Cat and Bird: Meaning

Cat and Bird by Paul Klee is a work that enchants with its apparent simplicity and the depth of its colors and forms.

In this text, we will explore the details and symbolism of this fascinating painting, revealing the influences and intentions of the artist in creating a composition so intriguing.

Join us on this analysis to discover how Klee uses the harmony between a cat and a bird to convey emotions and subtle narratives, and let yourself be carried away by the genius of this modernist master.

This painting by Paul Klee, is a tribute created for one of the greatest loves of his life, cats.

It belongs to the expressionism, a very used artistic current by painters at the beginning of the 20th century.

It is a beautiful hypnotic work of the face of a cat, where the animal is looking directly at the viewer.

About this painting in particular, Klee exclaimed:

“There are cats whose gazes are appreciated by armed flowers!”

The mystery surrounding many cats and their distant behavior, may have been one of the attractions of this artist, in detriment of more direct breeds such as dogs, for example.

Thus, Klee creates in his work a thinking cat.

Paul Klee was one of the many avant-garde artists who wanted to practice in painting what he called "the pure cultivation of means" - in other words, using line, form, and color for themselves, rather than describing something visible.

This priority freed him to create images that deal less with perception than with thought, so that the bird in this photo seems not to fly in front of the cat's forehead, but inside it - the bird is literally in the cat's mind.

For Klee, one of his goals as an artist, was "to make secret visions visible"; thus, he focuses on thought, fantasy, appetite, hunger of the brain.

The cat is attentive, frighteningly, but also calm, and Klee's palette is also calm, in a narrow range of contrasting colors, he explores from pink to red, with zones of blue-green.

Believing that children were close to the sources of creativity, Klee was fascinated by their art and evoked it through simple lines and forms: ovals for the cat's eyes and pupils (and more vaguely for the bird's body), triangles for ears and nose.

And the tip of that nose is a red heart, a sign of the cat's desire.

In the cat's eyes, there is a mixture of green and blue, which are mysterious, just like this animal.

There are other paintings very similar to this artist, such as Senecio and Fish Magic.

This dark and subjective style, is similar to the work of artists such as Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall.