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That is the subject of Balthus’s 1933 painting, “The Street,” which has inspired the artist Peter Doig to organize an exhibition by that name at Gagosian, one that is as tantalizing and enigmatic as its modernist centerpiece.

Balthus — the name adopted by Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, a Polish-French artist whose life spanned almost the entire 20th century — considered “The Street” to be his first major painting.

A show that started with pictures might make you come to wonder — following the pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin — why Picasso’s paintings of women are generally lacking in desire, quite unlike the pervy paintings of Balthus, Picabia and other cancelable midcentury gents.

Gendel’s descriptions can be, appropriately, almost photographic: The painter Balthus, he writes, “is like a lizard with a high IQ. Deliberate movements of the head. Quick eye. From the lizard comes slow deliberate speech, which gives even banalities a certain weight or at least measure.”

“The Paris Diary” covers his stay there and is filled with famous names of people he met — Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, Balthus, Salvador Dali, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Man Ray, and James Baldwin.