"Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus, French painter. From a highly cultivated family background, he began painting at the age of sixteen. He met Rilke - who wrote the preface for a collection of his drawings - and Bonnard, who was a strong influence on him up to 1930. It was at this time that the characteristics of his style became fixed: a convinced figurative artist and opposed to all forms of abstraction, his draughtsmanship is incisive and of great precision. He produced matte paintings, in muted tones, founded on strict observation and internalization of things and people. In 1933, The Street caught the attention of the Surrealists because of its strange, almost dreamlike atmosphere: all the figures seem indifferent to one another and carve up the space into a series of continuous private worlds.