Plan Ahead

Visiting Manet/Degas?

You must join the virtual queue. Read the additional visitor guidelines.

MetPublications

Balthus: Cats and Girls

Rewald, Sabine (2013)

This title is out of print.

BIGNY Book Show, Winner (2014)

Read an interview with Sabine Rewald at Now at the Met.

Publication Details

Table of contents
Press reviews
Tags

Related Titles

Related Content

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (3)
Exhibition
Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations
September 25, 2013–January 12, 2014

Balthus is best known for his series of pensive adolescents who dream or read in rooms that are closed to the outside world. Focusing on his finest works, the exhibition will be limited to approximately thirty-five paintings dating from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Between 1936 and 1939, Balthus painted his celebrated series of portraits of Thérèse Blanchard, his young neighbor in Paris. Thérèse posed alone, with her cat, or with her two brothers. When Balthus lived in Switzerland during World War II, he replaced the forbidding austerity of his Paris studio with more colorful interiors in which different nymphets daydream, read, or nap. The exhibition concludes with images that he created of Frédérique Tison, his favorite model, at the Château de Chassy in the Morvan during the 1950s. Never before shown in public will be the series of forty small ink drawings for Mitsou, in which the eleven-year-old Balthus evoked his adventures with a stray tomcat and which were published by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1921. This is the first exhibition of the artist's works in this country in thirty years. Four works belong to the Museum's collection and the rest—with the exception of several loans from France, England, Switzerland, and Australia—will come from museums and private collections in the United States.