BLACK CAT
Tonight a
young
very black
cat
crosses my
path
silent as a
ghost
I’ve got
it!--
making a
cross
between its
path
and mine
so our fates
are twined
I sit on the
side
until a fat
woman
in a loose
dress
dangling a
bag passes
What she doesn’t
see
can’t hurt
her, I guess
La femme au chat [Woman with a Cat] -- Edouard Manet [ca. 1880]
In 1863 Manet shocked the art world with his painting of "Olympia," featuring a nude, hyper-thin woman and a black cat on a bed. Not only was Olympia a name that was associated with Paris demi-mondaines in the 1860s, but black cats also traditionally symbolized prostitution; "chat" was even a French slang word for female genitalia, much the same as "pussy" in English. A few years earlier he had sketched a similar pairing of a naked woman and a cat, but it lacked the brazen sensuality of the later work. Decades later he began a painting with the same title but that one reflected the domestic tranquility of his new lifestyle. The models this time were his wife Suzanne, whom he had married in 1863, and the family cat Zizi. It was probably painted in 1880, and he may have still been working on it when, at 51, he died of syphilis and rheumatism in 1883. Edgar Degas obtained it from dealer Ambroise Vollard in exchange for a pastel. In a sense, the two ladies with a cat represented a pair of symbolic self-portraits of the artist as a young scandlizer of the bourgeoisie (critic Ernest Chesneau had lamented his “taste for the inconceivably vulgar” and his “choosing subjects solely to create a furore”) and as an older, more settled, family man.
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