Soon after Balthus made them, he showed them to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a close friend of his mother’s. Enchanted, Rilke arranged for them to be published in a little book for which he wrote the introduction. Pierre Bonnard admired them. The eminent German publisher Kurt Wolff called them “astounding and almost frightening.”
These images have always been known in reproduction but were presumed lost until Ms. Rewald tracked them down through Rilke’s heirs. And to have the entire suite laid before you confirms the sharpness of Wolff’s reaction.
Barely measuring five inches on a side, the images are as impressive for their sustained narrative, clarity of emotion and easy conjuring of different settings as for their effortless pan-modernist style. They alternately evoke the Nice interiors of Matisse, the alpine scenes of some German Expressionists and the woodcuts of the Flemish graphic artist Frans Masereel.