Realistic Peculiarity

Balthus is one of the most pioneering, creative, and mysterious artists of the20th century. Moreover, he is a figure against the tides of western modernistic and post-modernistic arts in the20th century. A person of perseverance and independence, Balthus has established a unique system of painting language. With their realistic style, his works presents a fully enchanted reality, which look, peculiarly, both familiar and strange to people. Being rooted in the tradition since Renaissance and absorbing the essence of his predecessors’languages, Balthus’s painting language incorporates his understanding of oriental drawing techniques, with special reference to the Japanese Ukiyoe language. Relief profiling, plane composition, and dramatic space are characteristic of Balthus’s paintings. His distinctive painting language is designed to reveal something seemingly invisible but truly authentic; for this he has explored and developed a kind of psychological painting with vivid emotive powers. This essay aims to deeply investigate the expressive elements of Balthus’s painting language on a method of comparison.