When I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past weekend, I was shocked to see a painting that depicts a young girl in a sexually suggestive pose. Balthus' painting, Thérèse Dreaming, is an evocative portrait of a prepubescent girl relaxing on a chair with her legs up and underwear exposed. 
 
 It is disturbing that the Met would proudly display such an image. They are a renowned institution and one of the largest, most respected art museums in the United States. The artist of this painting, Balthus, had a noted infatuation with pubescent girls, and it can be strongly argued that this painting romanticizes the sexualization of a child. 
 
 In 2013, the Met hosted the exhibit "Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations," which included more of Balthus' overtly pedophilic work. As the Guardian wrote: "The Met, not imprudently, has put a plaque at the start of the show that reads: "Some of the paintings in this exhibition may be disturbing to some visitors." If The Met had the wherewithal to reference the disturbing nature of Balthus for this exhibit, they understand the implications of displaying his art as a part of their permanent collection. 
 
 Given the current climate around sexual assault and allegations that become more public each day, in showcasing this work for the masses without providing any type of clarification, The Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children. 
 
 
 
 
 
 I am not asking for this painting to be censored, destroyed or never seen again. I am asking The Met to seriously consider the implications of hanging particular pieces of art on their walls, and to be more conscientious in how they contextualize those pieces to the masses. This can be accomplished by either removing the piece from that particular gallery, or providing more context in the painting's description. For example, a line as brief as, "some viewers find this piece offensive or disturbing, given Balthus' artistic infatuation with young girls." 
 
 Ultimately, this is a small ask considering how expansive the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection is (they can easily hang up another painting), how overtly sexual the painting is (the Met's description of the piece provides no background on Balthus or his reputation), and the current news headlines highlighting a macro issue about the safety and wellbeing of women of all ages. 
 
 
 
 Please sign this petition if you agree that the Met needs to reconsider the way it is displaying Balthus' suggestive, Thérèse Dreaming. I will be sending a letter to the museum alongside these signatures. ||||| New Yorkers launched a petition demanding that the Metropolitan Museum of Art remove a 1938 painting of a young woman with her underwear exposed due to the “current climate around sexual assault” — but the Met refused Sunday. 
 
 The piece, “Thérèse Dreaming” by the French artist Balthus, “sexualizes” the girl by depicting her lounging in a skirt with her knee up on a chair, according to the petition, which was posted on the website Care 2. 
 
 “The artist of this painting, Balthus, had a noted infatuation with pubescent girls and this painting is undeniably romanticizing the sexualization of a child,” writes Mia Merrill, 30, a New York City entrepreneur who started the petition. 
 
 “Given the current climate around sexual assault … The Met is romanticizing voyeurism and the objectification of children.” 
 
 It proclaims, “The [Met is] a renowned institution and one of the largest, most respected art museums in the United States. 
 
 “I am simply asking The Met to more carefully vet the art on its walls, and understand what this painting insinuates. 
 
 “Ultimately, it’s a small ask in consideration of how expansive their art collection is … how overtly sexual the painting is, and the current news headlines highlighting a macro issue about the public health and safety of women.” 
 
 The petition, which launched Friday, had raked in nearly 7,000 signatures by Sunday evening. 
 
 But a rep for the museum said it won’t remove the painting because art is meant to reflect many time periods — not just the current one. 
 
 “[Our] mission is to collect, study, conserve, and present significant works of art across all times and cultures in order to connect people to creativity, knowledge, and ideas,” said spokesman Kenneth Weine. 
 
 “Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present.” 
 
 In 2013, the Met held an exhibition of Balthus paintings titled, “Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations.” 
 
