Balthus Cats and girls

LOOK - how can you not? - at the supple creature stretched across the divan. Legs bent and parted, arms folded overhead, eyes trained on some distant vision. She could lounge that way for hours, it seems, staring at the wall, or through the human who gazes on her, he confounded by her aloofness, tormented by what he cannot know: What does she feel? What does she desire? What does she think of me? Girl or cat. Either could inhabit the scene. It was the impish genius of the French-born painter Balthasar Klossowski, a.k.a. Balthus (1908-2001), to pair them, repeatedly, in portraits created over the course of two decades, beginning in the 1930s. These paintings are the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (running through Jan. 12) and of the accompanying catalog by the exhibition's curator, Sabine Rewald. Moody and ambiguous, Balthus's work is rarely cheerful, despite the omnipresence of cats with Cheshire grins. His girl models, draped over furniture or posed on the floor on all fours, "peer into mirrors, read or daydream" and "appear completely self-absorbed," Rewald writes, their postures conveying "sensuality and languor, sometimes ungainliness,... perfectly in keeping with the phenomenon of puberty" - and the comportment of cats. From boyhood, Balthus was a cat nut. A treat of the exhibition is "Mitsou: Forty Images," a tender and melancholy pencil-and-ink series he drew at age 11. Here are joy and mischief, frustration, worry and loss, as the young Balthus rescues a stray, tries to tame it (folly, that) and, despite his devotion, is eventually spurned. A Freudian would say that from this primal wound sprang Balthus's fixations and fetishes, and that evidence of this can be found in the decades of work that followed: the self-portrait of a rangy Balthus, "H.M. the King of Cats," a furry sidekick nuzzling against his leg; the ravishing sequence of his neighbor Thérèse Blanchard, 10 portraits in all, including one in which we glimpse the ingénue's white undergarments and a cat lapping milk from a dish, a "tongue-in-cheek erotic metaphor," Rewald writes; "Nude With a Cat," in which a woman "undulates" while stroking a "deliriously happy, smiling cat" - the animal in so many of these paintings a stand-in, Rewald posits, for Balthus himself. The artist, who in later life played coy regarding the intent behind his images, might protest. "I really don't understand why people see the paintings of girls as Lolitas," he said. Rewald dismisses such remarks as feigned bafflement. A great strength of Rewald's catalog is its informed (if brief) reading of Balthus's confrères in the portrayal of un-selfconscious eroticism: Balthus has claimed Poussin as a major influence; Rewald also finds "haunting prototypes" in paintings by Gericault, Courbet and Degas, and in one instance points out interesting echoes with Man Ray, Munier and a Pears' Soap advertisement. I could have used more of this, less of the heavy-breathing hype - after all, this is not Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn. (A separate breed of genius.) The Met exhibition promises "paintings and provocations" and, as you enter, warns that the art inside "may be disturbing." Anything to sell a few more tickets, I suppose, although I can't help wincing at the prim moralizing. The sensuality of Balthus's work is plain: How the viewer will or should react is anything but. Art provokes, period - and therein lies the thrill of looking. Thankfully, even the Met's youngest patrons seem to have seen through the pandering. On the day I visited the museum, a boy broke free of his mother's grasp outside the exhibit and scampered past a guard, who called out, "How old are you?" "I'm 11!" the boy whooped back. "And I want to be provoked!" Somewhere, Balthus - King of Cats - surely purred. AT LEAST ONE Balthusian heroine graces the pages of "The Big New Yorker Book of Cats" : a girl with a "chopped black Cleopatra haircut and wise blue eyes" who, in a David Schickler short story from 2000, lures her antisocial English teacher to dinner with her family. This kitten, who chews her hair suggestively and derails class discussion (and her teacher's concentration) with disarming non sequiturs, appends curious, borderline-inappropriate notes to the ends of her papers and makes disconcerting late-night phone calls: "Do you know what's happening to my ankle as we converse?" "No," the unwitting teacher replies. "John Stapleton is licking it. He likes to nibble my toes, too." John Stapleton being a cat, naturally. The "Book of Cats" comes a year after "The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs" - a publishing slight that, though it stings, I'll forgive, as the latest anthology was worth the wait. Comprising 57 works of prose and poetry (with pictures!), it assembles quite a cast, both feline and human. We meet cats loitering at wine shops and book shops, a cat that stops at Sardi's on book tour, cats prone to vice ("He took up with the most frightful females"), cats gazing vainly into mirrors while reciting Blake ("What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"). Alastair Reid admires cats ("Imagination prowls at night,/catlike among odd possibilities"), while E.B. White wants to dispatch them efficiently ("Insert into the trap a tablespoonful of calcium cyanide or a wad of