Café Society

Presenting over fifty-five works 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 witnessed an explosion in cafés, brasseries, and restaurants, as well as a host of musical and performance spaces, that became social gathering spots for a wide range of artists, writers, intellectuals, political activists, performers and hangers-on. These cafés included Café Guerbois in Avenue de Clichy, frequented by Manet and Degas; Café-concert des Ambassadeurs in the Jardins des Champs-Élysées, a favourite haunt of Jean Béraud; and Le Lapin Agile the informal cabaret in Montmartre, closely associated with the struggling modernist artists Picasso and Modigliani. These establishments attracted both French and international artists, drawn to places where different social classes of men and women could freely mingle, and provided the kind of hedonistic sensory experience that became the subjects of these artists’ work.

This catalogue accompanies a traveling exhibition with venues at the Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund, Denmark; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN; and Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE.

Edited by Julie Pierotti
Contributions by Taylor J. Acosta, W. Scott Haine, Jeffrey H. Jackson, Julie Pierotti and Dorthe Vangsgaard Nielsen

Author biographies

Julie Pierotti is Martha R. Robinson Curator, Dixon Gallery and Gardens

Jeffrey H. Jackson is professor of History at Rhodes College, Memphis

Scott Haine is historian of Food Sociability at Cañada College, San Mateo, California

Dorthe Vangsgaard Nielsen is senior curator at Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund, Denmark

Taylor J. Acosta is chief curator and director of Collections at Joslyn Art Museum

Table of Contents

• Foreword and Acknowledgements by Jack Becker, Gertrud Oelsner, Kevin Sharp
• The Café Is a “Thinking Space” by W. Scott Haine & Jeffrey H. Jackson
• Cafés and the City of Paris by Jeffrey H. Jackson
• Femme au café: The Complexities and Evolution of Women’s Presence in Parisian Cafés in the Long Nineteenth Century by Julie Novarese Pierotti
• Café de la Régence: The Paris Haunt of Nordic Artists by Dorthe Vangsgaard Nielsen
• Modern Icons: Lithography and the Making of Café Society by Taylor J. Acosta
• Exhibition Checklist
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Map of Paris
• Index
• Photography Credits