Balthus (1908-2001) was 26 years old when he had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1934, which would earn him the reputation of an outsider with at least questionable tendencies for the rest of his long life. Among the five paintings exhibited were - in addition to La Rue, La Toilette de Cathy, La Fen tre, and the young girl nude Alice - also the painting La Leçon de Guitare, created in the same year, whose aggressive sensuality and explicit eroticism continued to provoke scandals for years. The morally less sensitive Surrealists, led by André Breton, found the young Balthus of 1934, who liked to present himself as an intellectual dandy, to be too individualistic, his painting too "Old Masterly," and above all, too figurative. In retrospect, this first exhibition proves to be not only representative of Balthus' entire body of work.