Cat’s footprint in art: which artists took their tailed pets as co-authors

On Cat Day, MK collected photographs of great masters with their pets

Friday, March 1st is Cat Day, and on this occasion let’s remember which artist loved mustachioed cats. And there are a great many cat lovers in the art community. Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Andy Warhol and many other masters not only loved to work while their pets purred, but also painted them on their canvases. Some cats even left their mark – literally – on their owners’ work because they roamed freely around the workshop.

Klimt and Katze

Gustav Klimt adored his cat and simply called him Katze (from German this is translated as “cat”). The pet constantly ran around the artist’s studio, leaving prints of the cat’s paws on the drawings and paintings. Although the Cat captured in the 1912 photo was not the only pet. Several cats lived in Klimt’s workshop. They loved to lie down in paintings and drawings, so in the master’s works you can find not only paw marks, but also lint of fur. True, Klimt did not paint his cats often, but the artist’s fans remade his famous “Kiss” so that a furry pet appeared in the picture.

Matisse and the Flea

Henri Matisse had three cats – Minouche, Coussy and Blocha. He loved to work under their purring. Many photographs of the French painter with cats have been preserved. The master depicted one of them on the lap of his daughter Margarita in the work “Girl with a Black Cat” (1910).

Dali and Babu

Salvador Dali was shocking in everything, so he got himself not just a cat, but a dwarf leopard – the ocelot Baba. The artist, however, claimed that he received the animal as a gift from the head of state of Colombia. In the 1960s, Baba accompanied Dali on all his trips. He also took the ocelot to restaurants, surprising and frightening visitors with the giant cat. During one of these outings with Babu, whom Dali led on a collar, a woman was so impressed that she fainted. Another time, an ocelot escaped from a luxury hotel room in Paris and scared all the guests. “Everyone ran away in a panic, like rats, in search of some kind of shelter,” the artist’s friend, actor Carl Lozano, recalled in his memoirs.

Picasso and Minou

Pablo Picasso kept a cat named Mina. Well, as he held, rather, she lived freely near the genius, walking on her own, from time to time sitting in the artist’s arms. It was Mina that Picasso depicted catching a bird in 1939, just a few months before the war broke out. The drawing has become symbolic and common. The artist himself said: “I can’t stand purebred cats that purr on the pillow in the living room. I like feral cats that hunt birds, rush through the streets like crazy, dragging everything they can get their hands on. They look at you with wild eyes and at any moment they will grab your face. Have you noticed that cats living in the wild are almost always potbellied? This is quite natural: after all, they only think about love.”

Warhol and Sam

Andy Warhol was a real cat person. In the 1950s, when the artist was still earning money from book illustrations, he got a blue cat, Hester. Then my mother came to visit New York from Pittsburgh, and with her a Siamese cat named Sam appeared in the house. As a result, Warhol had several dozen cats and cats, and he called them all the same – Sam. In 1954, he created the series “25 Cats Named Sam and One Blue Cat.” The watercolor drawings were made by Andy, and the comments on them were made by his mother.

Kandinsky and Vaska

The favorite of the artist Wassily Kandinsky was his mother-in-law. True, he rarely drew Vaska the cat, but he was very attached to him. Much later, thanks to this gentle photograph, a whole direction in painting appeared – Kandinsky cat – with images of Vasily in the style of Kandinsky.

Frida and Frida

Frida Kahlo kept various animals in her “blue house”. She loved everyone very much. She had a monkey, several Chinese Crested dogs, turkeys, pigeons and parrots. Cats too, of course. There are several self-portraits with cats.

Among them, the most poignant one is with a black cat. She is, of course, a symbol here. The second “I” of Frida herself.