Surrealism à la Courbet 

Nicholas Penny

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.

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From the archive

So South Kensington
Julian Bell on Walter Sickert

At the Royal Scottish Academy
Eleanor Birne: Ron Mueck

At Tate Britain
Frank Kermode: William Blake

Yellow Sky, Red Sea, Violet Sands
Richard Wollheim: Nicolas De Staël

At the Royal Academy
Jeremy Harding: Botticelli