Szene im Café

Szene im Café at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, painted in 1899, offers a slightly more theatrically staged café scene than his Cleveland version — a variation within a subject type he explored across multiple canvases in the late 1890s. The Neue Pinakothek assembled its French Post-Impressionist collection through a combination of purchases and donations that reflected Munich's particular cultural openness to French modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Munich was, alongside Berlin and Paris, one of the centers of European artistic exchange, and its collectors pursued Post-Impressionist work with genuine enthusiasm. Vuillard's café interior creates the warm enclosed atmosphere of the Parisian public room through his characteristic treatment of artificial light and its softening effect on the patterns of walls, tabletops, and human faces — an atmosphere that Munich collectors would have recognized as both specifically Parisian and universally intimate. His café scenes belong to the period when his Nabi formal language was beginning to relax from its most extreme flatness toward the slightly more atmospheric approach of his mature years.

The café interior creates a warm, enclosed space rendered with Vuillard's mature command of artificial light and its softening effect on the patterns of a public interior. Figures and furniture are integrated through the unified handling of paint surface, the café's atmosphere suggested as much through color temperature as through spatial description.