Poets, musicians, writers, singers, artists, shadow play...
Part artist salon, part rowdy music hall; a weekly magazine featuring literary writings, news from the cabaret, poetry, and political satire - bring back Le Chat Noir!
There’s something quite disturbing about trying to write about my recent experience of five days in Paris. It feels a bit like deciding to paint a landscape and then submitting it to a conventional gallery; suddenly I would be in the thing that I’ve never wanted to be part of - ‘the art world’, where a person’s creative output is judged against the entire history of European art, and entangled in the politics of who knows who and who has the right connections/pedigree.
How can I write about an area of Paris which I knew nothing about, but which is likely to be well-known to many of my potential readers; about the work I saw there which was by artists who everyone has studied in their journey through European art history? But write I will, because it’s never been my intention to teach or inform, only to explore and to write about the things I find.
I hadn’t thought in depth about the Impressionists since my art A level. I didn’t prepare myself in any way for this trip, and had ended up in Montmartre quite by chance. Totally overwhelmed by the Paris-ness of Paris, when our host told us that the museum was within walking distance, we decided to take a look.
The Musée De Montmartre is located in a building which was occupied by numerous artists at the turn of the 20th century, including Renoir, Bernard, Dufy, Valedon and Utrillo. My first stop was its glorious and peaceful garden, which felt like a holy miracle, given that the museum is about three minutes walk from the Basilique de Sacré Coeur and the tourist hordes.
Am I really going to tell you about my slice of Quiche Lorraine? But for the April 2026 experience of a naive in Paris - the quiche was central (of course I have no picture of it, who on earth takes pictures of their food…?). Accustomed to the cold slabs of undercooked pastry topped with a thin layer of watery egg which are the norm here in Scotland, what arrived was monstrous. Three inches high. I swear. Crisp, buttery pastry, deep Indian yellow egg, multiple layers of top quality ham. This was art.
As I was eating, I noticed a swing, long ropes from a high tree, which women kept stopping at and climbing onto to have their picture taken. I wish I’d taken their pictures myself now; each person arranging themselves differently, some sitting, some standing, some coy, some laughing, some serious. I understood that this was no ordinary swing.
It turned out to be the very swing that Renoir painted in the summer of 1876 for La Balançoire.
If you look to the left of my picture you can just see it (on a spring, for health and safety…).
I don’t know what to say about physically being in the places where things like this happened. Perhaps it’s an example of ritual time, where suddenly the fabrication of a linear past disappears, and all that remains is a timeless now which contains everything that has ever happened in that place, all at once1.
Eventually I came out of my quiche-fugue, and went into the museum.
The first thing I noticed were cats. Above the entrance, and then, in the first room, these two paintings.
These images resonated in a way that I can’t describe. There’s a quality to art made in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century for me. It’s something that I can’t put my finger on, which makes me wonder whether there’s something inherent in paintings that were breaking new cultural ground at the time that they were made. Is that even possible? Or is it something more prosaic like the quality of the paper or canvas, or the more natural pigments that were used at that time, or the fact that there was no acrylic paint, only oils?
I was mesmerised by the texture of the canvas, much rougher than you would see now, and the way that the yellow ochre and alizarin crimson were smeared across it so thinly in places that you could see the grain coming through. The colour was gorgeous.
The cats were wild.
Chats et Lunes, about 1885, by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlin (1859-1923).
This presentation of a variety of cats on a neutral background related to Steinlen’s numerous illustrations in 1884-85 for the Chat Noir journal. The frieze is a remarkable early painting by Steinlen what was lost for over a century. Cats play a dominant role in Steinlen’s art: his illustrations, posters, prints, paintings and sculptures, all pay homage to the feline personification of human traits. Steinlen’s home in Montmartre at 58 rue Caulaincourt was filled with cats to the point that it was nicknamed Cat’s Cottage
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I learned that the Chat Noir was ‘the first modern cabaret’, in the sense of people sitting drinking at tables while being entertained by a variety show on stage. The black cat was apparently an artistic reference to Paris, where ‘stray and meowing cats roamed especially at night’.
Founded by Rodolphe Salis in 1881, in a small space of two narrow rooms, one behind the other, the first Chat Noir barely held thirty of the artists, writers and musicians who were its clientele.
In 1982, Salis began promoting the cabaret with Le Chat Noir journal:
The Chat Noir is the most extraordinary cabaret in the world. You rub shoulders with the most famous men of Paris, meeting there with foreigners from every country in the globe… It’s the greatest success of the age! Come on in!! Come on in!!
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Three and a half years later it moved to a larger venue, attracting poets and singers, becoming the birthplace of a short-lived movement known as Les Arts Incohérents (an early precursor of Dada), and branching out into shadow play and comic monologues.
