BALTHUS — Balthus / Cantini, Musée Cantini, Marseille, 1973

Published for Balthus’s summer 1973 exhibition at the Musée Cantini in Marseille, this compact square catalogue surveys a practice that had spent four decades refusing almost every convenient account of twentieth-century painting. The publication reproduces 73 works and includes texts by Gaston Defferre, Jean Leymarie and Albert Camus.

By 1973, Balthus no longer required introduction. His international position had been secured through exhibitions including his 1956 presentation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the major Tate Gallery retrospective of 1968. At the same time, he was twelve years into his tenure as Director of the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici, a position André Malraux had appointed him to in 1961 and which he would retain until 1977.

That timing gives the Cantini catalogue its particular charge. In an art world moving through Conceptualism, performance, Arte Povera and increasingly dematerialised practices, Balthus continued to construct interiors, landscapes and figures through an intentionally slow language of observation, memory and historical painting. His refusal to appear contemporary increasingly became the thing that made him contemporary.

The catalogue quietly moves backwards through that position. One of its strongest spreads reproduces Grand paysage aux arbres of 1955, made during Balthus’s years at the Château de Chassy. The landscape belongs to a period in which the architecture and surrounding countryside of Chassy allowed him to rethink scale, viewpoint and the spatial construction of landscape; the work was subsequently included in the 1973 Cantini exhibition as catalogue number 28.

Elsewhere, dense colour plates are followed by drawings reduced almost to disappearance: paintings carrying the weight of fresco and old-master composition beside faint graphite marks barely holding themselves to the page. The modest production sharpens the contrast. A washed blue photographic cover, near-blank reverse and restrained square format give the publication none of the monumentality normally associated with a retrospective.

That is precisely what makes it good.

Balthus at the point where an individual visual language has become an historical position: after the retrospective, during the Villa Medici years, but before the major institutional reassessments that would follow in the 1980s. The catalogue catches that history while it was still being assembled.

A small Marseille exhibition catalogue containing a painter very consciously moving at his own speed.

16.5 × 16.5 cm. 88 pages; 73 works illustrated and annotated. Original illustrated wrappers; colour and black-and-white reproductions.

Condition: Good vintage condition. Light toning, rubbing and handling to wrappers with minor edge and corner wear; slight surface marking to the predominantly pale covers. Internally well preserved with expected age toning. Binding sound.

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