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.
This makes “Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a rather strange, even refreshing exercise. It does not march toward the inevitable triumph like most tributes to leading modern artists. It proceeds in fits and starts; many of the paintings are interesting in one way or another but not especially original or even very convincing as totalities. The show is, in some ways, a study in kinds and degrees of failure.
Organized by Sabine Rewald, a Met curator with deep knowledge of Balthus, the exhibition spreads 34 paintings of mostly adolescent girls — 9 of which include cats — through four galleries. All were made between 1935, when Balthus was 27, and 1959, when he was 51 and still had four decades of painting ahead of him.