On a blustering but bright afternoon last week, the artist Setsuko met me for tea at the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side. Dressed in a serene pale green kimono, her black hair in an elegant chignon, the 82-year-old artist appeared as a calm vision against the wintry gusts.
Setsuko, whose full name is Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, was in New York for the opening of “Kingdom of Cats” her new exhibition at Gagosian’s Park and 75th space (on view through March 1), just a few blocks away. The artist lives between Paris, where she keeps a studio at the workshop at Astier de Villatte, a celebrated artisanal ceramics workshop in the 13th arrondissement, and in the Swiss Mountains, where she resides in the Grand Chalet, a magnificent home she and her late husband, the acclaimed Balthus, moved into in 1977.
“Japan is a country of ceramics, whether it’s a tea ceremony bowl or for daily use,” Setsuko said of her recent ceramic works. “Maybe it’s in my blood. My grandmother made tea ceremony bowls as a hobby.”
“Kingdom of Cats” marks the first New York showcase of both the artist’s ceramics and bronzes. Cats, as the exhibition title would suggest, are her central, mischievous subject matter. Glazed in luminous shades of white, the cats appear like snowy ciphers, climbing trees and resting on branches. In the two works, sitting cats don gold medallions, reminiscent of Maneki-neko, Japan’s famous waving cat figurines.
Setsuko, who has painted since the 1960s and her early years of marriage with Balthus, embraced ceramic and bronze in 2019 when she was invited to work at Astier de Villatte by the workshop’s founders, Benoît Astier de Villatte and Ivan Pericoli. Setsuko knew Benoît as a small child. Her earliest forays into ceramics were prototypes for a line of dishes, and her creativity sparked from there, blending influences from her native Japan and European traditions. Among the 100 Tibetan monks who work in the studio today, she began her experiments with an unencumbered sense of exploration.
Her earliest sculptures, which Gagosian has exhibited in Paris and Gstaad, primarily centered on imagery of trees. Setsuko is profoundly inspired by nature, especially ancient fig and pomegranate trees. Here, things are a bit more lively. Cats climb and nestle into trees, a jungle gym for these agile creatures, who appear ready to pounce on small birds. In Chat et la vie, a bronze that is one of the jewels of the show, a cat rests on a circular tree branch, hidden among fig leaves—the work marks a technical feat for the artist who has shown no timidity to learning new mediums.
These cats are, in many ways, a tribute to her beloved Balthus. In 1962, at age 20, Setsuko met the famed artist in Tokyo. She was a French language student at Sophia University, hired to translate for the 54-year-old artist, who was visiting Japan for the first time. A connection sparked and the couple soon moved to the Villa Medici in Rome, where Balthus was in residency. They married in 1965 and stayed at the heady Villa Medici for some 16 years. But, during those years, Balthus, who was a cat lover, wasn’t allowed to have any feline companions.
Over green tea and finger sandwiches, Setsuko explained: “When we lived at Villa Medici, which is part of the French Academy, we couldn’t have any cats because all the furniture belonged to the French government. It was all in very bad condition and Balthus restored it over the years. Balthus loved cats though and had made a self-portrait titled King of Cats. I own that painting.” In his memoirs, Balthus wrote of his affinity with the animal: “Very early on, I grasped my secret, mysterious belonging to the world of cats. I shared their urge for independence.”
Later, when the couple purchased the Grand Chalet and moved to Switzerland, they welcomed cats into their home life. “Cats are very dear to me. We had a cat named Mitsou. When Balthus was just 12 years old, he published a book about a cat named Mitsou,” she recalled. “When we were just the family at home, he would let Mitsou come onto the dining table and would give him spaghetti.” Setsuko believes Balthus is connected to cats on a spiritual level. “When he would see cats laying down, he would tell me ‘I remember how comfortable it was to be like that.’ I remember thinking that meant he had been a cat! So that’s where the exhibition title comes from.”
“Kingdom of Cats” also nods to Setsuko’s early years in Rome, with still lifes dating back to the 1960s. While Balthus was creating his discomfiting oil tableaux, Setsuko devoted herself to still lifes in watercolor and gouache. Those were years when the couple frequently welcomed the likes of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti into their home, but Setsuko’s inspirations were more ancient, drawing instead from the frescos of Pompeii and Italian antiquity, with their flattened perspectives, and refined simplicity.
“The frescos of Rome antiquity influenced me a lot. It’s a simpler relationship between life and shadow that’s three tones mostly,” she said. “Those frescoes are very near to me and are an expression very close to Eastern perspectives. After antiquity, European art becomes much more realistic. ”
Setukso still paints while in Switzerland, and a few of her recent still lifes are on view. “A painting you can do alone. It’s a lonely walk,” she said “For ceramic and bronze, you need help and in Paris, I have the facility with its enormous kiln.”
For Setsuko, art is a holistic way of being. Her approach is refined, but never exacting. The artist has included a few bronze candelabra in the shape of trees in the exhibition, and she delights in the possibility of their use in homes. They, like life, are meant to be enjoyed. She’s also debuted playful new drawings on terracotta palettes which are topsy-turvy images filled with references to Arcimboldo, Renaissance angels, the myth of Daphne and Apollo, and, of course, cats (these might be my favorite).
“The palette is a very mysterious thing to me. Color itself is a material but once you put on the palette with another color and a brush, it can become flowers or a young girl. It’s not a material anymore. It’s a kind of alchemy of another life,” Setsuko mused. “On the palette, I see a sort of spiritual adventure.”
In Setsuko’s eyes, life is brimming with possibility—and it’s a vision that’s contagious. She told me that she’s planning to expand her ceramic menagerie well beyond cats to include snakes (for the Year of the Snake… one work in this exhibition features a snake, too!), along with horses, swans, and other birds. Right now, however, Setsuko feels a sense of continuity in bringing these works to New York. In the late 1960s, she had the first and only previous New York exhibition with the Pierre Matisse Gallery. For that show, and later for the opening of the Met’s 2013 major exhibition of Balthus’s work, she stayed at the Carlyle, making it a home away from home (Setsuko also has a work in the collection of the Met, it should be noted).
Pouring the last of our tea, Setsuko told me she’d soon be off to visit a newly made friend at an apartment a few blocks away, a woman she’d met on the flight from New York to Paris. “Who does that these days? It’s like something out of a movie,” remarked Elsa Favreau, a director at Gagosian Paris, who helped organize the show.
Setsuko does, it seems. “It’s a great adventure. And I love adventure,” she told me with a knowing smile.
