Nightshade

In their treatment of personality, contemporary artists usually fall into the extremes of well-meaning portraiture, ill-meaning caricature or deep-meaning fantasy. For a highly unusual glimpse of the middle ground, the ground plowed up by psychoanalysts and cultivated more subtly by writers from Flaubert to Thomas Mann, Manhattanites last week repaired to the Pierre Matisse Gallery to see 15 paintings by a 30-year-old Parisian known as Balthus.

Compared to surrealism, the works of Balthus are realistic, conservative. Compared to most conservative paintings, they are deadly nightshade. Constructed with mathematical care, painted large and sombre, each conveys an atmosphere or a character with almost malignant intensity. Balthus' paintings of children, for example, suggest their potentialities as sadists, lechers and wretches as clearly as their childish charm. If this austere originality appears incapable of lightness, even morbid, most visitors last week conceded its maturity and credited it with at least one painting of extraordinary power--a portrait of Artist Andre Derain.

Born Balthasar Klossowsky, son of a Polish-French art critic, Balthus learned to paint without a teacher, put traditional methods immediately to his own uses. Since 1934, when the Balthus debut set Paris all agog, the artist has exhibited rarely. Last week's show was his first in the U. S. A slight, dark-haired man with a pale, pointed face and sharp eyes, Balthus is married to a Swiss girl, lives in a studio apartment on Paris' Cour de Rohan. He is a close friend of Author Andr eGide and, in spite of his frightening portrait, admires Andre Derain above all modern artists.

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