Balthus

Over 250 works will be put on show at Palazzo Grassi for this first major retrospective on Balthus. The works are on loan from over 90 museums, private collections and cultural institutions in 10 different countries: Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, Italy, Liechtenstein, Montecarlo, Switzerland, United States and Mexico. The city that has made the greatest contribution is Paris, with a good 24 lending institutions, while the work that has travelled farthest has been made available by a private collector in Mexico. The exhibition consists of nine sections and is divided into two parts, one arranged in chronological order and the other by themes. As for the single works, the largest is Passage du Commerce-Saint-André, the 1952-54 painting which measures almost 10 square metres. This is an oil painting on canvas that belongs to a private collection. At the other end of the scale, we have Illustration caricaturale de "L'Enjambement" de P. J. Jouve, dated 1948-49, which measures less than 10 square centimetres and is a remarkable pencil sketch drawn on a tablecloth fragment. The earliest works on show date back to 1923 and are Studies for self-portrait drawn in pencil on paper, while the most recent, presented to the public for the first time in Venice, is Girl with Mandolin painted in 2000-2001. The exhibition unfolds through all of the thirty-six rooms of Palazzo Grassi. All in all, it will take up an exhibition space of almost 4,000 square metres. Pressetext

Balthus