The recently opened exhibition of works by Balthus (1908-2001) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, focusing on early paintings of girls, presents over thirty canvases from the first 25 years of the artist’s career – the most Balthus works under one roof here since the artist’s retrospective at the Met in 1984.

Sabine Rewald curated the Met’s exhibition thirty years ago and also organized this show, Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations. This narrowly focused exhibition was inspired by portraits of Thérèse, the artist’s young neighbor in Paris in the 1930s. The exhibit opens with a room of portraits of the child-muse, including two works owned by the Met, canvases, Rewald says, that convey “both the vulnerability and the willfulness of adolescence.”

Balthus’ own childhood was cultured. His father was an artist, art historian and set designer for Berlin’s Lessing Theater who socialized with Bonnard and Wilhelm Uhde. After separating from her husband, Balthus’ mother and Rainer Maria Rilke became lovers. Rilke supported young Balthus’ creativity, finding a publisher for “Mitsou,” a suite of 40 ink drawings about a stray cat made by the artist at just 11 years old. These drawings, thought to be lost, are on public display for the first time here.

“Portrait of Juliette Courbet,” 1844, a Courbet canvas in Paris’ Petit Palais and a work Balthus surely knew well, is the likely inspiration for “Thérèse,” 1938. Like the Courbet portrait, Balthus’ painting features a young girl reclining in a wooden armchair. In Balthus’ composition, Thérèse’s pose is architectural, the barefoot model’s legs and arms carefully folded into the picture plane, adding structure to the composition. And like Juliette, Thérèse wears a distant, haughty expression.

In “The Golden Days,” 1944, Balthus finds refuge from the war ravaging Europe in an interior scene that looks like a page from Wuthering Heights. Here the fireplace, tended by a young man with his back to the viewer, glows orange as a lanky girl wearing loose clothes rests on an olive green chaise. She stares at her reflection in a handheld mirror. And as if to illustrate Balthus’ escape from current events, the clock on the mantle has no arms to tell time. A still life of a white bowl on a table anchors the left side of the composition.

By spotlighting early paintings of prepubescent girls, sometimes in sexually suggestive poses, the Met’s exhibit has run the risk of propagating Balthus’ reputation as an artist with “a very serious Lolita problem,” to quote WNYC art critic Deborah Solomon. “I always thought his fascination with girls explains his career,” she adds.

A more thorough exhibition of Balthus’ oeuvre would demonstrate Solomon has it wrong. Balthus’ paintings of girls are part of a larger body of work that includes landscapes, portrait commissions, still lifes and male bathers. Moreover, Balthus’ early paintings are not lecherous depictions of children, but, rather, paintings of childhood. In the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Emily Brontë, a dreamy world of youthful drama is the subject here. Solomon’s criticism of Balthus doesn’t do his work justice.

Despite its focus on a controversial aspect of Balthus’ output, the superb paintings in this exhibition hold up. And by zeroing in on the early decades of his career, we see a young painter learning quickly. In the last gallery, featuring artworks made during the 1950s, the eroticized scenes are gone. By this point in his life Balthus’ paint handling — sometimes scumbled, sometimes encrusted, sometimes applied in thin washes — is expert. Closing the show with a room of ambitious compositions by an artist at the height of his powers leaves visitors wanting more.

Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations, on view through January 12, 2014 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 212-570-3951, www.metmuseum.org

More information about Xico Greenwald’s work can be found at xicogreenwald.com