Balthus: Cats and Girls-Paintings and Provocations explores the origins and permutations of the French artist's focus on felines and the dark side of childhood. Balthus's lifelong fascination with adolescence resulted in his most iconic works: girls on the threshold of puberty, hovering between innocence and knowledge. In these pictures, Balthus mingles intuition into his young sitters' psyches with an erotic undercurrent and forbidding austerity, making them some of the most powerful depictions of childhood and adolescence committed to canvas. Often included in these scenes are enigmatic cats, possible stand-ins for the artist himself. The exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be organized chronologically and will focus on the early decades of the artist's career, from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, and will feature approximately 35 paintings, as well as 40 ink drawings for the book Mitsou that were created in 1919, when Balthus was 11 years old-thought to be lost, these drawings have never before been on public display.
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