The superb Polish-French painter Balthus—an anti-modernist beloved of modernists, including Picasso—charms the eye and rattles thought. For more than six decades, until his death, in 2001, at the age of ninety-two, Balthus depicted young girls in gamy poses, attributing any perceived eroticism to viewers with unclean minds. ... Was Balthus a pedophile? His interest, if not lust, didn't stir before his subjects' pubescence, but it waned in their late teens. The show occurs at a cultural moment that is stretched between sexualizing the young and reacting with horror and anger to the lately abundant cases of their sexual exploitation. If you can shrug off that tension at the Met, I salute your detachment. I sure can't. Balthus puts me in two minds, attracted and repelled, in search of a third. He strains the moral impunity of high art to an elemental limit, assuring himself an august, unquiet immortality.
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Then, in 1936, Balthus met Thérèse Blanchard, the eleven-year-old daughter of a restaurant worker. During the next three years, he made ten paintings of her, which are his finest work. They capture moods of adolescent girlhood—dreaming, restless, sulky—as only adolescent girls may authoritatively understand. (I've checked with veterans of the condition.) In two of the best, a short-skirted Thérèse raises her leg, exposing tight underpants. We needn't reflect on the fact that an adult man directed the poses, any more than we must wonder about the empathic author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." But there it is. Balthus claimed a quality of sacredness for his "angels," as he termed his models. That comes through. Yet, looking at the paintings, I kept thinking of a line by Oscar Wilde: "A bad man is the sort of man who admires innocence."