 When the erotic realist died in 2001, the lead singer of U2, Bono, sang at his funeral. The president of France and supermodel Elle Macpherson also attended the funeral. ||||| Art Bizarre Balthus show reveals artist's fixation with cats and young girls 3 / 5 stars More character study than retrospective, the Met's provocative new Balthus exhibition has an unsettling undertone 
 
 • Click here for more images from the Balthus show More character study than retrospective, the Met's provocative new Balthus exhibition has an unsettling undertone Thérèse Dreaming by Balthus, 1938. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 © Balthus 
 
 If current trends continue, in just a few years all of contemporary culture will be nothing but an unending stream of cat pictures. Newspapers desperate to survive will publish only adorable kitten photos; social networks will strain under the weight of shorthairs and Siamese. The art world is already getting in on the act: witness the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis hosting an internet cat video festival (it drew 10,000 viewers in one day), or White Columns, the avant-garde New York gallery, laying on The Cat Show, featuring "purr-formers in residence". The Brooklyn Museum recently rehung its august Egyptian collection in a display called "Divine Felines." 
 
 I wonder whether the Metropolitan Museum of Art had our contemporary cat mania in mind when it scheduled its smart, strange exhibition of the Polish-French painter Balthus – a figurative master in an age of abstraction, and one of the creepiest figures of modern art. You may know him as an anti-modernist with a taste for young girls. His love of cats, however, receives less attention, and in this cat-saturated moment that love might become the dominant one. 
 
 The first painting, on loan from Switzerland, is a remarkable, full-length self-portrait done at the age of 27. Balthus is wearing high-waisted yellow trousers and an abbreviated necktie, stepping forward seductively with his left foot while an obese tabby nuzzles his right. On the floor, a stone tablet bears an inscription in English: "A portrait of HM the King of Cats." He earned the title. In one almost psychedelic work, from 1949, a grinning feline of human proportions sits at a seaside cafe table; a school of fish jumps from the sea on to the cat's plate, trailing behind it a glorious rainbow. In another artist's hands this might feel tasteless. From Balthus, this is par for the course. 
 
 Cat's whiskers … Detail from Balthus's 1935 self-portrait, The King of Cats (1935). Photograph: Fondation Balthus, Switzerland © Balthus 
 
 Balthus, born Balthasar Klossowski on 29 February 1908, fell for both art and cats at an early age. At 11, devastated by the disappearance of a stray he'd taken in, the young artist produced 40 memorial ink drawings, each five inches square and done in a forceful black-and-white that recalls the woodcuts of German expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. In the first drawing, the preteen Balthus, wearing shorts, finds the cat, Mitsou, on a park bench. Soon they're snuggling together in bed, walking through the streets (Mitsou prances on a leash), sitting by the Christmas tree. In the final scene Mitsou is gone and the boy is left alone in his bedroom, sobbing uncontrollably. 
 
 Drawing the line … the final ink drawing in Balthus's Mitsou series (1919, black ink on paper, 6 x 4 3/4 in). Photograph: Private collection © Balthus 
 
 The Mitsou drawings made it into print in 1921 with a preface by Rainer Maria Rilke, a friend of the Klossowski family and, by the way, one of the lovers of Balthus's mother. Confident, musical, sweet and grim by turns, these drawings – the originals are being shown publicly for the first time, and they're the best reason to see the show – are much more than Balthus juvenilia. They're the pistol shot that began one of the most mystifying, frustrating careers in 20th-century art. 
 
 He stood at the core of mid-century European culture, a mate of Picasso and Lacan, but despised much of what we now think of as the greatest achievements of modernism. (His brother Pierre Klossowski, subject of a fantastic show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2006, was the more progressive figure.) He was a vile anti-semite, despite his own possible Jewish ancestry. Born into something like genteel poverty, he later styled himself as a count and told Alberto Giacometti that he "needed a château more than a workman needed a loaf of bread". 
 
 Recipe for concern … The Cat of La Méditerranée by Balthus (1949). Photograph: Private collection © Balthus 
 
 And, oh, he also had an inordinate fixation on girls who'd just hit puberty. "Little girls are the only creatures today who can be little Poussins," Balthus said late in life, and this show counterposes images of sly, knowing cats with ones of ostensibly innocent children. The Met, not imprudently, has put a plaque at the start of the show that reads: "Some of the paintings in this exhibition may be disturbing to some visitors." Only some visitors? They should disturb us all. 
 
