CAFÉ SOCIETY : ART AND SOCIABILITY IN BELLE ÉPOQUE PARIS

Edited by Julie Pierotti

D Giles Ltd. 208 pages. £30. ISBN 978-1-913875-80-0

Reviewed by Jim Burns

The introduction to this book refers to the rise of “thematic exhibitions” and it’s true that galleries in recent years seem to have focused on them to a greater extent. There are still plenty of solo shows devoted to individual artists, but there’s no doubt that exhibitions looking at work by a group of artists with similar aims or interests, or painters from a specific location, and others with a national identity, do appear to be popular. From a personal point of view, I welcome them. They can point to a particular period or movement in art history and in doing so help to widen our awareness of artists beyond a few well-known names.

Café Society : Art and Sociability in Belle-Époche Paris takes as its theme the café-culture that developed in Paris in the late-nineteenth century, and the artists who, in their various ways, depicted it. There had always been cafés of one kind or another, as witness the coffee-houses in eighteenth century London, and they existed in Paris. There’s a marvellous Daumier lithograph from 1864 which is called “The Corner of Ravaged Poets” and shows a trio of the tribe clustered around a small table. But it was primarily in the post-1871 period when France, which had been rocked by the disaster of the war with Prussia followed by the agony of the Paris Commune, was attempting to rebuild itself as a vibrant European nation, that the cafés and restaurants, as we perhaps know them, began to open on a wider scale.

By the 1890s, when the so-called Belle Époche was in full-swing, they were a predominant feature in the city, frequented by artists for socialising, but also used by them as material for their paintings. André Devambez’s 1904 “Les Incompris” shows an affronted-looking woman, three men arguing, and a figure slightly to one side who, “slumped over his beer is likely the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine”. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but the illustrations on nearby pages also give the impression of cafés as possible locations for drama as well as for pleasure. The woman in the Spanish painter, Santiago Rusinol’s “Café des Incoherents” doesn’t look too happy, and the one in Edgar Degas’s “Au Café” is clearly upset about something.  Both paintings capture scenes that wouldn’t be out-of-place in a café today.

To be fair, a painting with the same title as the Degas, the American Willard Leroy Metcalf’s “Au Café” does shows a calmer and more-conventional social scene, though clearly set among the bourgeoisie and not the bohemians. On the other hand, Felix Valloton’s woodcut “The Brawl” looks like it could also be in a bourgeois setting, but with its tipped-up table, a hand reaching out to grab someone by the throat, and the shocked expressions on the faces of the onlookers, it obviously doesn’t suggest that all is sweetness and light in even the most respectable establishments. There were tensions, political and otherwise, in Paris in the 1890s, and at the extremes it wasn’t unknown for anarchists to hurl bombs into restaurants frequented by the well-dressed wealthy. In 1894 the art critic Félix Fénéon was arrested and tried because he was suspected of being involved in a bombing at a restaurant popular with politicians. He was acquitted of all charges.

Jeffrey H. Jackson, who wrote the informative essay, Cafés and the City of Paris, refers to the artists who painted the pictures of café life, as “flâneurs”, who the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire declared, wandered “through the streets to catch glimpses of Parisian life, and then turn(ed) the faces and stories into art. The idea of “modern art” was born as artists turned away from biblical or classical themes to create work about the city, especially Paris”. Jackson then adds that, “Artists acting as flâneurs recognised cafés as important sites in a rapidly changing city and, therefore,  a crucial part of modern life”.  There’s a painting by the Russian, Ilya Repin, associated in his home country with the painters known as the Itinerants, which shows a Parisian café scene with what Jackson describes as a “cross section of social groups, from top-hatted gentlemen to homburg sporting men further down the social scale….Customers talk and drink, one man reads a newspaper – a reminder that the café has long been the heart of intellectual as well as social life – and a family dines in the middle of the image”.  A “bejeweled” woman prominent in the painting is said to be Anna Ludic, a famous actress of the time.

