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But it is more difficult to know what we are feeling: Balthus is a master of easing equivocation. His paintings are lifted by a tension between formality and obsessive eroticism. Balthus' nymphets, with their big heads, pale limbs and sidelong stares, are monsters in their way; they have the look of mutants, as young cicadas do when molting their husks. The most extreme case is Balthus' Guitar Lesson, 1934—one of the few masterpieces among erotic paintings made by Western artists in the past 50 years. But the suggestive mood pervades all his work except the landscapes. To encounter it in the mellowed and reduced form of Katia Reading, 1970-76, is still faintly disturbing—as if one of the figures in Seurat's Grande Jatte had turned from its Euclidean stillness and made a gesture of invitation. In terms of formal arrangement, it would be hard to imagine a more organized image than this: the chair could not be shifted an inch, or the angle of the girl's legs a degree, without some loss. But it is also a strangely equivocal picture, a filter of memory, dream and half-sublimated desire, without a trace of sentimentality. It is not a "modern" painting. But no account of modern art that leaves out its author can make much sense.