Dancer in a Café (also known as Danseuse au café or Au Café Concert and Danseuse) is an oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. The work was created while Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, were publishing, Du "Cubisme",Fondation Gleizes, Son Oeuvre, Du «Cubisme», published by Eugène Figuière in 1912, translated to English and Russian in 1913 the first major defense of the Cubist movement, and it was first displayed (under the title Danseuse) at the 1912 Salon d'Automne in Paris. The work proved controversial within the Municipal Council of Paris, causing debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to exhibit such 'barbaric' art, with the Cubists being defended by the Socialist deputy Marcel Sembat.Patrick F. Barrer: Quand l'art du XXe siècle était conçu par les inconnus, pp. 93–101, gives an account of the debatePeter Brooke, Albert Gleizes, Chronology of his life, 1881–1953Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Histoire & Mesure, no. XXII -1 (2007), Guerre et statistiques, L'art de la mesure, Le Salon d'Automne (1903–1914), l'avant-garde, ses étranger et la nation française (The Art of Measure: The Salon d'Automne Exhibition (1903–1914), the Avant-Garde, its Foreigners and the French Nation), electronic distribution Caim for Éditions de l'EHESS (in French)
Dancer in a Café was first reproduced in a photograph published in an article entitled Au Salon d'Automne "Les Indépendants" in the French newspaper , 2 Octobre 1912. The painting is now located at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo New York.Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo New York, Jean Metzinger, Danseuse au café, 1912
Description Danseuse au café is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 146.1 × 114.3 cm (57.5 × 45 in). The painting represents a woman dancing in a café-concert. She is shown on the right half of the canvas wearing an elaborate gown and holding in her right hand a bouquet of flowers. In the café scene, four others, two women and two men, can be observed on the left of the painting, three of whom are seated in front of a table upon which various items are placed (including beverages), and one of whom is placed seemingly in the background (upper left).
As in other works by Metzinger of the same period, there are elements to be found of the real world, e.g., lighting fixtures, flowers, feathers and lace. The rest of the canvas consists of a series of crescendos and diminuendos of greater or lesser abstraction, of convex and concave forms, of hyperbolic and spherical surfaces, that stem from the teachings of Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne. The Divisionist brushwork, mosaic-like 'cubes', present in his Neo-Impressionist phase (circa 1903 through 1907) have returned giving texture and rhythm to vast areas of the canvas, visible both in the figures and background.Art of the 20th Century, Louis Vauxcelles, 1907, describes the brushwork of Delaunay and Metzinger as mosaic-like 'cubes'
Dancer in a café depicts strikingly fashionable women and men at the height of Parisian fashion in 1912. The dancer dressed in a directoire-style beaded and embroidered green silk velvet and chiffon caped evening gown embellished with celluloid sequins and gold trim, her hair coiffed in an elegant chignon, appears on a low stage or table performing for patrons or guests, all fashionably dressed and coiffed in silk and beaded net gowns, silver brocade and lace full-length gowns, ostrich-plumed hats, patterned suit, fedora and black tie. The artist depicts the figures and background as a series of subdivided facets and planes, presenting multiple aspects of the café scene simultaneously. This can be seen in the deliberate positioning of light, shadow, the nonconventional use of chiaroscuro, of form and color, and the way in which Metzinger assimilates the fusion of the background with the figures. The manifold surface has a complex geometry of reticulations with intricate series of (almost mathematical looking) black lines that appear in sections as underdrawing and in others as overdrawing.David Cottington, 2004, Cubism and its Histories, Manchester University Press
"The style of the clothes is meticulously up-to-the-minute" writes Cottington of Metzinger's three entries at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, "the cut of the dresses, and the relatively uncorseted silhouettes they permitted their weavers to display, owe much more to Poiret than to Worth—indeed the check of one figure in the Dancer and the polka dots of the Woman with a Fan anticipate the post-war geometries, if not the colour harmonies, of Sonia Delaunay's fabrics, while the open-collared sportiness of the dress and cloche-style hat in The Yellow Feather look forward to the 1920s."
Paul Poiret, Isadora Duncan and the art world
The French fashion designer Paul Poiret actually worked for the House of Worth early in the 20th century, however, the "brazen modernity of his designs" proved too much for Worth's conservative clientele. Poiret established his own house in 1903 and threw spectacular parties to promote his work.Hamish Bowles, Fashioning the Century, Vogue (May 2007): 236–250. A condensed version of this article appears online.
In June 1911 Poiret unveiled "Parfums de Rosine" in a grand soirée held at his palatial home (a hôtel particulier avenue d'Antin), a costume ball christened "", (the thousand and second night), attended by the Parisian high-society and the artistic world. Raoul Dufy—with whom Metzinger had exhibited at the gallery of Berthe Weill in 1903, the Indépendants of 1905 and Galerie Notre-Dame-des-Champs in 1908—designed the invitation.Dominique Paulvé, Marion Chesnais, Les Mille et Une Nuits et les enchantements du docteur Mardrus Edition Norma, 2002 Gardens were illuminated by lanterns and live tropical birds. His marketing strategy became a sensation and the talk of Paris. A second scent debuted in 1912, "Le Minaret", again emphasizing the harem theme.Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Secret of Chanel No. 5, HarperCollins, 2010, pp. 25–26
In 1911, the photographer Edward Steichen was challenged by publisher to promote fashion as a fine art by the use of photography.Penelope Niven, 1997, Steichen: A Biography, New York: Clarkson Potter, , p. 352 The photographs of Poiret's gowns, published in the April 1911 issue of the magazine Art et Décoration, are now considered to be the first modern fashion photography shoot.Jesse Alexander, "Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography", HotShoe, no.151, December/January 2008, pp. 66–67 In 1912, Vogel began his renowned fashion journal La Gazette du Bon Ton, showcasing Poiret's designs, along with other leading Paris designers such as the House of Charles Worth, Louise Chéruit, Georges Doeuillet, Jeanne Paquin, Redfern & Sons and Jacques Doucet (the Post-Impressionist and Cubist art collector who purchased Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, directly from Picasso's studio).
