Art history has always been obsessed with cats – now there’s a book to prove it

Edited by Olivia Clark, Phaidon’s new book gathers more than 200 works across centuries, tracing the feline’s influence on artists and pop culture.

It seems like cats have always been loved by humans (dog lovers, look away). They’ve been worshipped, mummified, associated with deities, prized for their mouse-catching abilities and affectionate nature.

But until now, there hasn’t been such an expansive book documenting their influence. That’s where Cat, Phaidon’s latest offering comes in, a celebration of the feline in over 200 images, edited by Phaidon’s Olivia Clark and with essays from Hannah Shaw, an award-winning kitten rescuer and author known as Kitten Lady, and Leïla Jarbouai, chief curator of graphic arts and paintings at the Musée d’Orsay. 

“I felt like there weren’t any ‘cool’ books about cats in art and pop culture,” says Olivia, “My goal was to make something that jumped off the shelf with its design and the artworks included, but was still dynamic and did not dumb it down, telling a diverse and modern story of cats in the visual world, especially one that emphasised humanity’s love for and symbiotic relationship with these animals across time and cultures.”

Inside, expect to find cats, cats and more cats, depicted across a range of mediums and contexts. There’s a painting of a cat named Clementine by American artist Hilary Pecis, a reflective cat by Lydia Blakeley, a 19th-century pamphlet from Thailand revealing the secrets behind a Siamese cat’s marking,s plus work from the likes of Tracey Emin, Kerry James Marshall, Louis Wain, Henri Matisse and Judy Chicago. Not to mention characters such as Puss in Boots and the Cheshire Cat.

With such a plethora of work over the years, you can imagine a lengthy editing process to whittle it down. Olivia explains that it started with a long list of almost 1,000 potential entries, which a panel of experts helped to narrow down to around 200. Olivia also collaborated with an international group of curators, cat behaviourists, artists and the founding director of New York’s first Cat Museum.

When flicking through the book, you’ll notice that each image is paired with a counterpart – demonstrating either a similarity in style, gesture or composition, or even a juxtaposition between them. “The way we make these books is pretty old school, in that we print out every potential piece and physically start matching them into intriguing visual juxtapositions,” explains Olivia. “My floor was covered in cut-outs, which my cat Mocha loved to lie on and then, unsurprisingly, zoom over, kicking up a tornado of paper, at the exact moment I felt I had everything locked in.” She wanted the reader to be hooked on every page, and she did not disappoint. Each spread feels like its own mini exhibition.

In one pairing, a psychedelic painting by artist Walasse Ting is paired with Lalique’s neon-orange crystal kitten sculpture, matched by their colours. In others, there’s a woven work from textile artist Elizabeth Radcliffe who depicts an orange tabby cat called Algie, who’s coupled with another tapestry feline – the cover of Carole King’s 1971 album, Tapestry, which features her pet Telemachus. Olivia says this one’s a bit more “tongue-in-cheek”, while some are more historical with nods to breeding over time. For example, a written piece on Siamese cats from 19th-century Thailand is paired with a sculpture of the same breed by Korean artist Lee Sangsoo. These visual conversations give the book rhythm – and a sense of play.

Olivia’s favourite, however hard it was to choose, is Jodie Niss’ painting of a “hilariously fluffy” cat, slumping against a wall and meowing; it’s paired with Adolphe Thomasse’s early 20th-century opera fan, featuring a blue-ribboned kitten “similarly overcome with fiery emotion”.

She adds, “They both capture this intense emotion, a sense of over-it-ness that humans and cats alike can tap into, and luckily it just so happened that their pastel, pearlescent colour palettes only enhance their visual connection.” There’s also the cover cat, designed by Phaidon’s creative director Julie Hasting, which will no doubt be making it onto the lists of best book covers. “Her illustration of a graphic black cat curled up and in that classic ball shape is immediately evocative and draws readers in from the get-go.”

You might pick this up because you’re a cat fanatic, or maybe you want to learn more about their long history, or maybe you just like the look of it – whichever the reason, it’s hard not to notice how influential the feline friend has been in the world after reading it. This is something Olivia will take from this process.

“When I close my eyes at night while I was working on this project, I would see nothing but cats, patches of fur, curling tails, Egyptian worship statues, Impressionist paintings. Even so, I don’t think I truly grasped not only how much people, since time immemorial, have loved and continue to love cats, but also how little we still seem to know about when or how our relationship began. We have a vague sense of when they became domesticated and for what reasons, but our data is not as exact as it is for dogs.”

Olivia continues: “Cats just sort of chose to stick with us at some point 10,000 years ago and told us not to ask too many questions. And we have devotedly worshipped, painted and photographed them since. It’s this passion combined with ongoing mystery that seems so feline to me, and I hope this book captures that spirit.” If the goal was to make a ‘cool’ cat book, mission accomplished.