Notes

How often have you seen a cat in elegant seated pose, seemingly frozen on a table or a counter – like a decorative ornament?  Living and animate, yet motionless and static, it embodies the very contradiction embedded in the notion of a still life. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Laubser painted several still lifes with cats – many with flowers, one with a large bold orange pumpkin.

But Laubser also owned a black cat  – a photo of her holding a large black cat can be found in the University of Stellenbosch archives – so it would have been an image that was readily at hand to paint. However, the cat is also a motif which lends itself ideally to stylised simplification. Think how one only needs to draw two circles, with two triangles on the smaller circle, for the image to be recognizable as a seated cat. And Laubser’s painting style was one which was reductive, avoiding naturalistic detail. Laubser not only chose subject matter that was idyllic and harmonious but, through her painting style throughout her life, she simplified extraneous detail and reduced objects to their most recognizable and essential attributes. As she put it: “I did not want to paint things or events or ideas but wanted to paint visions. Whatever the object on my canvas it must only represent the final spiritual shape of that object.” ¹

In this late work A Black and White Cat Seated amongst Flowers, the green of the cat’s eyes echoes the background hues and the white on the cat’s back echoes the shape of the leaves. Animate and inanimate are integrated in a unified composition as a ‘harmony of colour and form’.²

1 Laubser ‘What I remember’ Talk on English radio, SABC, 30 June 1963.

2 Laubser in Huisgenoot, 18 August, 1939, page 7.

Elizabeth Delmont, 2017

We are grateful to Elizabeth Delmont, author of a dissertation on the early works of Maggie Laubser, published by Perskor in 1994, Maggie Laubser: her paintings, drawings and graphics, compiled by Dalene Marais, for this catalogue entry.

Provenance

Sotheby's, Johannesburg, 19 November 1985, lot 119.

Literature

Dalene Marais. (1994) Maggie Laubser: her paintings, drawings and graphics, Johannesburg and Cape Town: Perskor. Illustrated on page 389, catalogue number 1776.