25 Cats is a tender snapshot from Warhol's early life and career, when he shared a small Manhattan apartment with his mother, Julia Warhola. One by one, Warhol filled the apartment with cats until there were 25 of them — all incidentally named 'Sam'. Warhol studied 18 of the many cats and recreated them in his formative commercial illustration style, characterised by bold colours and striking linework.
Warhol and his many friends hand-coloured each plate in watercolour at one of their legendary 'colouring parties'. These events were hosted by the artist at either the fashionable Serendipity 3 café in Manhattan or at his Lexington Avenue apartment — the very apartment where he lived with the 25 cats. Warhol would invite his friends to add coloured inks to his drawings, encouraging playfulness and non-conformity, otherwise known as colouring outside the lines. This collaborative process is one we see throughout Warhol's later career. In particular, it foreshadows his iconic years in 'The Factory', which operated like a commercial assembly line — one that employed known contemporary artists, poets, musicians, photographers, and other cultural figures.
As well as representing Warhol's love for his many cats, the work embodies the artist's obsession with mechanical reproduction. Warhol was captivated by a machine's ability to reproduce the same image over and over again, thus challenging the meaning of authenticity in the art world. Warhol himself famously stated that he wanted to 'be a machine'; to be free of the rigid judgements and systems associated with humanity, and to instead possess the moral neutrality of a machine. This motif is translated into the practical process of repeated images and machine-made prints, and is present throughout Warhol's career. Particularly in his soup cans and Monroes, and here too in the repeated imagery of 18 cats one after another.
Unlike Warhol's later Pop Art style, deliberately 'unfeeling' and devoid of any indication of the artist's hand, 25 Cats instead features his blotted line technique, which clearly demonstrates his own expressive hand.
25 Cats Name[d] Sam and One Blue Pussy is one of Warhol's earliest print sets — a capsule from a formative time in his long career. It was privately printed and self-published by Warhol in a strictly limited run of 190 copies between 1954 and 1957. Warhol personally gifted it to friends, art-world figures, and prospective clients, never releasing it for commercial purposes.
