Art: Cat

Fortnight ago the St. Louis City Art Museum announced with pride that it had acquired an Egyptian bronze statue of a cat for $14,400 from Manhattan Art Dealer Joseph Brummer. Same day, St. Louis newspapers carried a pathetic story about the eviction of a family of eight for failure to pay $15 a month rent. The conjunction of these news items proved too much for the editorial sense of the St. Louis Star-Times, which published an open letter to the cat informing it that its “visit” was ill-timed. Wrote the Star-Times:

“Our refusal to welcome you, Dear Cat, is not to be taken as a personal slight, but merely as our protest against spending taxpayers’ money for ancient art objects . . . with a relief crisis in our midst.”

By last week museum and cat were the subject of public clamor. Members of the Women’s Chamber of Commerce called on the mayor for repeal of the special tax from which the museum derived $239,000 last year. The city director of public welfare proposed diversion of the tax to hospitals. Pickets sweltered at City Hall complaining that the cat was an affront to Labor. Six St. Louis members of the American Artists’ Congress chimed in with a demand that the museum buy “indigenous” art. “It is hard for many of us,” said they, “to see the lasting value to a 20th-Century community in the purchase of an Egyptian cat. . . .”

Last year the St. Louis City Art Museum received 330,000 visits from St. Louisans, listed few purchases of contemporary art. Disinterested citizens last week were able to debate this policy while doubting not at all the “lasting value” of the cat, an image of the Goddess Ubasti from the 6th Century B.C. Comparable to great similar bronzes in the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum, the Cleveland Museum and the Bliss Collection in Washington, D. C., it possesses, as the museum eloquently pointed out, “in a static pose, the strength and snap of a taut bow string.”