r/CatsInArt

Suzanne Valadon had one of the more unusual biographies in French modern art. She was born Marie Clémentine Valadon, worked as a circus acrobat as a teenager, then became a model for artists such as Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec and Puvis de Chavannes.

Instead of staying on the model’s side of the studio, she watched, learned, and eventually became a serious painter herself. Degas admired her work and bought several of her early pieces. In 1894, she also became the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

Her private life was quite colorful as well. Erik Satie was so overwhelmed by their brief affair that he reportedly kept a small room almost like a shrine to her. Later she married André Utter, a painter more than twenty years younger, and with her son Maurice Utrillo they became known as the “infernal trio” of Montmartre.

Raminou was her own cat, and not a one time studio prop. There is something very funny about Valadon’s life being so dramatic and unconventional, while Raminou’s contribution to modern art was simply to sit on expensive fabric with the face of someone who has never paid rent and never intends to.

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6195304

Ekaterina Kachura-Falileeva belonged to the generation of Russian Empire artists whose lives were later reshaped by Revolution and emigration. She was born in Warsaw, studied in Odessa and St. Petersburg, worked as both a painter and a printmaker, and in 1924 left Soviet Russia with her husband, artist Vadim Falileev, for an exhibition in Stockholm. They never returned, later living in Berlin and Rome.

The painting is a Russian tea scene, with the samovar, fruit, embroidered cloth, bright shawl and garden arranged almost like a memory of domestic life. It is not just a decorative idyll. The woman, the beautiful white mother cat and her kitten are all looking beyond the painting, toward something we cannot see. Knowing the artist’s difficult life, and the old association of cats with intuition and foresight, it is hard not to read this shared gaze as a hint of premonition.

Peter de Sève is an American illustrator and character designer, trained at the Art Students League and Parsons School of Design. He is best known for his many New Yorker covers and for character design in animation, including Ice Age, Mulan, A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo. He has also received multiple awards, including an Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Design.

Animals seem to have been his natural subject from the beginning. As a child he kept a small menagerie of reptiles, amphibians, birds and little mammals, and as a teenager he worked in a pet shop. So a shop window full of cats, with one small black kitten quietly auditioning for a supernatural career, feels like the perfect use of his well earned animal expertise.

The Society of Illustrators described de Sève as an observer, craftsman and comedian, which is probably the right combination for this image. It is not just a witch finding a cat. It is a cat finding the one person in town who may finally appreciate his professional qualifications.

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5561267