Retrospective is the first exhibition devoted to Balthus by a Swiss museum in a decade

With its Balthus exhibition, the Fondation Beyeler presents one of the last great masters of twentieth-century art, and also one of modern art’s most singular and controversial exponents. This extensive presentation, which has been in planning since mid-2016, takes as its starting point Balthus’ key work Passage du Commerce – Saint – André (1952–1954), which has been on permanent loan from a major Swiss private collection to the Fondation Beyeler for many years. With his multifaceted and ambiguous oeuvre, which has prompted both reverence and rejection, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908–2001), known as Balthus, pursued an artistic path running distinct from, or even counter to, the currents of modernist avant-gardes and our established notions thereof. On this solitary path, the eccentric painter drew on a number of art historical traditions and predecessors, ranging from Piero della Francesca to Poussin,