Balthus Quotes

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

I only understand realism.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

I still remember my first Giacometti exhibition, and going back to the museum every day, whenever I could, to look again and again at these long, thin stick figures, so beautiful, so graceful. That, I think, was the moment I became really obsessed by art.

I'm just really impressed by oil paintings - I don't see how people do it! That's the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn't my thing.

I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

I don't really look like people in films; I look like people in paintings.

I'm interested in Jackson Pollock's kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it's nothing, and yet it's incredible.

I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.

The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.

I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.

I carry out my work thus: I never use models or nature for the figure, drapery or anything else.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first... I've been labeled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess.

I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot - I think that's just extraordinary.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.

I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters, but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper.