On an Edward Gorey exhibition.

Animals, both real and invented, live large in Gorey’s work, perhaps none more so than his cats. Gorey loved cats at least as much as he loved the ballet—for thirty years he spent half of each year in Manhattan during ballet season—and his anthropomorphic renderings of them are everywhere in the exhibition: peeking out from his books, posing on buttons for the “New York Kitty Ballet,” relaxing contentedly on a cat-patterned cravat, and emerging into being in a charming sketch from one of Gorey’s notebooks (on loan from the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust). “Cats share with ballet dancers the quality of graceful movement,” Gorey told Cats Magazine in 1978. “As an artist, I find their expressions endlessly and frustratingly fascinating.” Perhaps this is why most of his cats wear bewitching smiles; whether they are standing atop a unicycle or leaning against a gravestone, they seem carefree and sprightly, in happy contrast to Gorey’s more Gothic creations.

More in the link. [via New York Review of Books]

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