[1] Nevertheless, towards the end of his life he took part in a series of dialogues with the neurobiologist Semir Zeki, conducted at his chalet at Rossinière, Switzerland and at the Palazzo Farnese (French Embassy) in Rome.

[4] Unlike his brother or parents, Balthus claimed that he belonged to the former Polish petty nobility (the drobna szlachta) and his family bore the Rola coat of arms.

In another confabulatory twist, Weber reports that Baladine's lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, had said that the Spiros were descended from one of the richest families of Sephardic Jews, that is that they were of Spanish, not Eastern European origin.

Weber doubted this story too, since Balthus's son Fumio, born in the late 1960s, had Tay–Sachs disease, a genetic disorder commonly associated with Eastern European Jews.

The Klossowski children grew up in an art-world environment, with frequent visits to their household by famous artists and writers, including Rilke, André Gide (who mentored Pierre), and Jean Cocteau (who would depict the family in scenes of his 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles).

[9] Overall, Balthus had an idyllic memory of these early childhood years, which were disrupted when, shortly after the First World War began in 1914, the family were forced to leave Paris in order to avoid deportation due to their German citizenship.

His circle of friends in Paris included the novelists Pierre Jean Jouve, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Joseph Breitbach, Pierre Leyris, Henri Michaux, Michel Leiris and René Char, the photographer Man Ray, the playwright and actor Antonin Artaud, and the painters André Derain, Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti (one of the most faithful of his friends).

In 1948, another friend, Albert Camus, asked him to design the sets and costumes for his play L'État de Siège (The State of Siege, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault).

In 1942, he escaped from Occupied France to Switzerland, first to Bern and in 1945 to Geneva, where he became a friend of the publisher Albert Skira as well as the writer and member of the French Resistance, André Malraux.

With Adolphe Mouron Cassandre in 1950, Balthus designed stage decor for a production of Mozart's opera Così fan tutte in Aix-en-Provence.

Three years later he moved into the Chateau de Chassy in the Morvan, living with his step-niece Frédérique Tison and finishing his large-scale masterpieces La Chambre (The Room 1952, possibly influenced by Pierre Klossowski's novels) and Le Passage du Commerce Saint-André (1954).

As international fame grew with exhibitions in the gallery of Pierre Matisse (1938) and the Museum of Modern Art (1956) in New York City, he cultivated the image of himself as an enigma.

That he had a second, Japanese wife Setsuko Ideta whom he married in 1967 and was thirty-five years his junior, simply added to the air of mystery around him (he met her in Japan, during a diplomatic mission also initiated by Malraux).

Bono, lead singer of U2, sang for the hundreds of mourners at the funeral, including the President of France, the Prince Sadruddhin Aga Khan, supermodel Elle Macpherson, and Cartier-Bresson.

His work shows numerous influences, including the writings of Emily Brontë, the writings and photography of Lewis Carroll, and the paintings of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Simone Martini, Poussin, Jean-Étienne Liotard, Joseph Reinhart, Géricault, Ingres, Goya, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Courbet, Edgar Degas, Félix Vallotton and Paul Cézanne.

[18] In its transgressive themes and treatment of sexual taboo, his art has been compared to the work of the contemporary philosopher Georges Bataille (a friend of his brother Pierre Klossowski).

[22] His widow, Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, heads the Fonds Balthus, the archives of the painter, which is accessible to scholars as a long term deposit in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne.

A reproduction of Balthus's Girl at a Window (a painting from 1957) prominently appears in François Truffaut's film Domicile Conjugal (Bed and Board, 1970).

During December 2017, a public petition was circulated requesting that Balthus's painting Thérèse Dreaming be removed from display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York due to its alleged explicit content and suggestive portrayal.

[25] The German newspaper Die Zeit called the images, which depict a model named Anna from ages eight to 16, “documents of pedophile greed.” Since then, despite attempts,[26] no planned exhibition of Balthus’s work was censored or cancelled for such allegations.