The French painter who called himself Balthus was infatuated with his medium’s rich history and with girls. He painted alluring, disturbing pictures of nubile adolescents more than he painted anything else, making images that conjured Courbet, Ingres, Piero della Francesca and Seurat and were charged with suggestive undercurrents. Occasionally he included cats in these scenes, increasing their erotic frisson.
These works earned Balthus, born Balthasar Klossowski (1908-2001), widespread notoriety, starting in Paris in the 1930s. But only a few match his best efforts, which are from the same decade. Those include his few portraits of adults; his illustrations for Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”; and two large, stagy paintings, “The Street” and “The Mountain,” both populated by multiple figures that seem unaware of one another.