The worldaccording toLéon

The forty-two cats published by the Galerie du Marché in Montreux. Not the kind you meet on the street — an ironic vision of humanity wearing fur, each one unique, painted in colours that have no business together and work anyway.

Titles and plate numbers taken from the gallery's own catalogue.

The wider cat series that carried Léon into museums in Amsterdam, Nice, Lausanne and Ainville. Oil and mixed media on canvas board and paper, most of it small enough to hold in two hands.

Fifteen small panels of figures alone in colour. The series was exhibited at the Musée d'Art Naïf Anatole Jakovsky in Nice.

Eight figures sealed into their own backgrounds — the most claustrophobic thing Léon made, and the closest he came to painting a mood rather than a joke.

The hollow man, at 50 × 70 cm: bigger, emptier, and considerably less amused than the cats.

Ten satirical works following Poe's poem. Léon's biography names the series; the paintings sat unpublished on the estate's server for two decades and appear here for the first time.

First publication.

Named in Léon's own biography alongside the cats and Homo Vacuum, but never given a page of its own until now.

First publication as a series.

Mouths, at 18 × 24 cm, on a red so loud the old website used it as a page background.

A short series from the lagoon — the least documented group in the archive.

Everything painted at scale, up to the 320 × 172 cm Terra X. This is where the satire gets ambitious: Martians reviewing America, an indisposed Italy, cosmic procreators, and a butterfly meeting an elephant at Sanremo.

Twenty-four high-resolution studio scans held by the estate, and the finest images in the whole collection. No title, date or dimension has survived for any of them. They are shown here exactly as they are, pending identification.