Paul Poiret had a lifelong interest in modern art for the purposes of self-promotion and the benefit of his diverse commercial enterprises. In 1911 he rented and restored a mansion built by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV, 1750, called Pavillon du Butard in La Celle-Saint-Cloud (not far from Albert Gleizes' studio and close to the Duchamp residence, where the Section d'Or group gathered) and threw lavish parties, including one of the more famous grandes fêtes dated 20 June 1912, La fête de Bacchus (re-creating the Bacchanalia hosted by Louis XIV at Versailles). Guy-Pierre Fauconnet (1882–1920) designed the invitation. Isadora Duncan, wearing a Hellenic evening gown designed by Poiret,Aydt, Rachel (May 29, 2007). "Rediscovered". Time. "Life in Paris during the Belle Epoque ..." danced on tables among 300 guests and 900 bottles of champagne were consumed until the first light of day.
Isadora Duncan, a girl from California said to have posed for Eadweard Muybridge,Dancer Isadora Duncan, Photo by Eadweard Muybridge, Getty Images placed an emphasis on "evolutionary" dance motion, insisting that each movement was born from the one that preceded it, that each movement gave rise to the next, and so on in organic succession. Her dancing defined the force of progress, change, abstraction and liberation. In France too Duncan delighted her audience.Ann Daly, Done Into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT. 1995,
André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Max Jacob, André Salmon and others such as Kees van Dongen and Raoul Dufy are known to have attended Poiret's balls.20 juin 1912, Isadora Duncan conviée par Paul Poiret aux Festes de BacchusDanse sur les table, l'Histoire, Poiret's 1912 Bacchus party, short summary Salmon writes about one of them in L'Air de la Butte: "Poiret who opens his home to artists of his choice, who prepare, in his gardens, a party in the spirit of 1889".André Salmon, L'Air de la Butte, Les Editions de la Nouvelle France, coll. Chamois, 1945, pp. 163–164 Here Salmon makes reference to the Exposition Universelle (1889).
By 1912, Marie Laurencin had entered into an intimate lesbian relationship with the fashion designer , born Nicole Poiret (the sister of Paul Poiret).Elizabeth Louise Kahn, Marie Laurencin, Une femme inadaptée, in feminist histories of art, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003 In 1906 Nicole Poiret, with her brother Paul and friend Isadora Duncan fought a tense battle for the liberation of women, which began by the abolition of the corset.Sonia Schoonejans, "La danse de l'avenir", from Regards sur Isadora Duncan, Isadora Duncan, Éditions Complexe, 2003, p. 15Florence Montreynaud, L'Aventure des femmes, XXe-XXIe siècle: 1912, Guerre au corset, Éditis, 2011 Laurencin had shown together with Metzinger and other Cubists in Room 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants (at the suggestion of Guillaume Apollinaire), which provoked the 'scandal' out of which Cubism emerged and spread throughout Paris, France, Europe and so on. In the company of her friend Marie Laurencin, Nicole Poiret frequented the bohemian world of Montmartre, Le Bateau-Lavoir, and the Cubists.Benoîte Groult, Mon évasion, Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2008
The sculptor Emile-Antoine Bourdelle had met Isadora in 1903 at Auguste Rodin's picnic, and in 1909 he saw her dance on stage. Bourdelle had previously been asked to decorate the façade of the planned Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. When he saw her he realized that Isadora was his muse: "To me it seemed that there, through her, was animated an ineffable frieze wherein divine frescoes slowly became human realities. Each leap, each attitude of the great artist remains in my memory like flashes of lightning." Bourdelle would return from the theatre and sketch for hours. His images of Isadora are the most varied, for they convey not only Isadora but the vast range of emotions she embodied.John Zavrel, Isadora Duncan and 'The Dance, West-Art, Prometheus, Internet Bulletin for Art, Politics and Science, Nr. 86, Spring 2003.
By 1912 Isadora had become an icon for artists in Paris. Many had first seen her in 1903 when she had gone to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and distributed complimentary tickets to students. The artist Dunoyer de Segonzac published his first Isadora portfolio in 1910, with a preface in verse by the poet Fernand Divoire. At this time, Dunoyer de Segonzac and Metzinger were both teachers at the Académie de La Palette, 104 Bd de Clichy, Paris 18ème, along with Henri Le Fauconnier.
Metzinger's interest in fashion was mirrored by Poiret's interest in modern art. On 18 November 1925 works from the art collection of Paul Poiret were exhibited and sold at a public auction in Paris. Artists in his collection included Derain, van Dongen, Dufresne, Dufy, de La Fresnaye, Othon Friesz, Matisse, Modigliani (Portrait de Max Jacob), Picabia, Picasso, Rouault and Dunoyer de Segonzac.