Art Dogs Trivia: Pet names

Art Dogs is a weekly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, lizards, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these weekly posts to your email inbox.

I’m on vacation in Costa Rica this week, so I thought I’d mix up the newsletter with a round of trivia.

One of the best parts of doing research for Art Dogs is uncovering the names artists choose for their pets. I’ve gathered some unique ones below. (My all-time favorite art dog name is Michael Heizer’s border collie “Tomato Rose.”)

So: Can you guess the names these beloved people gave their pets?

Answers are in the footnotes.¹

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What great names did I not include? Please tell me about them in the comments.

If you’re hungry for more trivia, check out the first Art Dogs trivia—a special edition for Pride.

1. Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas named three successive poodles “Basket.” (Alice felt the first poodle was so fashionable that he should carry a basket of flowers in his mouth, which he never did.)

They also had several Chihuahuas—“Pople,” two named “Byron,” and “Pépé.” The Chihuahuas were greatly loved, but appeared in fewer photographs than the poodles whose photographs were taken by Man Ray, LIFE Magazine, and Cecil Beaton. Below is a photo of Gertrude with Basket and Pépé:

2. Jean-Paul Sartre named his cat “Nothing.” Seriously! (Ironically, “Nothing” might be the agent responsible for Sartre finding meaning in his own life.)
   
   Note: Truman Capote named his English Bulldog “Charlie J. Fatburger.”

   

3. Frida Kahlo named her eagle “Gertrudis Caca Blanca” (in English, “Gertrude White Shit”). However, she also had an Amazon parrot named “Bonito” (who would perform tricks at the table for rewards of pats of butter), a fawn called “Granizo,” as well as many more pets.

   

4. Julio Cortazar named his cat “Theodor W. Adorno,” after the German sociologist and philosopher, and reportedly always referred to him by his full name. Cortazar even wrote a short story about this cat.
   
   Note: Albert Camus named his cat “Cigarette,” and Jorge Luis Borges named his cat “Beppo” (for Lord Byron).

   

   

5. The writer Dorothy Parker owned a lot of dogs, including a poodle named “Cliché” ( “because the streets are carpeted with black French poodles”). She also had a Dachshund named “Fraulein,” and a Boston Terrier named “Woodrow Wilson.”

6. Michel Foucault named his cat “Insanity.” Here’s one explanation I read for why:
   
   “It is likely that Foucault chose the name in correlation with one of his most well-known works, a book titled Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961). In this work, Foucault essentially explored the evolution of insanity from multiple perspectives, including psychological and historical ones.
   
   Note: Rachel Carson named her cat “Moppet.” Jacques Derrida named his cat “Logos.”

   

   

7. Kurt Vonnegut named his dog “Pumpkin.”
   
   Note: Mark Twain reportedly named one of his cats “Famine.” What!?

8. Alice Walker had cats with each of these names—“Frida” (after the artist), “Tuscaloosa” (which means "Black Warrior," derived from the western Muskogean language), and “Princess Marmalade” (wildcard!).
   
   Note: Toni Morrison named her cat “Zora,” because of Alice Walker. Read that story in a recent edition of Art Dogs.

9. George Orwell named his goat “Muriel” and there is a white goat named Muriel in Animal Farm.

10. Ai Wei Wei has cats named “Shadow,” “Half,” and “Yellow.” He wrote an essay in The New York Times Magazine about owning more than 40 cats….

11. 7‐foot‐l‐inch basketball star Wilt Chamberlain had Great Danes named “Odin,” “Thor,” and “Careem.” Some suspect Careem was named after

    Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
    but I couldn’t find it confirmed anywhere. Maybe Kareem can settle that for us!

    

12. John Cage had cats named “Losa” and “Skookum.” (Skookum was tragically lost—accidentally set loose on the streets of New York by a worker.)