in which Balthus, if living, will be 22.

The artist notorious for shunning personal publicity, snubbing journalists and headhunters and hoarding his privacy, has nevertheless seen himself become a living legend. For many years he refused even to give questioners biographical details of himself or his career. When the critic John Russell was preparing the catalogue for a major Balthus exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in 1968, the artist answered his urgent request for facts about his life with a telegram which read:

"NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS.

BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES.

REGARDS. B."

Even the name is a pseudonym or a nom de plume; he was born Bahhazar Michel Klossowski de Rola, in Paris. His father was a Polish French art historian, painter and stage designer with aristocratic ancestry; his mother was the self styled muse" of the poet Rilke whose mistress she was for several years; and his older brother, Pierre (born in 1905 and seemingly still active today) went on to become a writer, philosopher and artist.

Rilke took a fatherly interest in the boy and wrote a preface (in French) lord a book of drawings he published precociously in 1922, called Mitsou after his pet cat. Even when Balthus was still a schoolboy, Rilke was struck by how instinctively the embryo painter was drawn to all things Oriental. Another obsession was the novel Wuthering Heights, for which he did a series of powerful, mannered illustrations and which continued to haunt him over many years through some element of subjective self identification.

From his teens, established older painters were interested in him, encouraged him and gave him advice, including De rain. Balthus was born with a silver brush in his mouth, had the entree into all the avantgarde circles and was friendly with Picasso, Giacometti (in particular), Camus, Antonin Artaud, among dozens more. He became a familiar figure in the upper reaches of Paris bohemia, but he was unusual or untypical in two respects: he joined no group (although the Surrealists probably would have welcomed him) and he did not become involved in ideology or political activism. From first to last, Balthus has gone his own way - which has sometimes been a very odd one.

Small, neat, rather dandified, he struck some of the Montmartre set and the frequenters of the arty cafes about the Left Bank as being haughty and reserved, even as having a touch of snobism. They were largely right in this, as was proved later. And in spite of mixing easily with the Modernist artists who were so thick on the ground, and who quickly accepted him as one of themselves, instead of following Cubism or abstraction he preferred to study Old Master paintings and to make copies after Poussin and Piero della Francesca. The curious timelessness of Balthus's style was apparent from the first, and his acute awareness of tradition without being swallowed up or enervated by it.

BALTHUS had his first one man exhibition in Paris at the age of 26 and a few years later, in 1937, he married Antoinette de Waterville. By then the war clouds had thickened over France and when fighting came in 1939 he was conscripted, sent to the front and wounded. Shortly after, with his wife he moved to the Savoy region of France and from there managed - presumably by crossing the mountains - to get to Switzerland. Here he lived out the rest of the second World War and his sons, Stanislas and Thadee, were born there.

When the war ended Balthus was soon back in Paris, but his friends noticed a change. Reviving a lapsed or obsolescent family title, he began to call himself "Count de Rola" and to insist them they called him so too, and he decided to look for a suitable chateau to live in - though he was not, as Picasso and certain other senior, chateau buying painters were, wealthy and famous. In the early 1950s he found what he was looking for, an uninhabited, run down, uninviting building with turrets in the Morvan region between Paris and Lyons (France was then full of unwanted chateaux and stately homes which their owners could no longer afford and wanted to rent or sell). Yet Balthus at this stage was finding it hard to sell his pictures, and he seems to have survived financially on a kind of allowance made to him by a group of art dealers and wealthy collectors. It is strange and ironic to read of this today, when his pictures either fetch millions or are simply unobtainable.

Those who know his output at all well will recognise in this cheerless Big House the setting in many of his paintings - the rutted farmyard and its outbuildings, the sloping fields around, the run down orchard, the jersey clad farmer or farmhand herding a cow. Above all, they will recognise the bare interiors, though these are often peopled by one or other of Balthus's favourite pubescent girls, lying dreamily on a sofa or reading a book. In the words of James Lord, the biographer of Giacometti "the interior was unfurnished and unheated. Breezes whistled under loose fitting doors. The roof leaked. There was no telephone. The nearest village was several miles away." The pubescent girls were mostly modelled on his niece Frederique, who acted as a kind of housekeeper - Madame Balthus, apparently, had by now either been left behind, or had departed voluntarily.

The decade he spent at the rustic Chateau de Chassy was probably the most creative one in Balthus's long career, the period in which many of his greatest paintings saw the light. Meanwhile his fame was growing, and his rural interlude came to an end when in 1961 his friend Andre Malraux, then de Gaulle's Minister of Culture, appointed him director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici in Rome, where Ingres and Berlioz had once lived and studied. Here Balthus seems to have shown himself a capable administrator and he carried out a complete restoration of the historic building. (Incidentally, his opposite number at the British Council in Rome was Derek Hill, well known in Ireland, who recalls Balthus vividly).

THE dominance of abstract art after the war had tended to shut Balthus out of contemporary happenings and fashionable interest, but during the 1960s he rapidly grew to world fame and the Tate retrospective of 1968 was only the first of a series climaxed by last year's exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. (There had in fact been an important Balthus show at MoMA in New York in 1956, but the artist couldn't be bothered to go to it. Probably he was reluctant to quit his rural idyll - or just possibly, he could not afford the fare).

In 1967 he got married again to a Japanese artist, Setsuko Ideta, whom he had met in Tokyo, and by her he had a daughter, Harumi; presumably the Oriental woman who figures in several of his later paintings is modelled on his young wife (eg Japonaise au miroir noir). For nearly 20 years Balthus has lived in Switzerland, in the Alps, and according to the latest reports still goes to his studio every day. Photos show him with the inevitable cigarette jutting or dangling from his mouth, just as in his cafe going days.

The still, arrested, enigmatic world he has created, sometimes charged with erotic reverie and an almost sinister intimacy, is sui generis. Balthus works slowly and his output is not huge, but it includes masterpiece after masterpiece, many of them on quite a large scale. The female nude, landscape, portraiture (his depictions of Derain and Miro are among the century's greatest), still life, interiors with figures - Balthus has taken all these hackneyed themes or genres and re charged the batteries. He is the greatest living disproof of the often heard claim that the Grand Style is dead; an Old Master who is fully aware of his ancestry in Piero, Poussin, Courbet, Cezanne and the classical tradition generally, but now looks intrinsically more "modern" in sensibility than at least two thirds of the artists of the contemporary School of New York.