The paintings of Balthus abound in paradoxes and are likely to challenge any effort to situate his style and interpret his work. In the retrospective exhibition that accompanies this publication we find that these paradoxes are not illusory—they are an integral part of the artist's expressive, often disquieting power. To an uncommon degree Balthus is a painter both of our time and of eras past. He has used traditional compositions to enter a haunted realm. His pictorial language is highly disciplined, evocative of Piero della Francesca and of Poussin, and there is a profound poetry in the matière. But there often is in addition a quality of fierceness that jolts us from tradition and into a chimerical world. No other figurative artist of our century has expressed himself at such an intense level of consciousness, and few have plumbed so deeply the mysteries of the subconscious imagination. Somewhat like Sassetta in his own time, Balthus stands apart from contemporaneous artistic movements. This deliberate aloofness contributes to the poignancy of his still interiors, solitary figures, and strictly ordered street scenes and landscapes. He is very much an enigma. His oeuvre is a quintessential expression of our age, yet it resists categorization. Indeed, the achievement of Balthus commands its own chapter in the history of twentieth-century art. It is entirely appropriate that The Metropolitan Museum of Art present a Balthus retrospective. Two of his most important works reside here—Nude in Front of a Mantel, painted in 1955, and The Mountain, the recently acquired monumental landscape of 1937. Balthus's paintings are especially suited to an environment that evokes a vital component in their parturition: the contemplation of the Old Masters. During his youth Balthus studied the art of the past in the Louvre and in Italy and later the work of more recent masters such as Courbet; had he lived in New York, one would like to imagine that the Metropolitan would have been his world.

In ten years, Baldus established the model for photographic representation in genres that barely existed before him.

Editorial Assistant Nadja Hansen spoke with Sabine Rewald, curator of Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations, to discuss her personal fascination with the artist and her latest research regarding Balthus's subjects.

"The secret of Édouard Baldus"—that was the subject line of an email I received recently. I rolled my eyes. "Right," I said to myself, "the secret of Édouard Baldus." I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Édouard Baldus (1813–1889), the nineteenth-century French photographer of landscape and architecture, and had the enormous pleasure of introducing him to the general public through a beautiful show and catalogue in 1994. Ever since, I've been "Mr. Baldus."

Although today we think of bathing as a private activity, the public bath, or hammam, was a vital social institution in any Middle Eastern city for centuries before the advent of modern plumbing.

The photographer Édouard Baldus (1813–1889), a central figure in the early development of French photography and acknowledged in his day as a pioneer in the still-experimental field, was widely acclaimed both for his aesthetic sensitivity and for his technical prowess. Establishing a new mode of representing architecture and describing the emerging modern landscape with magnificent authority, he enjoyed high patronage in the 1850s and 1860s. Yet, despite the artist's renown during his lifetime, his name is all but unknown today, his work savored only by connoisseurs. This book, the first to chronicle the life and career of this important artist, brings his work once more before the public. The superb quality of the reproductions captures the subtle tones and soft matte surfaces of the original prints, many of which are published here for the first time. Baldus made his reputation with views of the monuments of Paris and the south of France, with dramatic landscapes of the Auvergne, with photographs of the New Louvre, and with a poignant record of the devastating floods of 1856. But it is his two railroad albums—the first commissioned in 1855 by Baron James de Rothschild for presentation to Queen Victoria, the second in 1861 by the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee railroad company—that are his greatest achievement. Here he brought together his earlier architectural and scenic images with bold geometric views of the modern landscape—railroad tracks, stations, bridges, viaducts, and tunnels—to address the influence of technology (of which both the railroad and the camera are prime examples). In so doing, Baldus anticipated the concerns of Impressionist painters a decade later and those of many artists of our own day, meeting his task with a clarity and directness not since surpassed.