Having said all that about Louis Wain and his genius cat paintings, I have to confess that there is one that truly scares the hell out of me.
It's this one.
Maybe it's the vaguely "cattiform" nature of it - just barely - and the expression, most uncatlike, like some hideous grinning clown from hell with gaping mouth and pinwheel eyes. Or is it something else?
If you look at this painting closely, it's incredible. Each detail is wrought with extreme care. The colours are glorious, the pattern full of motion as the golden sprays splash upwards. Taken as an abstract with no natural reference, it's amazing. It's only when you pull back to look at the whole that it becomes disturbing.
Had Wain not been chiefly a painter of cats, this might have been seen very differently. But he DID paint cats, and at some point this painting represented - I think - a cat, or was it merely some bizarre "cattiform" fractal a century ahead of its time?
We'll never know, but one thing that REALLY disturbed me was that, not once but twice, I saw this painting displayed on the internet THE WRONG WAY. In one of those godawful cubic sequential things, with this one near "the end" (when he went crazy, which meant his life was, of course, over), this painting was displayed UPSIDE-DOWN. I could not believe what I was seeing, because even with its extreme abstractness, it definitely has the general features of his cats. The ears are the ears, the eyes are the eyes, disturbing or not. The mouth does suggest the fierceness of a cat's wide-open mouth when all the teeth show. But someone put together a sequence of his work, which was probably not even a sequence at all, with this painting upside-down, like that famous Matisse in the Museum of Modern Art which hung that way for years.
Right way.
Wrong way. I think.
But that wasn't the end of it. Looking for a good example of a print, I found the same painting displayed SIDEWAYS. No, I am not kidding! This was on a site offering pristine Wain prints, and even a few originals. And they let it fall on its ear.
If I ever needed proof that no one understands Wain and his cats, I have it, but it's so sad. Revile him if you will, be afraid or scornful of his "madness" and write him off as a whack job, but for God's sake, please, display his paintings right-side-up. Really, is that so much to ask?
