Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (February 29, 1908 – February 18, 2001), known as Balthus, was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls, but also for the refined, dreamlike quality of his imagery. Throughout his career, Balthus rejected the usual conventions of the art world. He insisted that his paintings should be seen and not read about, and he resisted any attempts made to build a biographical profile. 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. They were published in 1995 under the title La Qûete de l'essentiel and in it he gives some of his views on art, painting and some painters. See also Ref. Biography Early years Balthus was born in Paris, in 1908, to Prussian expatriate parents. His given name was Balthasar Klossowski – his sobriquet "Balthus" was based on his childhood nickname, alternately spelled Baltus, Baltusz, Balthusz or Balthus. His father, Erich Klossowski, was an art historian who wrote a noted monograph on Honoré Daumier. Erich grew up in the town of Ragnit in East Prussia, now part of Russia but then in the German Empire. According to Balthus he belonged to the former Polish petty nobility (the drobna szlachta) and his family bore the Rola coat of arms. This largely undocumented family background would later be appropriated by Balthus when he decided to use the surname "Klossowski de Rola". (Had he lived in Poland, the arrangement of the name would have been Rola-Kłossowski or Kłossowski h. Rola). Balthus had the Rola arms embroidered onto many of his kimono, in the style of a Japanese . Balthus's mother Elisabeth Dorothée Spiro Klossowska (known as Baladine Klossowska) was descended from Russian Jews who had emigrated to East Prussia. In the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1984 Balthus exhibition, she was described as the daughter of a cantor from Korelitz in Novogrudok district in the Russian Empire. However, Balthus told his biographer Nicholas Fox Weber that this was erroneous, and that his mother came "apparently from a Protestant family in the south of France". But according to Weber, this was a confabulation on Balthus's part. In fact, Balthus would often embroider upon his story of his mother's ancestry, saying that she was