Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin

A Paris dance hall remembered from the inside out, with real sequins glued into the paint, the words VALSE and POLKA floating in the spin, national flags strung across the top, and a tiny nude riding an open pair of scissors.

1. 1
   The two dancers at the heart of it

   Center, the pair of whirling women in a flounced dress

   Two dancing women hold the middle of the canvas, one with light, blond curls toward the left and one with darker hair toward the right, caught mid-whirl in a swirling, flounced dress (sources read its color as pink-and-purple, or as white, blue and pink, so trust the spin more than any one swatch). They are the still-turning core the whole picture flies apart from, and they are doing what the hall did best, dancing. The Bal Tabarin’s signature act, the high-kicking French cancan, is the world they belong to, even if no single set of legs here is captioned “the cancan.”
2. 2
   The real sequins, set into the paint

   Across the center, in looping lines over the dancers’ dress

   Look closely at the dress and the looping patterns over it are not painted dots. They are actual sequins, small reflective discs fixed into the wet paint, so the surface physically catches and throws the room’s light back at you as you move past it. This is the work’s signature trick and the reason its full medium line reads “oil on canvas with sequins.” Most painters render glamour. Severini glued it on. The shimmer of a dance-hall gown is not described here; it is the literal, three-dimensional truth of the object on the wall.
3. 3
   The words floating in the spin

   Scattered through the swirl; “VALSE” reads toward the lower right

   Painted words drift through the chaos, the Cubist lettering device Severini lifted straight from Picasso and Braque, who had started gluing and stenciling real type into their canvases a year or two earlier. The two clearest are VALSE (French for waltz) and POLKA, two dances named right on the surface, sound made into something you can read. They turn the picture into a kind of score: not just the look of the night but the names of the music it moved to. (No other word is reliably legible here; read these two and resist the urge to find more.)
4. 4
   The small nude riding an open pair of scissors

   High in the upper jumble, a small, realistic figure

   Up in the upper jumble, far smaller and far more lifelike than anything around it, a realistic nude woman sits astride an open pair of scissors, riding them like a hobbyhorse. It is the strangest of all the dream-fragments, a jolt of plain figurative drawing dropped into the abstraction, and it reads the way the night itself ran, as a cabaret turn or a costume-ball gag remembered through several drinks. (Yes, scissors. Not a goose, not a bird, an open pair of scissors, which every source that reads the figure agrees on.)
5. 5
   The broken blaze of the lights

   Throughout the upper field, the brilliant shattered facets

   The hall’s electric lighting is everywhere and nowhere, splintered into bright faceted shards that ricochet off mirrors, glasses and spangles across the whole upper half of the picture. There is no single chandelier you can point to and name; the light has been broken into pieces and scattered, which is exactly the point, a remembered glare rather than one fixture. And because the sequins are real, part of that light is not depicted at all. It is actually bouncing off the canvas, the only painting in this movement where the glare is partly the room’s and partly yours.
6. 6
   The night’s odd cast: flags, a camel, a cat, the glasses

   Across the top, national flags and streamers; among the fragments a camel-rider, a cat’s head, martini glasses

   Strung across the top of the canvas are national flags and streamers, the kind of bunting a festive hall hangs up. Hunt through the rest of the swirl and more legible little incidents surface: a North-African man riding a camel, a black cat’s head, and the slim stems of martini glasses, the night’s drink. The cat and the glasses are plainly the night’s nonsense, snapshots shuffled together. But the flags, and the man on the camel with them, also let the world outside the hall leak in: 1912 sat in the middle of Italy’s colonial war against the Ottomans in North Africa, and Severini was a committed Italian nationalist, so scholars often read the camel as a topical glance at that war rather than a pure cabaret gag. (Some also read the straw-hatted figure at lower right as Severini himself. Treat that as a reading the experts float, not a fact the canvas confirms.)