Eventually the cabaret was responsible for renewing the popularity of the shadow play in France, developing an innovative technique using zinc silhouettes:
Advertised by this poster, the shadow play toured France, Tunis, Algeria and Belgium.
Before leaving the room with the cats and the zinc shadow play scenes, I want to mention an extraordinary painting which was displayed between the shadow play painting above and this one:
This is ‘Parce Domine, Parce Populo Tuo’ (Spare Lord, spare your people’) by Adolphe-Leon Willette, 1857-1926.
A work created for the Chat Noir cabaret, the Parce Domine, Parce Populo Tuo is a cry of distress and terror issued forth toward God by a suffering people. The atmosphere created by the work and its muted colours help to relate the scene. A farandole cascades down from Montmartre. ‘At the head of the retinue Pierrot commits suicide’. Taken from a play on words on the liturgy of words, this macabre dance can be seen as an allegory of death and the futility of life and its frivolous pleasures.
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A Pierrot dancing with a white-winged woman, another playing a guitar with wild abandon, a woman with tambourine dancing her stockings off.
A woman riding a black cat…
…with a shocked-looking Pierrot trapped below her in a mayhem of women, someone smoking above his head.
Multiple angst-ridden Pierrots, including the one at the front with a pistol (sorry, didn’t seem to include that in my closeup), who’s being assaulted by a black-winged fairy, presumably death.
Some rather young-looking naked woman gazing from the sidelines.
And above them all, a line of dancing ballerinas slowly dissolving towards a huge skull.
Here’s an interpretation from one internet source:
Willette painted the scene of Pierrot’s suicide and his funeral procession of revelers for a famous cabaret on the Parisian hill of Montmartre, Le Chat Noir (the Black Cat). The painting hung there as a prompt and a notice to its patrons: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” (Isaiah: 22:13)
Look closely at Willette’s painting and you’ll see many renditions of Pierrot (in the foreground, right to left) with his signature skullcap and pale face: as a lad tossing away money, lifting a dancing girl, playing music, romancing a beautiful angel, tripping over himself with empty pockets, being relieved of his soul by a black-clad angel with dark wings, and finally, next to the lead nun carrying the cross, making his ascension to heaven. The painting is his biography.
Over the centuries, Pierrot’s constellation of incarnations in theater and art—from the bungling buffoon to the lonely sufferer whose only true friend is the moon—made him Everyman: the doomed innocent blessed and burdened with the follies, foibles, and fatal flaw of being human.
Apparently the same artist also designed the Moulin Rouge.
There’s so much more that could be explored here, but I’m going to end with the original sign for Le Chat Noir, which was apparently also designed by Adolphe Willette.
The museum has a later sign on display which was created by Caran D’Ache in 1882, based on Willette’s original (with reflections!).
It’s all impossibly romantic and no doubt the reality of this heady time was far from the fantasy we create about it now.
But I do love the idea of a place like this where all the arts came together; where painters made posters as well as oil-paintings, and where music and literature and art and dance were in riotous conversation with each other.
Should we revive Le Chat Noir?
For a big discussion of different ways of conceptualising time, see my previous essays on this topic. You can find most of them in this one, which is the fifth in the series, and includes links to the previous discussions at the end. Then there are two more after that which develop the idea of time as a spiral, and time as a well.
This makes me want to go to Paris again, I have had few visits, none recently. More importantly, you inspire me to visit everywhere I go with this attitude of look anew, never mind what you have heard or seen previously. (It isn't easy!) Thanks for writing and sharing the pictures.
I had not realized how completely Le Chat Noir has been following me since I was born. This goes back to your article about the curtains!
The cat with the moon at the end of your post is my first recollection of a Halloween cutout decoration for our apartment window to the street. I must have been about 2! Never realized it was from real art!
A copy of the original Chat Noir poster you show (red, yellow, black) was on my German grandmother’s wall above her very mod zebra striped sofa in an ensemble with Jane Avril ( Lautrec) and Picasso line drawings of hand holding flowers and a bather with a baby. It was quite the commercial rage to have prints of these on lucite in the bath at the time. My grandmother preferred them featured with her lucite lamp, lucite clock, and lucite Calder style mobile. I had no clue any of this was art. It was just decor I was born around.
So much more interesting to see all this through your discovery! I am glad you did wrote about it anyway. It’s been ages since I have been in Paris and I have a terrible habit of staying in Le Quartier Latin since I was in my 20s. It seems I will have to change that!
It’s always wonderful to finally have the real food where it was actually conceptualized—and realize how much better it is firsthand. I will never forget the first time I had a real Spanish Omlette. Almost impossible to duplicate correctly here and they just produce them in mass there. I could eat that every day. I hope you had some other wonderful meal experiences as well!
And most importantly—that you sat outside at a bistro with a café au lait and croissant or madeleine just letting the time go by…. Reading, of course 😉