cotton saturated with one ounce of carbon disulfide or chloroform"). But the cats bite back. It's not too far a stretch to say that if cats were writers, they'd be critics. "To write like a cat," Anthony Lane observes in a foreword, is "to find a new angle from which to pronounce, with a lightly modulated hiss, upon the infinite gradations of human sin." Consider the pedantic assessment flung at a silly human who mutters, "Bad luck!" on crossing one feline narrator: "This little action suggested to me that his eyes were failing or that he was paranoidal, for, though a black cat, I have a redeeming band of white at my throat." Or this, by a cat sussing out the motives of a human adversary: "I intend to be fair about this if it kills me." Two standout articles feature real-life obsessives of ages past who reveal today's Caturnet devotees - with their GIFs and Tumblrs and hastily aggregated listicles - for what they truly are: amateurs. Introduced to readers in 1951, Robert Lothar Kendell, president of the American Feline Society, compiled "the world's largest list of friends of the cat - some 92,000 presumed ailurophiles," and in his office kept "innumerable photographs of cats - cats yawning, cats playing, cats sleeping, cats pouncing, cats watching birds, ... cats looking bored or supercilious, cats suffering the gingerly fondling of movie stars clad in bathing suits or evening gowns, cats staring in amazement out of airplanes." Eat your heart out, Cute Overload. Then there is Rita Ross, a chorus girl turned cat catcher who, between 1919 and 1938, herded for "painless destruction" over "200 tons of cats." In search of her quarry, the lionhearted Ross penetrated "sewers, elevator shafts and cellars," ascended rooftops and scrabbled through "freight yards, abattoirs, bridges and cemeteries." Consumed by her work, she had few other interests and "would rather kiss a cat than the best man who ever walked on two feet." Most fascinating to me was a 1986 essay by Vicki Hearne (poet, philosopher, animal trainer) delving into the complex psychological interplay between cats and people. "Our cats are looking at us," Hearne writes, "and perhaps the thing about ailurophobes" - fraidy-cat humans - "is that they don't want to be looked at like that. ... Perhaps the aloofness story is one we tell ourselves in order not to know that we are being looked at. But why should we not want to be looked at?" Why not indeed. Jennifer b. McDonald is an editor at the Book Review.

Accompanying an exhibition at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art that opens in September 2013, this captivating catalogue focuses on French painter Balthus (aka Balthasar Klossowski, 1908-2001) and his obsession with childhood and the pubescent girls who modeled for his best-known works. Veteran Balthus scholar Rewald, a curator of modern and contemporary art at the Met, lucidly provides both the biographical and art-historical context for Balthus's young subjects, whom he often depicted in gawky poses that heighten the tension between their innocence and looming puberty. Balthus vehemently denied the work's eroticism. The girls are typically accompanied by smug cats-possibly erotic symbols and perhaps "a stand-in for the artist." Cats had been a theme of Balthus's since his childhood; at age 11, he completed 40 ink sketches of a stray he called Mitsou, and published the sketches with the support of poet Rainer Maria Rilke; they are splendidly reproduced here. Rewald describes Balthus's childhood with his eccentric mother, Baladine, as withdrawn from conventional life and makes well-founded analogies to Lewis Carroll's photographs, and literary works such as Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles. The catalogue is further enriched by Rewald's interviews with Balthus's models, though Therese Blanchard, perhaps the most mysterious model, died at age 25. Balthus devoted the most canvases and afforded the greatest individuality to this brooding child, whom he showed on the verge of adolescence, knowledge, and sensuality. Illus. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In this catalog accompanying a recent exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rewald, curator of modern art at the Met and a prolific author of art texts including previous works on Balthus, provides a fresh overview of the French painter with a focus on his iconic paintings of 1930 to 1950. Balthus was part of prominent intellectual circles in 20th--century Paris and is, indeed, best known for his distinctive approach to his two main subjects: girls and cats. Rewald's substantial essay reflects on the uneasiness with which contemporary audiences view the evident eroticism of the artist's paintings of girls on the threshold of puberty or slightly older and how the art public's view of this work has changed over time. But the current volume also serves well as a general overview of Balthus's art and career and includes photographs and a chronology of the artist's life. Rewald confirms Balthus's firm place in the fine arts canon, despite the discomfort provoked by his images. VERDICT This sympathetic reconfirmation of Balthus through the lens of a modern sensibility should be considered for -academic and arts libraries.-Kathryn -Wekselman, Cincinnati (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.