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Spotlight | 25 Cats Name[d] Sam and One Blue Pussy
Andy WARHOL
Untiled, from 25 Cats Name[d] Sam and One Blue Pussy
Offset lithograph, circa 1954, on wove paper, with the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Warhol Foundation ink stamps on the reverse.
49.1 x 34.2 cm. (19¼ x 13½ in.)
£6,500
25 cats name[d] Sam, and One Blue Pussy, circa 1954, was one of Warhol’s first illustrated bound books. Produced with Seymour Berlin of Record Offset Corporation in New York, and written by Charles Lionsby, Warhol illustrated 25 cats name[d] Sam, and One Blue Pussy with sixteen drawings of cats, each named Sam, and a seventeenth captioned ‘One Blue Pussy’. The blotted lines effortlessly articulate the fur coats and expressive faces of Sam and the one blue pussy.

Warhol created his bound books to promote his commercial illustration and sent them to clients. One such recipient, Diana Vreeland, then fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar and later Vogue, found her copy of Warhol’s 25 cats name[d] Sam, and One Blue Pussy, to be ‘Charming!’
25 cats name[d] Sam, and One Blue Pussy, further features calligraphy by Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola, with whom Warhol lived in New York City from 1952 to 1970. She was the first to nurture his artistic interest and shared with him the folk-crafts of her Carpatho-Rusyn homeland – she practised embroidery, handmade tin and paper flowers, and decorated eggs. What influenced Warhol most however was Julia’s drawing and calligraphy, and admiring her style, he asked his mother to contribute her handwritten script to 25 cats name[d] Sam, and One Blue Pussy.
Throughout this joint project Warhol embraced all of his mother’s calligraphic idiosyncrasies; even when she made a mistake, Warhol adored it. Warhol chose to include his mother’s slip-ups in his finished product to such an extent that the title, 25 cats name[d] Sam, and One Blue Pussy, owes its origin to one such quirk – as Julia mistakenly left off the ‘d’ in ‘named’. The style and character of Warhol’s early drawings are typical of his mother, with similarities between Warhol’s 25 cats name[d] Sam, and One Blue Pussy and Julia’s Holy Cats, 1954.

