Controversial artist Balthus' widow on his fixation with young girls

In September 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, held an exhibition of paintings by a man who liked to call himself Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola but was better known as Balthus. It was the first overview of his work in an American museum for more than three decades. The show's title was Cats and Girls: Paintings and Provocations, a warning allusion to his artistic predilections, although anyone who'd heard of Balthus knew that what he liked to paint were felines (often sinister) and females (young, and in a state of undress).

The work in the Metropolitan show was mostly produced between the 1930s and 50s but it didn't include Balthus' most notorious painting, The Guitar Lesson, which he painted in 1934. As recently as 2001, The New York Times refused to reproduce it - and you won't be seeing it in Post Magazine either - but the internet has now made it widely available. It features a woman whose right breast is exposed and who looks as if she's about to play, or play with, the naked private parts of the child splayed across her lap whose hair she's viciously pulling.

At the same time as the 2013 Met exhibition, the Gagosian Gallery in New York held its own Balthus show. The Polish-French artist had died in Switzerland in 2001, a couple of weeks before his 93rd birthday, and the Gagosian works were from the last decade of his life. They weren't paintings, however. It turned out, although few people in the art world had known it, that he'd taken nearly 2,000 Polaroids of a girl called Anna Wahli, the youngest daughter of his doctor. They were studies for his paintings, never intended to go on public view: old age had stiffened his hands and he found it difficult to do preparatory sketches.

 

Every Wednesday afternoon in the 1990s, therefore, from the age of eight until the age of 16, Anna posed for him, usually semi-naked. Afterwards, the pair would settle down to watch American television soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, which is the sort of shrieking metaphor a director might hesitate to put in the film that is surely waiting to be made about Balthus' extraordinary life.

Anna grew up to become (further cinematic alert) a psychotherapist. She wrote a short piece for the coffee-table book, titled Balthus - The Last Studies, that was published to mark the Gagosian exhibition. In it, she says that she'd been chosen by Balthus because he liked the sound of her humming Mozart, that he was such a "klutz" with the camera she'd had to show him how to operate it and that he made endless, tedious adjustments to her position. "It took such a long time to change what seemed to be a minute detail and, from my point of view, all the photographs looked alike."