Café Society: Art and Sociability in Belle Époque Paris

Presenting fifty-five paintings by a broad cross-section of major and lesser-known names in French and expatriate American art, the volume looks at the changing role of caf廥 as gathering places for a new type of urban bourgeois clientele, that increasingly dominated life in central Paris in the late nineteenth century. The redeveloped city centre saw a massive explosion in caf廥, brasseries, and restaurants, as well as a host of music and performing establishments, that became social gathering spots for a wide range of artists, writers, intellectuals, political activists, and hangers-on, as well as a growing number of often exploited cabaret performers.

These caf廥 included Caf?Guerbois in Avenue de Clichy, frequented by Manet, Degas and Monet, Caf?concert des Ambassadeurs in the Jardins des Champs Elysees, a favourite haunt of Jean Beraud, and Le Lapin Agile the informal cabaret in Montmartre, closely associated with the struggling modernist artists Picasso and Modigliani. These establishments ranging from formal restaurants and brasseries, to cabarets, small caf廥, and table d'h矌es attracted French - and international - artists, drawn to places where different social classes of men and women could freely mingle, and providing the kind of hedonistic sensory experience that became the subjects of these artists' work.