Balthus first attracted notice early in 1934 with a small exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. Several of the works he showed - The Street, The Window and Alice - seem as startling now as they must have done then. This Catalogue raisonné, published not long before the artist's death earlier this year, enables us to determine the unremarkable ingredients that so surprisingly and so explosively combined to make these paintings possible.

LRB 24 May 2001 | PDF Download