When artists talk about Balthus, whose paintings are now the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[1] they frequently seem to enter into a kind of imaginary dialogue with him. Comments that I have heard more than once over the years are: “I can’t figure out why he decided to do that in that part of the painting,” or, “I see why he decided on that effect—I know why he thought it would work . . . but it seems, somehow, unconvincing.” Artists—and I don’t think it’s just representational artists—often approach the work of Balthus the way they would that of a close friend. They feel in some way a part of it—implicated. Balthus’s fame will probably always begin and end with his young girls, but what many of us are responding to in his work now is not so much the particularity of his subject matter (though many lessons can be learned from that) as the range of his pictorial imagination—the fecundity of painting ideas. At this point, the success or failure of any particular Balthus is probably less important than the way Balthus can let loose with ideas and go wherever they may lead him.

A week or so before the Balthus retrospective opened, a show of new paintings by Jasper Johns closed at the Leo Castelli Gallery on Greene Street. Johns’s first notoriety, like Balthus’s, was based on a somewhat sensational subject matter. As the years have gone by and