Sunday, July 20, 2014

Cats in Art: Cat Fight (Foujita)

From my continuing weekly Sunday series of cats in art. I'm using some ideas from the coffee table book, The Cat in Art, by Stefano Zuffi.  This is the third in a series of posts of the cat art of Leonard Foujita.


Image credit WikiArt, here.  

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Cat Fight, 1940, media and size unspecified, held in a private collection.

As we saw last week, WikiArt calls this genre of painting "Magic Realism."  To me, the true magic of this painting is that some 15 cats--plus or minus--are to be found therein, all in one place.  

That's more than magic; some would call it a miracle. Along those lines, note that the cats are gravity-defying (truly a potential miracle) and largely following a clockwise fighting pattern (another potential miracle...will they never cease?).

Another observation: none of the kitties are solid colored.  In my home, 2 of our 3 cats are solid (a gray and a black), so that's a bit unusual, but likely not miraculous.

That's it for Foujita this week, but the whole discussion of miracles, conveniently, reminds me of one of my very favorite posts.  From the fall of 2013, I called this post A Miracle at my House: Should I Call the "Miracle Commission"?  (you really should click over and come back).  

When it comes to miracles, thank goodness, it seems that the Vatican has this area under control, as I previously posted in the link above:

I have a call in to the Vatican.  But it turns out that while they are on top of this type of thing, and actually have a "Miracle Commission," it only investigates healing type miracles.  They do not, unfortunately, investigate physical phenomena such as mine since it is NOT medically-related. 
 
The miracle commission only investigates miracles associated with healing.  The Vatican does not study phenomena such as weeping Madonna statues and bleeding palms. These phenomena are only studied by the Church’s local people. If they don’t find any evidence of cheating, they can believe in the phenomena if they wish.


Maybe I should call the local priest instead.  Provided he is comfortable dealing with cats in art.




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