 Thérèse Blanchard, his first muse (if you can use that word for a child), is shown reclining on a divan with her skirt hiked up, panties clinging to her inner thighs, while a cat sups milk from a saucer. Thérèse is depicted a second time, in bobby socks, splayed out on a bench and losing her balance. One girl is reading a book on the floor, her bottom hiked in the air; another lounges like an odalisque, gazing into a mirror while her bare leg dangles off a settee. 
 
 The girls are self-possessed and serious, and Balthus always denied any hint of paedophilia. But get real: these are erotic images of children. Some, especially the Thérèse portraits, show real invention and even a little humour that make them difficult to dismiss outright. Others, especially the mannered domestic scenes of his later career, are barely competent acts of voyeurism. Their inclusion here displays a welcome willingness on the part of the curator, Balthus specialist Sabine Rewald, to present the artist in full. 
 
 More a character study than a real retrospective, this show leaves out many of Balthus's most famous paintings to concentrate on two obsessions that end up rolling into one. Cats may seem anodyne fun to the legions of reblogging obsessives driving today's digital feline explosion. In Balthus's world, though, cats have a much more chilling flipside, and they stay with you long after the latest meme has faded. ||||| The superb Polish-French painter Balthus—an anti-modernist beloved of modernists, including Picasso—charms the eye and rattles thought. For more than six decades, until his death, in 2001, at the age of ninety-two, Balthus depicted young girls in gamy poses, attributing any perceived eroticism to viewers with unclean minds. His other perennial subject was the cat, his totem animal. A fat feline nuzzles his leg in a self-portrait made when he was twenty-seven; the artist cuts an imperiously Romantic figure and dubs himself, in an inscription in English, “The King of Cats.” It is the first painting in “Cats and Girls,” a focussed retrospective, finely curated by Sabine Rewald, at the Metropolitan Museum. Then come girls, by the dozen, often with cats in attendance. Was Balthus a pedophile? His interest, if not lust, didn’t stir before his subjects’ pubescence, but it waned in their late teens. The show occurs at a cultural moment that is stretched between sexualizing the young and reacting with horror and anger to the lately abundant cases of their sexual exploitation. If you can shrug off that tension at the Met, I salute your detachment. I sure can’t. Balthus puts me in two minds, attracted and repelled, in search of a third. He strains the moral impunity of high art to an elemental limit, assuring himself an august, unquiet immortality. 
 
 He was born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908 in Paris. He added “de Rola” to his name, fancifully claiming noble birth; he was given to pretension all his life. He had a remarkably enriched childhood: his father, an art historian, and his mother, a painter who went by the name Baladine, hobnobbed with the literary and artistic élites. In his teens, he was mentored by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a family friend and a lover of Baladine’s, while his older brother, Pierre, became André Gide’s secretary. (Pierre went on to be a cult hero of French intellectuals as a devoutly obscene philosopher, novelist, graphic artist, and exegete of the Marquis de Sade.) When Balthasar was eleven, his adored pet cat, Mitsou, ran away. He made forty ink drawings detailing his memories of the animal and his fruitless search for her. In the last, he stands alone, crying. Displayed at the Met, for the first time anywhere, the suite is fantastically talented—the most precocious art I believe I’ve ever seen, with boldly rhythmic compositions like those in German Expressionist woodcuts and uncanny affinities to Matisse. Rilke arranged for the publication, in 1921, of a handsome book of the Mitsou images, for which he wrote the preface. The artist was identified by his nickname, Baltusz. Imagine being thirteen years old and bathed in such glory. A year later, Balthus wrote in a letter, “God knows how happy I would be if I could remain a child forever.” 
 
