Time Travel Tuesday

Time Travel Tuesday: Balthus

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Image via.

I am fair­ly cer­tain I’ve talked about Balthus before on this blog, but at this point, it is prob­a­bly years since I have done so. But, last week­end I saw the movie Stok­er and found the visu­al sim­i­lar­i­ties  between Balthus’ paint­ings and the visu­als of the film strik­ing. (Lat­er, I found an inter­view with one of the actress­es, Mia Wasikows­ka. She said that did indeed look at Balthus’ work to pre­pare for their roles.)

Balthus is a Pol­ish-French painter who pre­ferred to be seen and not heard. Coini­cen­tal­ly, there is lit­tle writ­ing about him, so the empha­sis of course is on look­ing at his works. Balthus pre­ferred the fig­ure, and his most famous paint­ings depict­ed young girls in an often erot­ic con­text. They were and still are con­tro­ver­sial because of this, although the artist insists that this is not his intention.

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Two above images via.

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Image via.

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Above two images via.

Some stills from Stok­er. Not a ton of them out there yet, but hope­ful­ly you get the idea. I would def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend see­ing the film! It also takes cues from Hitch­cock­’s Shad­ow of a Doubt. So, if you are a Hitch­cock fan like me, you’ll prob­a­bly real­ly enjoy this.

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