Book review of Cat by Phaidon

It is difficult to know how a reader indifferent to cats might respond to Cat, but I suspect mild irritation, if not a full allergic reaction. That’s because this book is not only full of cat-like objects—cat-shaped cakes, Japanese woodblock-print cats, cat-face swimsuits—it also proves that cats have always been everywhere, all at once. They appear in unexpected spots: One sits near the bare feet of Carole King on the cover of her 1971 album, Tapestry; another prowls across a 5th-century B.C.E. Greek vase. Cat is among a recent strain of books that includes The Female Body in Art and Butterfly, both titles we’ve reviewed here, that treat a single motif as both an organizing principle and archival lens. It relies on loose categorical tactics—there are no chapters or chronological guidelines here. Instead, it leans into the structure that a book affords: Aside from an occasional two-page spread, images appear in pairs that function like small arguments in comparative form. A detail from the 12th-century Aberdeen Bestiary of three cats poised midhunt in the margins of an illuminated manuscript is set opposite stills from “Medieval cats having a good old medieval time,” a 30-second stop-motion animation by contemporary Montreal-based animator Laura Venditti. The pairing is both wry and precise. A 1928 oil-and-ink panel by Paul Klee featuring narrowed cat eyes that communicate compressed disdain looks remarkably similar to the 2012 Grumpy Cat meme that’s right beside it. These juxtapositions elevate the book from being a simple catalog of images. What Cat ultimately offers is not simply abundance, although there is also that. It proposes a way of looking: obsessive, associative, alert to recurrence.