Presented by: Joe Orgill Family Fund for Exhibitions

Organized by: Dixon Gallery and Gardens

Café Society: Art and Sociability in Paris, 1855 – 1914 will examine the development of the French café, a crucial and accessible site for artistic discussion, and, ultimately, how cafés became the subject of works of art themselves.

Café Society will be comprised of more than fifty works of art drawn from public and private collections in the United States and Europe. The exhibition will open at the Ordrupgaard in Charlottenlund, Denmark, on February 5, 2026, and will remain on view through May 31, 2026. The show will then travel to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, where it will run from June 18 – September 6, 2026. Our colleagues at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, will host the final venue of Café Society from September 26, 2026, through January 17, 2027. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by D. Giles, Ltd. in England, featuring essays by Julie Pierotti, the primary organizer of the exhibition, Dorthe Vangsgaard Nielsen, curator at Ordrupgaard, Taylor J. Acosta, Chief Curator & Curator of European Art at The Joslyn, along with Jeffrey Jackson and Scott Haine, scholars noted for their research on French café culture.

Organized into thematic sections, the exhibition and catalogue seek to demonstrate the multitude of factors that led to the rise of café culture, from the French Revolution and the growth of the bourgeoisie to Haussmannization and the Franco-Prussian War. Though ubiquitous, cafés were also infinitely varied in their nature, making them intriguingly difficult to categorize both in the fin-de-siècle and today. As places where Parisians and expatriates of various backgrounds mingled daily, cafés were often considered a microcosm for the city of Paris itself. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the café remained an important part of daily life for artists and provided the inspiration for experiments with new approaches to art-making.

The works presented in Café Society navigate these complexities while simultaneously demonstrating how the café fundamentally changed the fabric of Parisian life, allowing for daily collective social activity. These spaces proliferated rapidly, shifting how people experienced the city and each other, leading to increasingly connected populations. Alongside this social progress, the Paris café became a pervasive motif in European and American art of the nineteenth century.