Baladine Klossowska - Biography

Baladine Klossowska or Kłossowska (born in 1886 as Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro, died in 1969) was a twentieth-century European painter. She was the mother of the artist Balthus and the writer Pierre Klossowski, and the last lover of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

She was born Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro in Breslau, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland). Family members report Elisabeth Spiro descended from a family with Greek origins. She married the painter and art historian Erich Klossowski; the couple moved to Paris, where their sons were born — Pierre in 1905 and Balthasar in 1908. Elisabeth Spiro Klossowski pursued her own artistic career under the name Baladine Klossowska; she preferred life in France and lived there through much of her later life.

The Klossowskis were forced to leave France in 1914, at the start of World War I, due to their German passports. The couple separated permanently in 1917; Klossowska took her sons to Switzerland. They moved to Berlin in 1921 due to financial pressures. Mother and sons returned to Paris in 1924, where the three lived a materially marginal existence, often dependent upon help from friends and relations.

Klossowska met Rilke in 1919. The two pursued an intense but episodic romance that lasted until Rilke's death in 1926. Rilke called Klossowska by the pet name "Merline" in their correspondence, which was published after his death.

External links

• A 1923 photograph of Klossowska and Rilke
• Klossowska's 1925 sketch of Rilke
• Eugen Spiro's portrait of his sister