 Balthus was a largely self-taught artist, who learned what he needed from copying paintings and frescoes in Italy, especially those of Piero della Francesca. Besides the loftily serene Piero, his other major influence was the guttural messiah of realism, Gustave Courbet. That improbable pairing registers throughout Balthus’s work as classical elevation infused with sensual vigor. The style doesn’t feel conservative; it feels outside historical time. You’re always off balance with it, sometimes as if you were being subjected at once to a high-church orison and a dirty joke. Balthus learned to soft-pedal the latter quality after his first gallery show, in Paris, in 1934. Craving attention, he got all too much of it with “The Guitar Lesson”—a painting not in the Met show—in which a bare-breasted woman holds a schoolgirl, naked from the waist down, across her lap and strums the girl’s genitals. (In one study, the guitarist is male.) Strangely, Balthus was unprepared for the outraged critical response. Meanwhile, Antoinette de Watteville, a girl from a socially prominent Swiss family whom he had desperately wooed for four years, told him that she was engaged to a diplomat and to stop writing her. He attempted suicide with laudanum; his friend Antonin Artaud found him in time. He resumed painting only gradually, with commissioned portraits that bored him. 
 
 Then, in 1936, Balthus met Thérèse Blanchard, the eleven-year-old daughter of a restaurant worker. During the next three years, he made ten paintings of her, which are his finest work. They capture moods of adolescent girlhood—dreaming, restless, sulky—as only adolescent girls may authoritatively understand. (I’ve checked with veterans of the condition.) In two of the best, a short-skirted Thérèse raises her leg, exposing tight underpants. We needn’t reflect on the fact that an adult man directed the poses, any more than we must wonder about the empathic author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” But there it is. Balthus claimed a quality of sacredness for his “angels,” as he termed his models. That comes through. Yet, looking at the paintings, I kept thinking of a line by Oscar Wilde: “A bad man is the sort of man who admires innocence.” It’s an odd relief of uncertainty, if nothing else, to learn that Balthus’s later relationship with his teen-age model Laurence Bataille, a daughter of the writer Georges, was frankly carnal. The painting “The Week of Four Thursdays” (1949), in which a loosely robed Laurence reclines in abandon and plays with a smiling cat, commemorates days when school was out and she came to pose. She grew up to become a psychoanalyst, like her stepfather, Jacques Lacan. 
 
 In 1937, Antoinette de Watteville, having shed her diplomat, gave in and married Balthus. They had two sons. In the one painting of her in the Met show, “Girl in Green and Red” (1944), she looks half her age of thirty-two. Wearing a vaguely harlequin costume, she sits at a table, grasping a candlestick next to a loaf of bread with a knife thrust deep into it. The picture marks one of Balthus’s closest approaches to Surrealism, a movement whose leaders admired and courted him. He rebuffed them, but the equivocal sexuality of his art anchors it in a time, defined by Surrealism, of avant-garde evangelism for an anti-bourgeois, liberated libido. His reticence, in a classicizing style tremulous with carefully observed light, preserves his power to provoke, while the would-be-shocking sallies of, say, Max Ernst have become period curios. Eroticism fades in Balthus’s later work, with simplified figures and rather dull, tortuously worked surfaces of matte pigment, archly evoking Renaissance frescoes. His pretentiousness survived his passion. ||||| Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Jen George revisits Balthus’s painting Thérèse Dreaming. 
 
 In Balthus’s painting Thérèse Dreaming, a young girl sits, face turned to profile, arms up, elbows out, hands rested on her head, legs a little open, underwear visible—a sort of clothed, daydreaming, preteen odalisque. She is at home in her youth. She has the countenance of someone who knows other things are coming, eventually. Maybe she knows what, though she probably doesn’t. Not like she needs to—experience comes from being alone in the world, and with time. When asked about the provocative poses of preadolescent girls in his work, Balthus said, “It is how they (young girls) sit.” 
 
 When I first saw Thérèse Dreaming, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stopped to sit. Maybe I’d been tired. I had been traveling cross-country with a counterfeit sixty-day Greyhound Ameripass—it allowed for unlimited bus travel within the U.S—and I had been smoking heavily and maybe not sleeping at all. I couldn’t stay all day in the Brooklyn apartment where I’d been sleeping, so most days I went to the Met, looking at art, spacing out, reading, sometimes staring at blank walls. It was inviting, the room and the painting. Thérèse’s skirt was like mine. My hair was longer. I liked her shoes. I liked that she was both in this room and not; she was dreaming, but I couldn’t see where she’d gone. 
 
