Café Society
The spring season opens with the landmark exhibition Café Society: Art and Communities in Belle Époque Paris. In the exhibition, artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Édouard Vuillard invite the public into the Parisian cafés of the decades around 1900. Here artists, writers, musicians and poets gathered to discuss art and forge new communities, while coffee, beer, wine and absinthe fuelled the conversation. Nordic artists too — among them Edvard Munch, Anders Zorn and J.F. Willumsen — flocked to the French establishments, where they depicted modern life, which among avant-garde artists had replaced the historical and mythological subjects that had defined art throughout the century.
As modern urban life and café culture became a central motif for a new era of art, cafés took on the role of informal incubators for new artistic ideas and movements. Paris became the hub of an increasingly international art world, and the city's many foreign artists found inspiration in modern café life and the communities that grew from it. In the late nineteenth century, Nordic artists such as Edvard Munch, Christian and Oda Krohg, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, J.F. Willumsen and Anders Zorn were regular visitors to the legendary Café de la Régence on the Right Bank of the Seine, where they could find newspapers and letters from home. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the international art scene around the Cubists — Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Elisabeth Epstein among them — shifted to the Left Bank, where cafés remained a central part of the artists' daily lives and artistic subject matter.
Café Society: Art and Communities in Belle Époque Paris has been organised in collaboration with the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, USA, and the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. The exhibition will subsequently travel to both American venues.
The exhibition is generously supported by
A.P. Møller Fonden / Augustinus Fonden / Ny Carlsbergfondet / Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond