While I haven't been a regular participant in the cat diaries here, I have always had a great fondness for cats. In that great war of cat people vs dog people, I am definitely on the cat side. I have been spending time exploring the considerable resources about art history that are available on the internet. The world's museums and private collections are now available on your desktop. One side issue I got interested in is the place of cats in western art and have been doing some exploring about it. I thought that among the cat lovers on Daily Kos there might be some who are interested in this topic.
As settled human human societies began to develop with managed agriculture the mice were quick to discover the abundance of supplies of stored grain and cats discovered a nice steady supply of mice. Humans managed to figure out the advantage of this arrangement. The ancient Egyptians seemed particularly appreciative of their company and used them as religious symbols and created various works of art in which they figure prominently.
Somewhere in the middle ages there was a falling out between cats and Christian superstition. They were often thought to be associated with witches and the devil. That mythology is still reflected in many of the images associated with the celebration of the medieval observance of Halloween. The Christians would have been much better off if they had been nicer to the cats. When the black plague came along they could have killed the rats that were spreading it. From the renascence onward cats generally get fairly short shift in art works. Dogs get a lot of bit parts in hunting scenes and scarfing up table scraps on the floor of the castle dinning hall. What set me off on this topic was discovering a painter who was a clear exception to this unfortunate historical trend.
Pierre Bonnard was a French post-impressionist painter. Cats appear over and over in his works. He was clearly a man who liked cats. The impressionists set the art world in a fury by beginning to break from the tradition of painting in a way to look as much like an exact reflection of observed reality. The post-impressionists were taking that a few steps further down the line. They began to alter the shape of images and to use colors for their emotional impact rather than exact representation. Bonnard used this approach to great effect in dealing with cats. His images give me a very strong sense of the arrogance and curiosity that I have always attributed to them.
The White Cat, 1894
I ask you, does this not look like a cat that is not going to take shit off anybody?
Woman With Cat, 1912
Someone or something is being subject to intense scrutiny.
Bonnard painted a number of other pictures with cats in them. Here's a Pinterest blog that has done a good job of collecting them. The two above strike me as being the best at grasping the essence of cat.
In my searching around for more cat art I discovered something interesting. With the dawn of the 21st C and the arrival of PhotoShop cat lovers are rising up and fighting back against the grave injustice that has been done to cats over the centuries. They are recreating famous paintings and giving cats the place that is theirs by right.
Some of them take a fairly subtle approach as with this observer added to Cezanne's The Card Players.
However, others have decided that cats should replace homo sapiens as the main subject of the picture. Here are a few examples.
Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (revised)
Here's the real story of Delacroix's well known celebration of the French revolution.
And finally,
Whistler's Mother
This feline revisionist movement is becoming rather ubiquitous on the internet. It can be found on Tumblr and Pinterest which are great places for finding all sorts of images. I found two blogs that are exclusively devoted to it.
Historical Paintings Made Better with Fat Cats
Artodyssey
The possibilities are really quite endless. I hope that some of you have enjoyed this little excursion into art history.