Coffee in 20th-century art

In the twentieth-century, coffee took on new values and was represented in new ways ...

Even Pierre Bonnard, in the canvas titled Coffee, from 1915 (London, Tate Gallery), chose an everyday setting: the girl sipping a cup of coffee is seated at a table with one arm resting on a tablecloth of large red and white squares. The sparse composition is dominated by the large area of the table in the foreground on which rest a coffee pot and white cups, while the human figures are relegated to the background.

Dating to 1914, Juan Gris's Breakfast, used mixed technique with gouache, oil, and crayon on cut-and-pasted printed paper on canvas (New York, Museum of Modern Art - Queens), and is an evolution of cubist themes, promoted beginning in the end of the first decade of the twentieth century by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Although the images are broken down into different levels and what look like multiple views, two white coffee cups can be seen on a wooden table, along with the usual accoutrements: spoons, sugar bowl, glasses, and the morning paper to read during breakfast.

American life, with the places and situations typical of the country, was depicted by Edward Hopper. In his deserted nocturnal visions, which make his works seem like freeze-frames from a movie, coffee is often present: in Automat (1927, Des Moines (Iowa), Des Moines Art Center), the girl is absorbed in her thoughts before a steaming cup of coffee.

In Nighthawks from 1942, also by Edward Hopper (Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago), a few forlorn and melancholy figures sit in a diner, drowning their solitude before the inevitable mug of American style coffee.

Antonio Donghi, an exponent of "Magic Realism", was very active on the Roman and international art scene in the first half of the twentieth-century: in Cocottina, from 1927 (Rome, private collection), a young woman dressed in the style of the day is seated at a small coffee table on which rests the inevitable cup, along with the glass of water that so many people enjoy. The figure holds the observer's gaze, immersed in an unusual silence, surrounded by an empty and unnatural space.

Friends in a café (1930, Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art): this is the title of one of the most famous paintings of twentieth-century Rome - a sort of snapshot of the cultural life of Rome at the time. Amerigo Bartoli portrays intellectuals and artists seated at tables at the Caffè Aragno. Among others, we can identify Ardengo Soffici, Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Riccardo Francalancia, Mario Broglio, and Carlo Socrate. Bartoli also shows himself, in the act of drawing. Through his elegant and detail-rich technique, one can almost hear the tinkle of cups in their saucers and smell the cigarette smoke mixing with the aroma of coffee.

Another famous Roman coffee house, the Caffè Greco, was painted by Renato Guttuso in 1976 in a canvas of the same name (Cologne, Ludwig Museum). Among portraits of existing figures, Japanese tourists, hints of De Chirico, busy waiters, and charming young ladies in red and brown tones, he recreates the slightly chaotic atmosphere of the famous café.

Coffee grinder by Giuseppe Celi, an artist of masterful technical skill and rare sensibility, portrays a simple surface on which rest a few objects that seem to lack any connection with each other: a flowering twig, a few sheets of paper, an armless doll's torso, a cup in the foreground with its spoon resting on the rim, and in the background, the coffee grinder for which the work is named. With a mastery over black and white in its infinite different shades, with its chiaroscuro and contrast between shadows and light, the artist defines the tiniest details and makes it almost into a photograph.