Klimt’s love for cats is legendary. One of the most beautiful portraits of Klimt shows the painter with a cat in his arms. A large number of cats were left to roam freely around the rooms of both his studios: his studio in the city center on Josefstädterstraße, which he used until 1911, and his second studio, located in the outskirts on Feldmühlgasse. Klimt was well aware that the cats caused chaos with his many sketches, and sometimes damaged them. This did not bother him in the slightest.
Arthur Roessler, an influential art writer and critic, gives a striking account of the cats’ feral activity in Klimt’s studio. He also talks about Klimt’s relaxed response to this behavior: “Once, as I sat with Klimt and rummaged around in a heap of papers, surrounded by eight or ten meowing, purring cats, play fighting with each other, so much so that the rustling study sheets just went flying, I asked him, puzzled, why he tolerated such antics spoiling hundreds of the most beautiful drawings. With a smile, Klimt replied: ‘No, my friend, even if they crumple and tear one or the other pieces of paper, it doesn’t matter; they only pee on the others, and, you know, it makes the best fixing agent!’”
Thanks for the writeup!
TBF, sketches are only sketches, and it’s hard to conceive of the cats doing all that much damage to them, anyway. The real point of their existence was to play around with details and ideas… to help him decide how to execute his finished works. It would likely be decades later that various collectors and the art scene in general would have prized those sketches, not so much him at the time.
