The Street

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City (the USA).

Balthus’s first large painting became one of several infamous ones included in the artist’s earliest solo exhibition in Paris in 1934. In addition to the fact that the characters look like grotesquely masked models and the street without the sky looks like a theater stage, it shows aggressive sexual harassment on the edge. In general, early Balthus avoided stylistic categorization. However, this picture was of great interest to surrealist artists, as he turned a crowded street into an unusual test for the psychological isolation of citizens who did not notice what was happening right in front of them, and also gave rise to the study of sexual taboos.