Now here's a book for the committed cataholics in your life! Our whimsical new visual survey Cat celebrates humanity’s enduring connection to our feline friends, taking readers on a journey to discover the endless ways the house cat has inspired artists and image-makers across continents and cultures.
As the incomparable cat photographer Walter Chandoha, who took over 90,000 pictures of felines during his career, once declared, “The artistic possibilities of cats seem endless!"
As one of our oldest animal companions, cats have been adored and represented by humans for millennia. In the US alone, nearly 50 million households today boast cats as pets, and these much loved moggies have a long visual history that stretches well beyond their favorite corner of the sofa or inside an empty Amazon box, all the way from ancient Egypt, in fact, up to today in art and popular culture.
For our new book, we narrowed a literally limitless choice down to 211 spectacular images, selected in collaboration with an international panel of experts that includes curators, cat behaviorists, artists, and even the founding director of New York’s Cat Museum.
The works in Cat are each accompanied by an accessible text and illustrate a diverse, global selection of felines that span multiple mediums—from Japanese maneki-neko lucky cats to Disney’s The Aristocats, ancient mosaics to contemporary couture, and artists’ pets to Chia Pets.
Cat features a diverse range of artists known for their depictions of cats alongside inclusions, from Henri Matisse to Tracey Emin, Louis Wain to Yoshitomo Nara, Walt Disney to Grace Coddington, as well as iconic characters from popular culture, such as Grumpy Cat, Garfield, Felix the Cat, and more.
The illustrations are artfully arranged to reveal intriguing juxtapositions. For instance, a giant graffitied feline in Brussels smiles across the page at a contemporary painting of a cat named Clementine by the artist Hilary Pecis. Meanwhile, Dr. Seuss’s mischievous Cat in the Hat sits next to a charismatic photo of a tabby wearing an altogether different kind of headpiece, dressed as the Valkyrie Brünnhilde.
Balancing style with substance, the book opens with a foreword by New York Times bestselling author and renowned kitten rescuer Hannah Shaw aka Kitten Lady, while an introduction by Leïla Jarbouai, a curator at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, traces humanity’s relationship with cats through the lens of visual culture.
The book features an elegantly graphic cover of a curled-up black cat, which, when you flip it over, reveals paw prints traipsing up the back cover. Take a closer look at Cat here.
