In September 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, held an exhibition of paintings by a man who liked to call himself Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola but was better known as Balthus.

"Mieke Bal's analysis is focused in the eerie sense of very real and very unreal that the paintings emanate. She considers this the heart of Balthus's work. Bal argues that the paintings draw the ...

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 ...