Tuesday was a very interesting experience, since I’ve never gone to the Met before. I had no idea it was so big; narrowing the visit down to a specific exhibit was very helpful. A few of us decided to go to the exhibition Balthus: Cats and Girls. I honestly had no idea what the exhibition was going to be about, but the name itself sounded interesting.
First off, it took us a pretty long time to get there. Not that we got lost or anything.. but the map was pretty confusing. It was nice though, since we had to go through several parts of the museum. We went through American History, the Egyptian Wing (which was personally one of my favorites), and maybe a few more. In the Egyptian part, there was a beautiful temple surrounded by water. The design is very unique, since Egyptian temples were not only houses, but also were representations of religious and mythological concepts, which is shown in the architecture and carvings on the temple. Professor Eversley brought up an interesting point as to how this might be the closest we could be to experiencing Egypt for a while, especially with the current situation Egypt is in right now. Looking at the temple that day made me realize lucky we are to have easy access to art from all around the world.

When we finally got to the exhibition, I was a bit surprised by the paintings I saw there. Balthus was a French painter whose interest, as shown in the exhibition, was girls who were on the threshold of puberty, “hovering between innocence and knowledge.” Many of his pictures had sexual connotations to it, since they portrayed girls as young as 14 posing in ways like shown in this picture

One picture that was of great interest to me was “The Victim,” which shows a young woman’s body that has been thrown on the bed. If you look closer, there is a knife on the floor an it happens to be pointing to her heart. It’s hard to tell if the woman was murdered and died, or if she is in a trance, especially since there is no sign of blood anywhere. I found this interesting because after our discussion of nudity from John Berger’s book, this painting shows nudity in a different perspective; the subject of this painting does not have a seductive look like the other paintings of nudity that we saw. Balthus finished this painting after he came back from serving in World War II, so this may be a reference to the horrors that he saw during the war.

Another observation that was made while walking through this exhibition was the amount of paint Balthus used; if you look closely at his paintings, you can see the thick layers and strokes that he made. He used a lot of paint, which implies that he was rich (something new that I learned that day)