Shapeless, feeble and uninspiring: why is the NGV Australia exhibiting Cats and Dogs?
This exhibition about the relationship between man and his best fur friends is far from – to use one of the gallery’s puns – ‘purrfect’.
Humans began domesticating animals like sheep and goats some 10,000 years ago, a couple of millennia after we learned how to grow cereal crops. The domestication of the dog, however, is much older and belongs to the more primitive age of hunting and gathering. Wild dogs, it seems, began by following human hunters to pick over the discarded bones after a hunt or scavenge around the camps, and eventually joined in the hunt itself, driven by an instinctively recognised common interest in the success of the chase.
Dogs proved valuable in the pursuit of prey and no doubt also as alert guard animals; and thus began a long and unique coexistence and a special kind of intimacy with their human masters. As pack animals, dogs were able to transfer their loyalty to the pack leader, and intuitive understanding of his will, to their human master. Today dogs are still used, not only as hunters and guard animals, but for police and rescue work and as guides for the blind. They are ubiquitous as pets in wealthy countries and some childless people even refer to them, rather disturbingly, as their babies.
The special intimacy we can have with dogs is often attributed to this very long history of cohabitation and breeding; our relationship with cats is more recent, going back only to the beginnings of agriculture. Stores of grain attracted rodents, and then wild cats discovered that wherever there were human dwellings there were likely to be plenty of rats and mice to hunt; so they in turn came to live with us and were welcomed because they performed a valuable service. In time, felines too became domesticated and were bred by humans into the many different varieties we know today. But, whether because they are loners rather than pack animals, or because our cohabitation is of shorter duration, they never developed the same kind of loyalty or sympathetic affinity that we feel with dogs.
Cats and dogs naturally appear in art and literature from almost the earliest times. Odysseus’s old dog, Argus, ancient and emaciated, awaits his master’s return and dies as he recognises him, of course seeing through the disguise that deceives humans. The most memorable canine story in ancient mythology, though, is the death of Actaeon. This young hunter is the son of Aristaeus and grandson of Apollo, although the latter, of course, is not only immortal, but even as a grandfather, forever enjoys the acme of perfect youth.
Like all young hunters in mythology, Actaeon is a chaste youth dedicated to the cult of the huntress goddess Artemis, Apollo’s sister, who is also eternally young and virginal. One day he accidentally catches sight of her bathing naked in a pond. Enraged, she splashes him with water and transforms him into a stag, whereupon he is torn apart by his own hounds. It is a strangely compelling story, one that is illustrated in a fifth century BC metope from Selinunte and by countless modern painters, including Titian. It appears in this exhibition on a large 16th century majolica plate (1525) where Diana (her Latin name) is seen bathing in a fountain with two of her nymphs, hands in the water as though about to splash Actaeon again. Already transformed, he flees to the right, with human body but the head of a stag still turned back to look at the goddess; his dogs, meanwhile, are gnawing at his calf, less convincingly than in the ancient relief carving.
Why this exhibition is at NGV Australia is unclear, but one can’t help thinking that it reflects a lack of attention to the Australian collection, and of interest in the history of Australian art in general. Surely the gallery could have planned a summer exhibition on some theme from their extensive collections of Australian art, whether colonial and 20th century?
The best one can say about Cats and Dogs is that it is one of those rather shapeless exhibitions that at least allows the gallery to show a few relatively unusual things that are not otherwise on view. But as for the curatorial quality of the show, it feels like an idea that someone had years ago and was left in a bottom drawer for a rainy day. And that idea never seems to have evolved beyond asking each department to come up with a number of works that include cats and dogs as motifs. The display is uninspiring, hanging for some reason on ugly sheets of bare plywood, and scattered with kitschy puns like “purrfect”.
One really wonders how the gallery has the nerve to charge money – $16 for adults! – for this feeble effort, but clearly they counted on the populist appeal of pets, as confirmed by a final room in which kitsch reaches a hyperbolic level, with projected snaps of pets submitted by viewers, some of whom were squealing in delight as they recognised their own dogs. After this the exhibition abruptly ends – astonishingly without merchandise – simply passing into the Joseph Brown collection. I was half expecting a shop full of dog bowls, cat food, collars and cutesy picture books of cat photos.
