Cafe Society: Art and Sociability in Belle Epoque Paris

A wonderful volume which captures the centralrole of Parisian cafés as a source of inspiration in the development of modern art. 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 cafés 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 cafés, 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 cafés included Café Guerbois in Avenue de Clichy, frequented by Manet, Degas and Monet, Café-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 cafés, and table d’hôtes 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.