3 FEBRUARY 2026 – 31 MAY 2026

CAFÉ SOCIETY

Art and sociability in Paris, 1865-1914

The spring season kicks off with the spectacular exhibition Café Society. Art and Sociability in Paris, 1865‒1914. In this exhibition, the audience is invited to visit Parisian cafés by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Édouard Vuillard during the belle époque (period preceding World War I). Artists, writers, musicians, and poets used to meet here to discuss art and nurture new alliances in dialogues stimulated by coffee, beer, wine, and absinth. Scandinavian artists, among them Edvard Munch, Anders Zorn, and J. F. Willumsen, also flocked to the French venues to depict modern life, a motif adopted by avant-garde artists to replace the historical and mythological motifs that had defined art for centuries.

Gradually, as modern city and café life became core motifs in the art of the new era, cafés began to function as informal hatching grounds for new artistic ideas and trends. Paris became the centre of an increasingly international art world, and the many foreign artists in the city found inspiration in fashionable café life and the alliances formed there. Towards the end of the 1800s, Scandinavian artists including Edvard Munch, Christian and Oda Krohg, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, J. F. Willumsen, and Anders Zorn were regular guests at the legendary Café de la Régence on the right shore of the Seine where they could read newspapers and receive letters from home. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the international art scene around cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Elisabeth Epstein moved to the left shore of the Seine where the cafés remained a central part of the artists’ everyday life and motifs.

The exhibition Café Society. Art and Sociability in Paris is organised in collaboration with Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, USA, and Joslyn Art Museum in Nebraska, USA. Later, the exhibition will show at the two American museums.

The exhibition is supported by Ny Carlsbergfondet.