Dancer in a Café

Danseuse au café (also known as Dancer in a 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", 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. 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 Excelsior, 2 Octobre 1912. The painting is now located at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo New York. 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). Metzinger's "enchanting" Dancer in a Café, writes art historian Daniel Robbins, "exults in the exoticism of the moment, playing off the feathers or plumes of fashionable dressed Parisian women in their Worth gowns against an Amerindian pattern on the costume of the dancer, wittily comparing the height of European fashion with the anthropologically arcane." 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.