Baladine Klossowska or Kłossowska was a European painter.
Background
She was born Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro in Breslau, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland) to a Jewish family. Her father, Abraham Beer Spiro, was a cantor, who moved his family from Korelichi in Novogrudok district of Minsk Governorate to Breslau in 1873.
Career
She was the mother of the artist Balthus and the writer Pierre Klossowski, and the last lover of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In Breslau, he was appointed a Chief cantor of the White Stork synagogue (Synagoga pod Białym Bocianem) — one of the two main synagogues of the city. 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. They moved to Berlin in 1921 due to financial pressures.
Klossowska met Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) in 1919. At the time, Rilke was emerging from a severe depression that had kept him from writing for several years during and after World War I. The two pursued an intense but episodic romance that lasted until Rilke"s death from leukemia in 1926.
During this time, Rilke had written in what he called "a savage creative storm" his two most important collections of poetry, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, both published in 1923.
During their romance, Rilke called Klossowska by the pet name "Merline" in their correspondence—first published in 1954.