Friday, May 16, 2025














A sleek, proud bronze created in honor of the Egyptian goddess Bastet, “Cat” has lived at least six of her nine lives already. She was born between 664 and 332 BC, during Egypt’s Saite dynasty. A collector in Alexandria, M. Dattori, got his paws on her in the early 1900s, but Sage recalls a few cocktail party whispers (later echoed in a 1938 New York Times article) that she’d been sequestered by the German government as French property. She was released in 1920 and later sold to a New York collector—who sold her in 1937 to the Brummer Gallery.

The Depression was grinding on. In our efforts to give relief to the poor, St. Louis was about $2 million overdrawn that year. “And St. Louis, whose population has a background in which thrift and conservatism bulk large, does not like to be in debt,” noted the Times.

Hence the catfight. Smitten with the bronze, the Saint Louis Art Museum handed the Brummer Gallery $14,400 for “Cat.” Letters about this cat who was stealing food from the mouths of the poor poured into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Star-Times. One suggested selling the museum’s entire collection and putting the museum commissioners on display, 25 cents admission. Another hoped that all the cats in the city would congregate at the commissioners’ homes and yowl all night. Union leaders picketed, carrying signs that read, “$14,000 for a useless cat—nothing for labor.” Even artists protested the museum’s preference for antiquity over their modern works.

“Cat” sat erect, staring into the middle distance.

When she finally deigned to respond, in a letter to the Star-Times, she admitted being troubled—despite her “Egyptian imperturbability”—on reading a description of herself as an inanimate object. She extolled her own sleek elegance and menace, adding, “I am not vain. I am only truthful.” By then she was close to breaking the museum’s attendance record. New York and Paris had written about her. And soon, screenwriter and director Albert Lewin would beg to borrow her for his 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray, saying she was one of the most beautiful Egyptian artifacts he’d ever seen.

Such beauty is fragile, the museum responded, but he was welcome to copy her—so it is a replica of St. Louis’ “Cat” who grants Dorian’s wish that his painting age in his place. For the film (which made almost $1.4 million in U.S. box offices), artist Ivan Albright painted a lurid portrait of Gray’s otherwise invisible dissolution, the cat serene in the background. That painting is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And “Cat,” in all her mystery, is ours.

https://www.stlmag.com/topics/st-louis-sage/.

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