"Chaos and Classicism" at the Guggenheim

The Street, Balthus, 1933
The painter who called himself Balthus had too many agendas, some of them very strange, to be claimed under the simple category of a revived classicism. But this, his most famous painting, obviously shares in the return to slightly immobile figures that some of the more single-minded 1930s classicists went in for. But while there may be borrowings here from the unearthly spirit and self-absorbtion of the people and angels in the early Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, the action on the street is strictly modern — and, in that apparent sexual assault at left, faintly creepy.

• Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art