Giuliani, Meet Balthus: Trying to Root Out 'Pornography'

Giuliani, Meet Balthus: Trying to Root Out 'Pornography'
He was in his own affairs inconsistent and hypocritical. As an artist, he was a brilliant, painstaking technician whose strange fairy-talelike images, held together by a clever geometry, were bathed in a peculiar granular light. This is all that really matters. But it happens that he was in person a quintessential French intellectual of the prewar era: clever, amusing, wry, amazingly cultivated, socially ambitious but reclusive when it came to public scrutiny. [link]