The Black Cat in Art

No cat has been painted, reviled and admired more often than the black one. A short history — and why printing black is a craft of its own.

The black cat holds the strangest reputation of the entire species. The Middle Ages mistrusted her, charged her with witchcraft and made the animals pay for it; art has more than made amends ever since. By the close of the nineteenth century the black cat was the emblem of the Parisian bohème: for the cabaret Le Chat Noir, Théophile Steinlen drew the poster that hangs on student walls to this day.

Painting too gave her leading roles. In Manet’s Olympia a black cat with arched back brings the whole composition to a point — a detail that, at the time, caused almost as much scandal as the rest of the canvas. And Edgar Allan Poe handed the black tom a whole genre of his own: that of the guilty conscience.

On paper, black is never black; it is the sum of everything that is just barely not there.

In the atelier the black cat is a beloved and dreaded model. Beloved, because no coat is so graphic: two ears, two eyes, one silhouette. Dreaded, because printing black is precision work — in the shadows the coat must stay alive, or you print a hole in the paper. So we pull proofs and calibrate on profiled monitors: the difference between a black hole and a black tom lives in the last five per cent.

Anyone with a black cat at home knows she is difficult to photograph — dark coat, dark room, disappointing picture. The remedy is the same as ever: daylight, eye level, and the eyes in focus. The rest is up to us.

— the atelier