Whispering

Balthasar Klossowsky is a Parisian with Polish, Swiss and Scots blood boiling in his veins. Among friends he sometimes speaks proudly of descent from Lord Byron (through a Gordon grandmother); at other times he likes to style himself "The King of the Cats." But for everyday use he prefers plain "Balthus," and over that signature he has earned a reputation as one of the best of Paris' "younger" painters. Last week Balthus, who is 41, widened his fame with a Manhattan show.

The pictures were monumentally composed and painted in a crisp, realistic style reminiscent, at distant glance, of the 19th Century. There was nothing "modern" about them, but, up close, they did look mighty strange, and a bit unpleasant.

Partly it was their subject matter. Balthus confined himself almost entirely to bobby-soxers, with an occasional cat or goldfish on the side, and unerringly emphasized the dreamy, awkward sexuality of his figures. He placed them in turn-of-the-century interiors which, like his painting technique, were both luxurious and a little stiff; he showed them dressed and undressed, reading, playing cards, snoozing, and gazing into mirrors with faint, self-conscious smiles.

In a catalogue introduction to the show, French Novelist Albert Camus remarked that Balthus "fixes the . . . scene with such precision that we are left with the impression of contemplating, as through glass, figures that a kind of enchantment has petrified ... for the fifth fraction of a second . . ."

A pale stick of a man in a tweed jacket and scotch plaid tie, Balthus can be found almost any day in Paris' Cafe de Flore, a Left Bank hangout where artists habitually gather to talk about their lonely triumphs and still lonelier flops. But Balthus sits a little apart, sipping black coffee.

The discussions, which the others take as seriously as surgery without anesthetics, are apt to bore Balthus: he is a self-made painter who never studied art at all, and takes a dim view of esthetic theories. When he limps off to his studio--a bare workroom littered with cigarette butts and twisted paint tubes--and locks the door, no amount of shouting will bring him back to the Cafe de Flore. Wounded when he stepped on a land mine in World War II, Balthus says he still feels "disorganized" and way behind in his work.

He insists that an artist's work should be permitted to speak for itself. Balthus' own pictures speak in a hoarse, obsessed whisper, but a penetrating one.

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