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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. The rest of the canvas consists of a series of crescendos and diminuendos of greater or lesser abstraction, of convex and concave forms, of hyperbolic and spherical surfaces, that stem from the teachings of Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne. The Divisionist brushwork, mosaic-like 'cubes', present in his Neo-Impressionist phase (circa 1903 through 1907) have returned giving texture and rhythm to vast areas of the canvas, visible both in the figures and background.
Dancer in a café depicts strikingly fashionable women and men at the height of Parisian fashion in 1912. The dancer dressed in a directoire-style beaded and embroidered green silk velvet and chiffon caped evening gown embellished with celluloid sequins and gold trim, her hair coiffed in an elegant chignon, appears on a low stage or table performing for patrons or guests, all fashionably dressed and coiffed in silk and beaded net gowns, silver brocade and lace full-length gowns, ostrich-plumed hats, patterned suit, fedora and black tie. The artist depicts the figures and background as a series of subdivided facets and planes, presenting multiple aspects of the café scene simultaneously. This can be seen in the deliberate positioning of light, shadow, the nonconventional use of chiaroscuro, of form and color, and the way in which Metzinger assimilates the fusion of the background with the figures. The manifold surface has a complex geometry of reticulations with intricate series of (almost mathematical looking) black lines that appear in sections as underdrawing and in others as overdrawing."The style of the clothes is meticulously up-to-the-minute" writes Cottington of Metzinger's three entries at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, "the cut of the dresses, and the relatively uncorseted silhouettes they permitted their weavers to display, owe much more to Poiret than to Worth—indeed the check of one figure in the Dancer and the polka dots of the Woman with a Fan anticipate the post-war geometries, if not the colour harmonies, of Sonia Delaunay's fabrics, while the open-collared sportiness of the dress and cloche-style hat in The Yellow Feather look forward to the 1920s."
Daniel Robbins Georges Seurat Woman with a Fan Paul Cézanne right Sonia Delaunay Salon d'Automne chiaroscuro Divisionist left