Are you a cat person or a dog person? Well, you can be both! Is it the independent nature of cats and the independence of artists that make this obsession so perfect? Perhaps, but take a look at the following artists and their cats.
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol lived with several dozen cats (a colony of 25 cats) and his mother in an apartment in New York while he worked on hand-colored lithographs named 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy.
Pablo Picasso
Painter, sculptor, printmaker, draftsman… cat man!
Picasso was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. The total number of artworks he produced has been estimated at 50,000, comprising 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics, roughly 12,000 drawings, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs. He was especially fond of his cat pets!
Henri Matisse
Initially trained as a lawyer, Matisse developed an interest in art only at age twenty-one.
He became known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.
Paul Klee
Paul Klee’s was a Swiss born painter, with a unique style that was influenced by expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and orientalism.
He would spend hours wandering between the easels in his studio, adding paint here, dabbing watercolour there, coaxing new worlds from flat canvasses. By the time he died in 1940 aged 60, Klee had created nearly 10,000 artworks, mostly paintings, drawings and some puppets. A restless innovator, he spent a lifetime experimenting with new techniques, tools and materials.
Balthus
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist. His love of cats is taken to a whole new level. He fell for both art and cats at an early age. At 11, devastated by the disappearance of a stray he’d taken in, he produced 40 memorial ink drawings, each five inches square and done in a forceful black-and-white reminiscent of woodcuts of German expressionists.
