By Andrea Hoag, Special for USA TODAY

A long-awaited memoir from Balthus, the painter known for his erotic nymphets, has finally arrived. The French painter died in 2001 at age 92 after years of shunning interviews, but this posthumous book dispels the mystery surrounding one of the 20th century's most controversial careers.

Oddly, the sense of turmoil he brought to his disturbing canvases is nowhere to be found in the transcendent beauty of his prose.

Balthus published his first book of line drawings at 13 with a foreword by the poet Rilke, his mother's lover. It was a sign of things to come that even early critics considered Balthus' unsentimental work "frightening."

More about the book Vanished Splendors By Balthus Ecco, 237 pp., $29.95

When he arrived in Paris in 1924 at 16, Balthus made friends that included playwright Antonin Artaud and artists Georges Braque and Alberto Giacometti. He bravely shunned contemporary art movements to pursue figural painting, considered old-fashioned by the avant-garde, and managed to garner respect for his unique approach. Pablo Picasso once paid a call to Balthus' sixth-floor studio ("You had to want to visit me," Balthus explains) and told the young man: "You're the only painter of your generation who interests me. The others try to make Picassos. You never do."

One-man shows were quick to follow, and again viewers were disturbed.

Lolita-like images of half-dressed young girls led the Paris art establishment to shun Balthus. Though he never visited the USA, even when the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited a retrospective of his work, American patrons were most eager to purchase his paintings.

The artist's unusual memoir is a collection of two-page chapters with disorganized musings, but the memories are so delightfully written it is easy to ignore this lack of uniformity. Vignettes are woven throughout the text about his army days in Morocco, two marriages and even his many grand estates. The recollections are rendered in prose too rich and varied to be devoured in one sitting.

Balthus pauses only briefly to defend his reputation, laughably calling his controversial adolescent models "angels."

Also fascinating are Balthus' revelations about his work as longtime director of the French Academy in Rome. He spent his tenure refurbishing the tired Villa Medici and arguing with its frequent guests. Balthus is famous for causing French writer Marguerite Duras to abandon her opulent guestroom after a clash of artistic values. She insisted that all art must be revolutionary, something the elder statesman scoffed at.

Whether radical or just eerie, the work of Balthus has come to be seen as an important part of the 20th-century canon. Vanished Splendors will only heighten the uneasy appeal of this long-enigmatic painter.