The other day, I opened my front door, and a street cat in the street was sitting alone on my porch – a strange creature, just looking for. Not everyone likes cats. Me, I think they are charming because they are essentially wild creatures with extraterrestrial intelligences that are small enough to live.
John Craxton – A figurative painter, a homosexual, a single friend of Lucian Freud and an English Philhellene who died in 2009 – was a colleague of cat appreciator who painted them throughout his life. He found that the felines were the perfect models: to give them a little fish and they would pose. He would see the animal in the middle of the action and would think, it is another image.
In Craxton cats (2024), written by Andrew Lambirth, we find shy cats and aggressive cats; Dancing cats, happy and angry cats; Sleeping cats and cats fight with other cats; Cats with birds, with mice, and of course, with fish. His “conflicting cats” (1977), in which their two bodies are merged into a scribble of dense black lines, is a small masterpiece, like “Cats on a scale” (1984), in which one seems to help the other. Craxton, like some cat lovers, was a strange man: he was known to concoct the bad puns in his invented language, “Anglo-Craxton”, calling the painter's block, for example, “Procraxtonation”. So, of course, we find a panoply of strange cats: in “Marmalade Cat in Mirror” (1994-1995), for example, a tired orange-and green cat leg on itself in the mirror, a single visible eye. You could call the book a cat-allogue of Craxton's subjects.
In The order of things: an archeology of the human sciences (1966),, The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault quotes the non -standard classification of Jorge Louis Borges of different types of animals: “belonging to the Emperor, embalmed, tamed, porcly sucking, sirens, fabulous…. (animals) which, by far, resemble flies. ” Classification categories is important, supports Foucault, because they organize thought. Craxton catsSO, suggests a defamarization of art history. The historical writing of typical art grants the visual analysis of specific works to place them in a social context, sometimes based on the artist's personality. By focusing a single subject, Craxton cats Offers a new path in the artist's work – and invites viewers to share his obsession.
Maybe Craxton cats Will inaugurates a sequence of innovative studies: The Horses of Théodore Géricault, the dogs of Gustave Courbet and the monkeys of Jean Siméon Chardin. A history of modernism told through felines should discuss the black cat at “Olympia” by Edouard Manet (1863), the attractive cats of Balthus, cats taken on the screen of Andy Warhol, George Herriman's, George Herriman Kat (1913–44) – And, of course, Craxton cats.
Craxton cats (2024), written by Andrew Lambirth and published by Thames and Hudsonis available for online purchase and bookstores.
