Nicholas Fox Weber adopts an interesting biographical technique for his hefty book on Balthus. He does not offer straight, researched reconstructions of the events, social circles, and physical environments of the painter’s life. Nor does he try to evoke for us a linear narrative of his subject’s developing character, domestic circumstances, or spiritual progress. Rather what we get is, so to speak, a report on “How I Wrote a Book about Balthus.” We hear about Weber’s early admiration for and first approaches to the painter, about his subsequent meetings and interviews, about his stays as a houseguest at the artist’s chalet in the Alps, about his encounters with Balthus’s surviving friends and with those who modelled for figure compositions or sat for portraits. We have accounts of Weber’s trips to see certain Balthus paintings in public collections around the world or in the mansions and penthouses of tycoons. Much of the book is thus in the present tense— a prolonged rumination in which Weber takes us through his own adventure in “figuring out” Balthus’s elusiveness, his wily intrigues, his self-absorption, his picaresque social climbing.

All this is punctuated with readings of, and responses to, individual paintings. Their spellbinding power Weber accounts for by the way they invite yet resist erotic projection; provoke yet do not satisfy narrative curiosity; and transform the painter’s own experience and the masterpieces of past art that influence him. Balthus’s desire to manipulate and control, to elude responsibility, evade comprehension, possess and dominate the