Balthus + Cats

But one thing turns this exhibition and our understanding of Balthus on its head: a fifth gallery that contains 40 ink drawings that have never been exhibited before. Made in 1919, when Balthus was 11, they tell the story of his beloved tomcat Mitsou, a stray that entered his life when he was 10, stayed a while and then disappeared forever, leaving him devastated.

Soon after Balthus made them, he showed them to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a close friend of his mother’s. Enchanted, Rilke arranged for them to be published in a little book for which he wrote the introduction. Pierre Bonnard admired them. The eminent German publisher Kurt Wolff called them “astounding and almost frightening.”

These images have always been known in reproduction but were presumed lost until Ms. Rewald tracked them down through Rilke’s heirs. And to have the entire suite laid before you confirms the sharpness of Wolff’s reaction.

Barely measuring five inches on a side, the images are as impressive for their sustained narrative, clarity of emotion and easy conjuring of different settings as for their effortless pan-modernist style. They alternately evoke the Nice interiors of Matisse, the alpine scenes of some German Expressionists and the woodcuts of the Flemish graphic artist Frans Masereel.

It is not hard to imagine that Balthus, who grew up in Paris, Berlin and Switzerland, was exposed in one way or another to this art. His parents were both artists; his father was also an art historian.

In the Mitsou drawings, we see Balthus studying with his cat by his side; Mitsou presenting Balthus with a dead mouse; the two of them playing under a table. We also see Balthus hunting frantically for the missing cat and, in the final scene, crying inconsolably.

The Mitsou drawings cast Balthus’s strange career in a new light. They reveal a trauma that gives his attachment to cats a deeper meaning. (Mitsou almost feels like a lost first love.) They lay much of the groundwork for his later compositions — the scenes of children or cats playing under tables, for example — and they anoint him as a prodigy who may have been a more complete and satisfying artist in his youth than in his maturity.

Balthus’s identification with cats is announced in the show’s opening gallery with a full-length self-portrait that depicts him as a charismatic dandy with a big tiger cat pushing insistently against his trouser leg. Nearby, a delicate lion tamer’s whip rests beside an inscribed stone slab that identifies the work as "A Portrait of H. M. The King of Cats, Painted by Himself."

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“Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations” is on view through Jan. 12 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.