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Accro-chat-ge

From May 23rd to September 10th, 2023 -

Musée d'Orsay

Cabinet d'arts graphiques
Salle 41, niveau 5

Cats have been represented in art for as long as art has existed. In the 19th century, their importance is without equal. This exhibition, running from May 23 to September 10, 2023, brings together Édouard Manet, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen and the contemporary artist Françoise Pétrovitch, with the presentation of a notebook of unprecedented drawings.

Following Paradis de Montcrif who published Les Chats in 1727, the art critic Champfleury devoted a book to small felines in 1868-69, Les Chats: histoire, mœurs, anecdotes. The book, illustrated with engraved drawings by Delacroix, Manet, Mérimée and Hokusai, was a great success. At the end of the century, the black cat gave its name and silhouette to the famous cabaret founded by Rodolphe Salis at the foot of Montmartre in 1881. It was no doubt named in tribute to the short story The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe and to its translator Charles Baudelaire, a champion of cats. It was also a reference to Paris, where stray and meowing felines abounded, especially at night. Intermediary between nature and culture, cats brings together opposites: wild and domestic, independent and cuddly, predator and gentle, they have real, symbolic and aesthetic qualities that capture the attention of illustrators. With their predilection for sleep, they offer the artist an immobile and accessible model. Their curved, aesthetic and linear beauty inspires the artistic gesture.

Accro-chat-ge (more)

Manet is the author of probably the most famous cat in the history of painting: the black cat in Olympia (Musée d’Orsay, 1865). In 1868, he produced the promotional poster for Champfleury’s book on cats. The drawings on display here are sketches made around 1880 of his female cat Zizi, some of which were reused for watercolours adorning letters.

Steinlen is the artist who most represented cats, animals that populate his portfolios in the thousands. A member of the Society for the Protection of Animals, he housed and fed all the cats from the neighbourhood at his home, renamed the Cat’s Cottage on rue Caulaincourt. He decorated the new Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre with the cat as the main protagonist. He made the cat his emblem: independent, rebellious, this animal is, like the artist, “the eye on the street”. Steinlen knew how to express their presence, much greater than their small size, their absolute beauty and their mystery.

Françoise Pétrovitch draws daily in small notebooks. In one devoted to cats, she captures the elastic suppleness of the animal with the suppleness of her own gesture, using ink and brush with a conciseness and accuracy that recall Japanese calligraphy

Cats by Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil)

Sages austere and fervent lovers both,

In their ripe season, cherish cats, the pride

Of hearths, strong, mild, and to themselves allied

In chilly stealth and sedentary sloth.

Friends both to lust and learning, they frequent

Silence, and love the horror darkness breeds.

Erebus would have chosen them for steeds

To hearses, could their pride to it have bent.

Dreaming, the noble postures they assume

Of sphinxes stretching out into the gloom

That seems to swoon into an endless trance.