 I spent my days at the Met mostly trying to forget that I was hungry and without money. I wasn’t dressed properly for late fall in New York. I wrote letters I didn’t send to an older man, an artist back in California. He’d tried to draw me once, late at night, but I couldn’t sit still because I didn’t know how. In the drawing, he’d rendered my face too young, somewhat elfish. He’d titled the drawing The Model Who Kept Moving. “I don’t look like that,” I’d said. “You don’t know what you look like,” he told me. 
 
 A week into my visit, walking south along Fifth Avenue after the museum had closed, I met an older man who was also walking. He asked me why I walked so fast. 
 
 “Where is your coat?” 
 
 He told me about New York, what the best places were, why the city itself was superior. “It is different and better if you have money. I can show you the other side.” 
 
 The letters to the artist in California were brief, hopeful notes, written with a vague intention that if sent, the artist would think of me. Maybe we could see each other in the daytime, I’d written. 
 
 “You should learn how to wear makeup,” the man on Fifth Avenue said as we neared Fifty-Ninth Street. He took me to get my makeup done at Bergdorf Goodman. We didn’t look at coats. At the beauty counters, wealthy women asked for creams, serums, masks, and lipsticks by name. I was made up heavily with blush. 
 
 At the rooftop bar at the Peninsula Hotel later, there were heat lamps. I asked for whiskey, but he ordered us martinis. 
 
 “You could be anybody,” he said. “The hotel owner’s daughter, for instance.” 
 
 I was young enough, or feeling the alcohol enough, to believe that I could be anybody, that a way to get through life was to believe that you’re a certain type of anybody whom things belong to, are for. I ate all the free nuts. People looked at us, probably because I was looking at them. Or maybe they were looking at my heavy blush. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to eat the nuts. 
 
 Later in the hotel elevator, he put his hand on my neck. 
 
 “Do you always go where strange men tell you to go?” 
 
 “No,” I shrugged. 
 
 “They might want to harm you. Maybe I want to harm you.” 
 
 “Well, do you?” 
 
 “Maybe.” 
 
 I told him a friend was waiting for me. He wrote his number in the journal with the letters. 
 
 A few days before I left New York, I took a friend to the museum to look at the painting. 
 
 “Does she remind you of anyone?” I asked him. 
 
 “No,” he said. His failure to recognize a similarity between the painting’s subject and myself created a sudden distance between Thérèse and me. I’d spent so much time with her, more than with any one person in the last month, that I had almost considered her the type of close friend that girls have in youth, when they want to look the same and dress the same and think the same, and often do. 
 
 I went back to the museum alone the day I was to leave from the Forty-Second Street bus terminal, trying to convince myself that I did look like Thérèse, that we had some quality in common. The gallery was empty. I sat looking at her, studying her face, trying to remember the ways we were the same. Thérèse didn’t reassure me, she didn’t acknowledge anything. She sat still in her pose, eyes closed, face turned away, her profile and underwear catching the light. 
 
 I was about six years older than Thérèse is said to be, but Thérèse Dreaming would be the image, the place, that stayed with me when I traveled west across frozen highways, on a series of busses, stopping at Greyhound terminals and gas-station food courts, sleeping next to older women and accidentally resting my head against their shoulders as they farted all night and played scratchers and talked to me about their families. I remember they all told me how young I was, asked me what in the hell I was doing. “I wanted to be alone,” I said. “I wanted to be left alone for a little while.” 
 
