ART SEMINAR GROUP WEBINAR - ONLINE PROGRAM THROUGH ZOOM

The Café, the Music Hall and the Dance Hall in French Art, 1875-1895

Chris Boïcos, professor of art history for the University of Southern California Paris program and founder (2007) and main lecturer for Paris Art Studies

The Walters Art Museum owns a remarkable oil painting by Édouard Manet entitled “The Café-Concert” painted in 1878-79. The Paris-based art historian Chris Boïcos will be using this work as the basis for a presentation of the theme of the café and the music hall in French painting during the Impressionist era.

In a famous essay published in 1862 the great poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire introduced the concept of “modern life” as the crucial subject that artists of the 19th century should be focusing on. Beginning with the generation that included Manet and Edgar Degas in the 1860s and continuing with the Impressionist group founded in the 1870s, the depiction of modern Paris - its boulevards, railway stations, theaters, apartment buildings and its popular venues of entertainment -- cafés, brasseries, music halls, dance halls, circuses, and fairgrounds -- become legitimate themes for the new painting, in direct competition with the historical subjects favored by the conservative art world.

Our lecture will trace the evolution of the depiction of the “café concert” (the distinctive Parisian version of the 19th century music hall, the café and the dance hall) in the art of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. We will be connecting Manet’s Walters masterpiece with key predecessors like Degas’ “Absinthe” from 1876 and later depictions of Paris nightlife like Georges Seurat’s “Chahut” (1889-90) and Toulouse-Lautrec’s “At the Moulin Rouge” (1890). Renoir, van Gogh, Forain, Béraud, and Boldini are the other major painters whose paintings of late 19th century Paris dance halls and cafés will be presented. These artists reacted with both fascination and ambivalence to the attractions of the modern city in which cheap alcohol, entertainment, and women were perpetually on sale. The urban and social context of 19th century Paris will provide the background for our visual analysis of these first, fascinating depictions of the popular entertainments of a modern metropolis.

$15 door fee for guests and subscribers (no fee for members)