One of the features of café life that artists fccused on was the presence of absinthe drinkers. What distinguished them from the other drinkers was the effect that absinthe seemed to have in terms of what some believed were its hallucinogenic effects. Others just saw it as inducing states of intoxication which sapped the energies for everyday activities and even communicating with fellow absinthe imbibers. Jean-Francois Raffaëlli’s “The Absinthe Drinkers” shows two shabby-looking men at a table but seemingly detached from each other, while Edvard Munch’s similarly-titled painting gives us a couple of better-dressed individuals, but still locked in silence. And the famous Degas, “Dans un café”, depicts a morose-looking couple drinking absinthe, though neither the man nor the woman appears particularly happy about it. Again, silence and isolation ooze from the canvas.

The presence of a woman in the Degas painting raises interesting questions regarding the part they played in café society. Julie Pierotti’s essay Femme au café points out that “Though women are nearly always depicted in images of Parisian cafés throughout the long nineteenth century, their roles in those spaces were often ambiguous and precarious”.  She goes on to say that, between “1873 and 1902 more than 6,800 women were arrested at cafés and charged with unlicensed prostitution”. This, she adds, led to “a sensationalising in contemporary art of nearly all women in cafés as sex workers”.  The fact that more women were being employed in cafés and restaurants might have added to this assumption. Pierotti mentions that a “new type of establishment emerged, the brasserie à femmes, a type of restaurant that chiefly employed attractive young women to serve food and drink to male customers”.

Renoir’s “Young Woman (La Servante)” might have been one of them, and likewise the woman in the background of Manet’s “The Café Concert”. The classic example is, however, Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies Bergere”, a painting that has triggered numerous discussions over the years. Pierotti offers this analysis: “The barmaid in Manet’s image displays much the same indifference as the serveuses in his café paintings of the late 1870s but she is less a woman of action than a woman on display, an item for temptation, consideration, and perhaps purchase just like the bottles and clementines that line the bar counter. As in most nineteenth century paintings featuring women in café spaces, the distinction between server and sex worker is blurred”.

As an additional comment on how women were seen, there is a quote from the historian Jules Michelet : “How many irritations for the single woman. She can hardly go out in the evenings, she would be taken for a prostitute”. And, a full-page reproduction of Jean-Louis Forain’s “Café Interior”,  “contends more directly with what happens when a single woman enters a café. She is indeed a spectacle in her blue-dotted dress as she looks around boldly, a hint of a smile on her lips. A group of three men on the right of the composition size her up, while a couple seated at a table turn their heads to see her”. In this case, Pierotti inclines to the view that Forain, “In giving her an attention-grabbing dress and a bold singularity” clearly intended her to be “a clandestine sex worker who often trawled for company in cafés”.

A more-positive portrayal of women in cafés might be seen in the American Fernand Lungren’s “In the Café” where two well-dressed women sit talking while a waiter hovers in the background. Or there is Henri Gervex’s “Café Scene in Paris”, with a woman sitting quietly at a table while her male companions cluster around a newspaper. And James Tissot’s impressive  “The Artists’ Wives” is surely representative of respectability? But if a degree of ambiguity is required, Manet’s “Chez le Père Lathuille” has a younger man (a bohemian from his clothing) looking intently at what appears to be an older woman. Pierotti refers to the “central drama of the painting – the circumstances that led to a conservatively dressed bourgeois woman to be eating and drinking in public with a younger, charmingly aggressive man, in broad daylight or en plein air no less”.  It’s worth noting that the novelist and art critic J.K. Huysmans described the painting as “a masterpiece”.

The exhibition that this book accompanies opens in Denmark, so it’s understandable that there is an essay by Dorthe Vangsgaard Niesen on Café de la Régence : The Paris Haunt of Nordic Artists. A painting by the Norwegian Severin Segelcke has a predominantly male assembly in the café while a photograph on the opposite page is of the exterior of the building. It was of historic importance, having “counted Maximilian Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Victor Hugo among ts regulars. It famously hosted the pivotal 1844 meeting between the revolutionary socialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels”. In the late nineteenth century it was the artists who frequented it, especially those from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, with a Russian or two also present. If the Swedish painter Hugo Birger’s “The Scandinavian Artists Lunch at Café Ledoyan”  is anything to go by they were a lively bunch and the women mixed easily with the men. For the Nordic artists the experience of Paris was a part of what was called the “Modern Breakthrough”,  as younger painters, both men and women, threw off the traditional methods of teaching and painting that had dominated the art schools and academic institutions. Among them was Edvard Munch who had been influenced by Jean-Louis Raffaelli’s work. Munch’s “In the Tavern” broke away from colourful scenes of café life and had an obvious down-and-out in a sparsely-furnished bar as its subject.

It’s said that most, if not all of the Scandinavians worked in “a naturalistic style that struck a middle-ground between academic Salon painting and Impressionism”. The Finnish Antti Favén’s “The Chess Players” is an example, as is the Norwegian Sven Jørgensen’s “Portrait of Hans Jaeger”, with its subject leaning on a table with a half-empty bottle and glass in front of him. Jaeger, a writer, described as “a gifted anarchist thinker who challenged the prevalent moral and power structures of his time”, had published a novel called From the Kristiania Bohemia (Kristiania was the original name for Oslo) which was confiscated for blasphemy and offences against decency. Jaeger was fined and sentenced to sixty days in prison. A later book, Sick Love: The Erotic Confessions of a  Bohemian  “describes his passionate but unhappy love affair with Oda Krohg”, a free spirit if ever there was one. Her husband, Christian Krohg, painted a portrait of her which captures some of her liveliness, and a painting by Edvard Munch, “Kristiania Bohemians II”, shows her with her first husband, her current husband, and several of her lovers, including Jappe Nilssen, Hans Jaeger, Gunnar Heiberg, and Munch himself. She amounted to more than just a “bohemian princess”, and was a talented painter whose “Night Birds : Bokken Lasson and Sten Drewsen” is in the book.

“The rise of cafés coincided with a creative boom for lithography, spurred by a resurgent interest in the graphic arts, innovations in printing technology, lessened restrictions for printed materials  in public places, and a growing network of publishers, printers, dealers, and collectors….lithographic prints and posters not only captured and represented the new café society, they also helped to produce it”. It occurs to me that present-day viewers may not be too familiar with many of the paintings of cafés and other places of entertainment in Paris in the Belle Époche, but they will most likely be familiar with posters, especially those produced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It is, however, a fact, as Taylor J. Acosta tells us, that Jules Chéret is “credited with the invention of the artistic poster, bringing the more refined aesthetic and decorative sensibility of artistic lithography to the format of the commercial poster”.

Look at his poster advertising the appearance of the speciality dancer Loĩe Fuller at the Folies Bergere, or his poster for the Eldorado Music Hall, with its pretty girl gaily dancing and a clown with a banjo accompanying her. It was Huysman who said that Chéret’s work was “more representative of Parisian life than many of the formulaic submissions to the official exhibition of the 1879 Salon”.  I’m not discounting Lautrec’s work, which I admire, simply pointing to others in the same sphere of activity. Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, for example, created a poster for Yvette Guilbert after she had complained that Lautrec had made her look “too ugly”. But Lautrec’s “Divan Japonais”, which features Jane Avril, is a classic of its kind. On the question of the influence of posters generally, it’s interesting to note that Nicolas Felix Escalier’s portrait of the elegant Symbolist poet Henri-Francis Joseph de Régnier poses him “in front of a wall plastered with posters”, as if to emphasise his modernity.

Café Society: Art and Sociability in Belle Époque Paris is a thoroughly fascinating book, packed with information about paintings and their painters, as well as providing details about the growth of café society in Paris. It has been designed to accompany an exhibition which opens in Charlottenlund, Denmark, in May this year, and then travels to Memphis and Omaha in the United States. Anyone lucky enough to see it will surely be both entertained and enlightened.