 Jen George lives and works in New York City. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, n+1, The White Review, BOMB, and The Brooklyn Rail. The Babysitter at Rest, published this month by the Dorothy Project, is her first book. ||||| Washington, D. C. Museum of Modern Art Gallery. "Paris Painters of Today," January 31–February 26, 1939, no catalogue. New York. Pierre Matisse Gallery. "Balthus: Paintings and Drawings," March 17–April 8, 1939, no. 2 (as "Jeune fille endormie"). New York. Pierre Matisse Gallery. "Figure Pieces in Modern Painting," January 20–February 14, 1942, no. 1 (as "The Dream"). New York. Pierre Matisse Gallery. "Balthus," March 15–April 3, 1949, no. 16 (as "Le Rêve"). New York. Museum of Modern Art. "Balthus," December 19, 1956–February 3, 1957, no. 10 (as "The Dream [Le Rêve]," lent by The Reverend James L. McLane, Los Angeles). Cambridge. New Gallery, Hayden Library, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Balthus," February 10–March 2, 1964, no. 10 (as "Le Reve," lent by Mrs. James L. McLane, Los Angeles). Pasadena Art Museum. "A View of the Century," November 24–December 19, 1964, no. 29 (as "The Dream," lent by Mr. and Mrs. Louis McLane). Cleveland Museum of Art. "Fifty Years of Modern Art, 1916–1966," June 14–July 31, 1966, no. 70 (as "Le Rêve," lent by Louis McLane). London. Tate Gallery. "Balthus," October 4–November 10, 1968, no. 12 (as "The Dream [Thérèse and Her Cat]," lent by Mr. Louis McLane, California). Marseilles. Musée Cantini. "Balthus," July–September 1973, no. 5 (as "Thérèse revant," lent by a private collection, U.S.A.). Paris. Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne. "Balthus," November 5, 1983–January 23, 1984, no. 14 (lent by a private collection). New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Balthus," February 29–May 13, 1984, no. 19 (lent by a private collection). New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Twentieth-Century Modern Masters: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection," December 12, 1989–April 1, 1990, unnumbered cat. (p. 203). London. Royal Academy of Arts. "Twentieth-Century Modern Masters: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection," April 19–July 15, 1990, unnumbered cat. Mexico City. Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo. "La Colección de Pintura Mexicana de Jacques y Natasha Gelman," June 23–October 11, 1992, not in catalogue. Martigny. Fondation Pierre Gianadda. "De Matisse à Picasso: Collection Jacques et Natasha Gelman," June 18–November 1, 1994, unnumbered cat. (p. 227). New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Painters in Paris: 1895–1950," March 8–December 31, 2000, extended to January 14, 2001, unnumbered cat. (p. 111). New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Balthus Remembered," March 27–May 27, 2001, no catalogue. Cologne. Museum Ludwig. "Balthus: Aufgehobene Zeit. Gemälde and Zeichnungen 1932–1960 / Balthus: Time Suspended. Paintings and Drawings 1932–1960," August 18–November 4, 2007, no. 13. Martigny. Fondation Pierre Gianadda. "Balthus: 100e anniversaire," June 16–November 23, 2008, no. 43. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations," September 25, 2013–January 12, 2014, no. 9. Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. "Rétrospective Balthus," April 19–June 22, 2014, no. 21. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. "Balthus," July 5–September 7, 2014, no. 21. 
 
 References
– As one New York City institution wrestles with high-profile molestation accusations, another finds itself the target of outcry over the "sexualization" of a young girl—in a painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art says it will not take down the 1938 painting "Thérèse Dreaming" by the French artist Balthus, though 7,000 people have asked that it do so via the petition site care2. The petition started by Mia Merrill describes the work as "an evocative portrait of a prepubescent girl relaxing on a chair with her legs up and underwear exposed," and calls it "disturbing" that the museum would knowingly display such a sexualized image in our "current climate." As for the knowingly part, she notes that the Met paired a 2013 exhibit of Balthus' work with a sign explaining some of the pieces could be "disturbing" to viewers. A 2013 Guardian article indicates "Thérèse Dreaming" was part of that exhibit. Merrill writes that "if the Met had the wherewithal to reference the disturbing nature of Balthus, they understand the implications of displaying his art." The New York Post reports the museum on Sunday said the painting would remain hanging, with a rep saying, "Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation." The museum's description of the piece notes that Thérèse Blanchard, Balthus' neighbor in Paris, was 12 or 13 when she was painted. The Paris Review reports the late Balthus was asked about the "provocative poses" he painted young girls in, and replied, "It is how they sit." In his review of the 2013 exhibition for the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl had this to say: "I kept thinking of a line by Oscar Wilde: 'A bad man is the sort of man who admires innocence.'" (A US couple has been forced to give up their $1.75 million painting.)