This one I picked up for the cover. Cartoon style black cat curled up, title simply “Cat”. It’s an art book, over 200 pages of cats in painting, photograph, wood cut, and objects over time. Each page has an image and the museum description (although not always where the original currently lives). There’s almost a little bit of everything, from graffiti, to an Hermes scarf, to a Garfield strip (had to wait a while for that one) to Nyan-cat to Warhol and Doré to da Vinci to Louis Vitton to Picasso to a bunch of folks I’ve never heard of.
There’s no real organization principle, not linear by time, organized by type, just a bunch of cat things, which might actually not be a bad thing, since you can never quite predict what comes next, maybe a Chia pet, Grumpy Cat, or the original Le Chat Noir poster. The movie poster for Flow, a how to train your cat to use the toilet guide, and a couple of cat inspired articles of clothing (including one from the Met Gala that apparently took 6 months to hand-bead) are also options. Possibly one of my favorites is an ink on paper piece from 1978 by an artist called Ay-o titled “Yawn”. It is an image of a cat yawning but it is done in a rainbow color palette to get depth and motion, which is pretty cool. Then there’s the back cover which I nearly missed; a series of paw prints, suggesting a kitty might have been walking past.
The curator forward was more interesting than the celebrity one, but both were still good pitches, although preaching to choir a little. Not a bad way to spend about an hour and a half. Final fun fact: this book is almost indistinguishable in weight from my heaviest cat (a whopping not quite 8 pounds).
There are a few artifacts that I was kind of hoping to see and didn’t, but to be fair, choices probably did have to be made in what to keep and what to leave out.