Returning to Diana and Actaeon, there is another version of the subject in a colour lithograph by the Sicilian modernist Renato Guttuso, but with an odd and not quite coherent iconographical twist, for Diana appears to lie sleeping in the foreground. Among the most appealing pictures in the exhibition is a Moghul-style miniature of Prince Man Singh of Jodhpur hawking (c. 1800) which gives us a sense of how much more interesting this exhibition could have been with a proper focus, like say animals in Moghul painting.
Similarly, several pieces of Japanese art remind us of the significance of animals of all kinds, both natural and demonic, in Japanese art: there is an extraordinary double-page spread of cats in a woodblock-printed manual of painting by Kawanabe Kyosai (1887) and two coloured ukiyo-e prints by Ishikawa Toraji from the 1930s represent intriguing female nudes in interiors – poised between Japanese and European styles – accompanied by a lapdog in one case and a sleeping cat in the other. But presumably one reason that the exhibition could not be more focused was that the gallery was clearly determined to include a grab-bag of Aboriginal work – almost compulsory these days – and that would, of necessity, have been excluded if the show had been given any serious parameters.
Of course there could have been a focus on cats and dogs, or indeed animals, in modern western imagery. Among the works included here are two great engravings by Albrecht Duerer. In Adam and Eve (1504) the serpent appears to be just giving the apple to Eve; although they have not yet eaten and discovered shame, their nakedness is already covered in anticipation. The Fall of Man in the Judaeo-Christian story is the equivalent of the end of the Golden Age in classical mythology; the end of innocence and peace and the beginning of knowledge, of progress but also of violence. In the Golden Age, even animals are at peace, hence the sleeping cat; but after the Fall, the violence inherent in the normal working of nature will be unleashed, and the cat will duly kill the mouse on the left.
Duerer’s Saint Eustace (1501) represents something like the reverse of this onset of violence. Here the saint, a pagan officer, has been pursuing a stag with his team of hounds until he sees that the beast bears a crucifix between its horns and he stops to adore it. Duerer shows him kneeling on the ground; but as he receives this mystical illumination, his dogs too are suddenly robbed of their fierceness and sit or lie, gentle and still, almost pensive though unaware of what is happening to them, under the influence of divine grace.
In more recent art, the most delightful cat in the NGV collection is undoubtedly in a small masterpiece by Balthus, Nude With a Cat (1949), in which the naked girl leans back blissfully in her chair towards the cat who is equally relaxed on the chest of drawers behind her. This picture, like Lucian Freud’s Naked Man With Rat (1977-78, purchased 1984) at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, is one of those rare cases in which a really good but potentially difficult picture has somehow made its way past the committees and the censors and the busybodies and the bureaucrats with their checklists to enter one of our public collections.
Of course the whole exhibition could equally have focused on British and Australian art, since no people has such a history of loving animals, and dogs in particular. From the 18th century there is a fine portrait by Thomas Gainsborough of a young officer, Richard St George Mansergh-St George (1776-80) standing in a rather melancholy attitude on the shore, while his faithful dog looks up at him. The sitter (c. 1752-98) was only about 24 at the time; according to his entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. He had recently completed his BA at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself both for scientific knowledge and artistic gifts, and had just purchased a commission in the army to help suppress the rebellion in the American colonies. This is why Gainsborough paints him on the shore, awaiting the ship that will take him to America.
There is in fact much more on this fascinating and complex character, who was the subject of another important portrait, in mourning after his wife’s death in 1792, and who was later murdered by Irish bandits. An exhibition was devoted to him at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia in 2019, in which this painting was also shown.
A final remarkable Edwardian portrait with a dog is by the today relatively little-known but talented Australian artist Violet Teague (1872-1951). It is titled Cynthia and Count Brusiloff (1917), and the people at the NGV seem to be a bit confused about its subject.
The website provides no information, but implicitly assumes that the figure with the dog is a boy. A social media post by the Gallery on November 26, 2024, a promotion for this exhibition, is headlined “A painter, a portrait, and a hound named Cynthia” and refers to the painting as a “portrait of Count Brusiloff and Cynthia the hound”.
In fact, it is the dog, a thoroughbred Borzoi, who is Count Brusiloff (or actually, as Steven Miller found out, General Brusiloff); the young figure is not a boy, but a girl, Cynthia, daughter of Violet’s cousin Lieutenant Eric Teague, whose portrait she had painted in 1916 (Private collection). In any case, it is a piece of bravura painting, a tribute both to Gainsborough and to Sargent, a poignant fancy-dress vision of a world that is being swept away by history.
Cats and Dogs
National Gallery of Victoria, until July 20
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