Sunday, August 3, 2014

Cats in Art: Self-Portrait With a Cat (Foujita)

From my continuing weekly Sunday series of cats in art. I'm using some ideas from the coffee table book, The Cat in Art, by Stefano Zuffi.  This is the fifth in a series of posts of the cat art of Leonard Foujita.


Image crediit Wikiart, here.


Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Self-Portrait With a Cat, 1928, media and size unspecified, held in a private collection.

Having just watched the kid movie Puss in Boots--again!--with Mister Tristan (the 6 year old human being, not the blog), I can unequivocally state, as does Puss in the film, that if the cat in Foujita's picture could talk, it'd say "I'm just a bad kitty."

Just look at those cat eyes!  And one can imagine that moments after this image was captured, the kitty was gonna take a swipe at his daddy's paintbrush.  I mean, the cat just could not do it.  Too bad that laser pointers would not be available as a consumer item till near the end of the century: Foujita would have a had a great time with one.  And so would have the kitties.

So, I find it interesting that Foujita identifies so much with cats that he uses one in a self-portrait.  And once again, as we have seen over the past several weeks, we see the genius of Foujita at masterfully capturing the essence of catness.


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