"Balthus - Cats and Girls" and "The Big New Yorker Book of Cats" - NYTimes.com Look - how can you not? - at the supple creature stretched across the divan. Legs bent and parted, arms folded overhead, eyes trained on some distant vision. She could lounge that way for hours, it seems, staring at the wall, or through the human who gazes on her, he confounded by her aloofness, tormented by what he cannot know: What does she feel? What does she desire? What does she think of me? Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art "Thérèse Dreaming," by Balthus. Cats and Girls By Sabine Rewald The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press. $45. Foreword by Anthony Lane Random House. $40. Girl or cat. Either could inhabit the scene. It was the impish genius of the French-born painter Balthasar Klossow­ski, a.k.a. Balthus (1908-2001), to pair them, repeatedly, in portraits created over the course of two decades, beginning in the 1930s. These paintings are the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (running through Jan. 12) and of the accompanying catalog by the exhibition's curator, Sabine Rewald. Moody and ambiguous, Balthus's work is rarely cheerful, despite the omnipresence of cats with Cheshire grins. His girl models, draped over furniture or posed on the floor on all fours, "peer into mirrors, read or daydream" and "appear completely self-absorbed," Rewald writes, their postures conveying "sensuality and languor, sometimes ungainliness, . . . perfectly in keeping with the phenomenon of puberty" - and the comportment of cats. From boyhood, Balthus was a cat nut. A treat of the exhibition is "Mitsou: Forty Images," a tender and melancholy pencil-and-ink series he drew at age 11. Here are joy and mischief, frustration, worry and loss, as the young Balthus rescues a stray, tries to tame it (folly, that) and, despite his devotion, is eventually spurned. A Freudian would say that from this primal wound sprang Balthus's fixations and fetishes, and that evidence of this can be found in the decades of work that followed: the self-portrait of a rangy Balthus, "H. M. the King of Cats," a furry sidekick nuzzling against his leg; the ravishing sequence of his neighbor Thérèse Blanchard, 10 portraits in all, including one in which we glimpse the ingénue's white undergarments and a cat lapping milk from a dish, a "tongue-in-cheek erotic metaphor," Rewald writes; "Nude With a Cat," in which a woman "undulates" while stroking a "deliriously happy, smiling cat" - the animal in so many of these paintings a stand-in, Rewald posits, for Balthus himself. The artist, who in later life played coy regarding the intent behind his images, might protest. "I really don't understand why people see the paintings of girls as Lolitas," he said. Rewald dismisses such remarks as feigned bafflement. A great strength of Rewald's catalog is its informed (if brief) reading of Balthus's confrères in the portrayal of un-self-conscious eroticism: Balthus has claimed Poussin as a major influence; Rewald also finds "haunting prototypes" in paintings by Gericault, Courbet and Degas, and in one instance points out interesting echoes with Man Ray, Munier and a Pears" Soap advertisement. I could have used more of this, less of the heavy-breathing hype - after all, this is not Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn. A separate breed of genius. The Met exhibition promises "paintings and provocations" and, as you enter, warns that the art inside "may be disturbing." Anything to sell a few more tickets, I suppose, although I can't help wincing at the prim moralizing. The sensuality of Balthus's work is plain: How the viewer will or should react is anything but. Art provokes, period - and therein lies the thrill of looking. Thankfully, even the Met's youngest patrons seem to have seen through the pandering. On the day I visited the museum, a boy broke free of his mother's grasp outside the exhibit and scampered past a guard, who called out, "How old are you?" "I'm 11!" the boy whooped back. And I want to be provoked! Somewhere, Balthus - King of Cats - surely purred. At least one Balthusian heroine graces the pages of "The Big New Yorker Book of Cats": a girl with a "chopped black Cleopatra haircut and wise blue eyes" who, in a David Schickler short story from 2000, lures her antisocial English teacher to dinner with her family. This kitten, who chews her hair suggestively and derails class discussion (and her teacher's concentration) with disarming non sequiturs, appends curious, borderline-inappropriate notes to the ends of her papers and makes disconcerting late-night phone calls: Do you know what's happening to my ankle as we converse? "No," the unwitting teacher replies. John Stapleton is licking it. He likes to nibble my toes, too. John Stapleton being a cat, naturally. Jennifer B. McDonald is an editor at the Book Review.