Art & Creativity Quote by Balthus

A provocation disguised as a welcome. Balthus opens by declaring himself unknowable, then immediately pivots to the only thing he’s willing to “confess”: the work. It’s a power move, but also a defensive crouch. His paintings have long attracted biographical hunger and moral scrutiny; the public wants the man behind the images, the key that will make them legible, indictable, containable. By insisting “nothing is known,” he tries to starve that appetite and reroute attention to paint, composition, and the stubborn, unsettling silence of his scenes.

The syntax does a lot of the heavy lifting. “The best way to begin” sounds practical, even genial, until it drops the curt verdict. Then comes the stage-manager’s cue: “And now let us…” He’s not just asking for formalist looking; he’s choreographing it, setting terms, controlling the room. The subtext is clear: biography is noise, interpretation is gossip, and the artist is not available for cross-examination.

Context matters because Balthus cultivated this posture. He built a persona of aristocratic remove, resisted interviews, and leaned into a pre-modern aura in a century obsessed with confession and self-exposure. The line also anticipates today’s friction between art-as-object and art-as-evidence. Balthus argues, elegantly and irritably, that the painting is the event; everything else is tabloid weather. Even if we don’t fully buy it, the gambit works: it forces you to confront how badly you want the backstory, and what you’re hoping it will let you avoid seeing on the canvas.