Parisian cafes

These pochades were executed when Amadeo, installed in Paris two years ago, decided to devote himself entirely to painting after giving up architecture and a caricature interregnum. The contact with the painters of the Cité Falguière is not exempt of the choice of the subject, as well as its treatment. First Toulouse-Lautrec and then Picasso made both innumerable cafes interiors with great freedom of execution in search of a new synthesis. In relation to the whole of Amadeo's work, these Cafés de Paris exhibit, at the outset, a freedom unrelated to academic traditions and based on the most characteristic achievements of the early twentieth century vanguards. The expressiveness of the brushwork, typical of the pochade, along with the synthesis and planning to which the forms are subject, develop agitated masses that create atmosphere. Two zones stand out: one more tonal and warm, where the black coats and the brown of the faces and the tables agitate with certain dynamism; another, serving as background, presents a colder and timbral chromatism with a rhythmic verticality. Regarding the national production of the time, these paintings, for the implicit freedom and understanding, almost presented themselves as goals of an unknown and only belatedly embraced Modernism.