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Night Café

Louis Marcoussis (French, born Poland, 1883–1941)

c. 1923

Medium: oil on canvas
Classification: Painting
Dimensions: Framed: 87.3 x 105.7 x 7 cm (34 3/8 x 41 5/8 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 70.5 x 88.1 cm (27 3/4 x 34 11/16 in.)
Culture: France, 20th century
Museum: Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
Credit line: Given in loving memory of W. Chave and Mary Tyler McCracken by their daughters
Rights: Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it: Kids profiles and older: it shows nature, places, still life or a children's book. How works are placed

About this work

Following Cubist principles, this painting depicts a table from multiple perspectives, providing different views of various objects simultaneously. Louis Casimir Ladislas Markus was born in Warsaw, Poland, into a Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism. In 1903, he moved to Paris where he met poet Guillaume Apollinaire and artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. He then began experimenting with Cubism. Also of Polish descent, Apollinaire had changed his own name and urged the artist to change his name to Marcoussis after a French village. The yellow hot air balloon and the French flag glimpsed out of the window pay homage to the artist’s adopted homeland.