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Cafes
became all the rage towards the mid to late 19th Century
in Paris and its suburbs.
With the advent of more affordable transportation, the
bourgeoisie as well as artists could leave Paris on weekends and
enjoy the bustle of the outdoors--La Grenouillere was such a destination.
Urban
cafes included Cafe Guerbois or Nouvelle-Athenes, often frequented
during the day predominantly by male artists and critics. Dance halls like Le Moulin de la Galette, near Montmartre, depicted here
by both Renoir and Lautrec were also ver popular. Cafe-concerts
or cabarets bustled in the evening. Degas and especially Lautrec
captured the lure and the dreariness of such haunts.
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Pierre Auguste Renoir
Le
Moulin de la
Galette (1876)
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Renoir
celebrates "la belle vie" , the beautiful life, of the
outdoor dance halls. With more time on their hands, people can now enjoy leisure--they
dance and socialze.At
the outdoor cafes and dance halls, romance and gossip are part
of the show. In both paintings Renoir revels in playing with sunlight.
In the painting of Le Moulin de la Galette, he chooses
dappled sunlight to direct our view throughout the composition,
so that our gaze dances around the picture imitating the dance
depicted in the painting. The play of light creates a sense of dynamism and impermanence
that breaks the rules of the Salon. Dance halls depictions
were frowned upon by the Academy, whose style focused on the classical
rather than the contemporary.
In
A la Grenouillere we see a young girl, stretched out on
a chair, her head comfortably perched on her left arm. She has
an open, self-assured smile--and she seems comfortable on her
own. One has the feeling she is listening attentively to a conversation
nearby or is waiting for her friends or her lover to appear. In
the background we see a river with a boat in the distance. This
painting is about the celebration of leisure.
Since
the cafe is a form of leisure that grew up with the advent of
industrialism, these are themes that are fascinating to the avant-garde
of late 19th Century artists. Renoir wants to celebrate the reality of bustling parties
rather than paint allegories of bacchanalian, classical feasts.
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Pierre Auguste Renoir
A la Grenouillere (1879) |
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Toulouse-Lautrec
Le
Moulin de la
Galette (1876
)
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Lautrec,
on the other hand, is more fascinated by the night scene.
Lautrec
is interested in portraying the taudry, the risky, the weird blueish
colors of the night, punctuated by lit pale white faces. Only
the"tropical" color emanating from hats or wild hairdos
brighten up the otherwise dark scene.
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 Toulouse-Lautrec
At the
Moulin
Rouge (c1892/95) |
The painting At the Moulin
Rouge is about another French artist of the time, Suzanne Valadon. Unlike the picture of Renoir we have
just discussed, this woman does not have a smile. She is tired, her lips curve down, as
if deeply disappointed. The
night cafe certainly does not seem to be as "friendly"
as the cafes depicted by Renoir.
A harsher reality comes through with Lautrec. This type of grim, depressing reality would have been disdained
by the Academy. |
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