Cats in Art: Cat Catching a Bird (Picasso)

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.  

[Note: sorry this is posting a day later than usual.  The bride and I were on the road a bit last week.]

Image credit WikiArt, here.  Cat Catching a Bird, Pablo Picasso, 1939, oil on canvas, 32" x 39", held by Musee Picasso, Paris, France.

Most of us don't think of our kitties as killers, but Picasso's surrealistic painting kinda dispels that notion, at least for this cat.  A few thousand years of domestication don't negate the millions of years of evolution that produced such an efficient and successful predator....that also delivers and receives cat love with such style.

That's one of the reasons why we love them, I think: the undercurrent of wildness behind the purring, the inability to know what cats are thinking, the aloofness and distance that many kitties keep.  You know, the mysteriousness, the dangerousness, which Picasso captured so very well in this image painted a lifetime ago.