A dance hall at the foot of the hill

The Bal Tabarin was a real place, and you could have walked into it. It sat at 36 rue Victor-Massé, in the district called Pigalle (pronounced “pee-GAL”), at the foot of the Montmartre hill rather than up on it. People loosely say “Montmartre,” and the spirit is right (this is the cheap, raffish, painters-and-pleasure quarter on the city’s northern edge), but the hall itself stood just below the hill, in Pigalle proper. Worth being precise, since the address is the point: this is the nightlife belt, the strip of cabarets and dance halls where Paris went after dark. A bal, in this period, simply meant a public dance hall, a room you paid to enter and dance in, with a band and a bar and, at the fancy ones, a floor show.

It opened on 20 December 1904, run by a composer and bandleader named Auguste Bosc, and it was an instant hit. Costume balls. Floor shows. Electric light, which in 1904 was still novel enough to be a draw in itself. And dancing, of every kind the era did: the waltz, the polka, and the high-kicking, skirt-flinging cancan, the riotous chorus-line dance that was Montmartre’s signature export and that the Bal Tabarin took on more fully after the nearby Moulin Rouge burned down in 1915. This was a loud, bright, slightly disreputable, thoroughly modern room, exactly the kind of place a young painter in love with motion and light would haunt. The hall ran until 1953, when the owners of the nearby Moulin Rouge bought it and shut it down; the building was pulled down after a final gala in 1963. By then it was the painting, not the building, that kept the name alive.

Now the move that makes this a Futurist painting and not a postcard. Severini did not set up an easel at the Bal Tabarin and paint what he saw. He painted what he remembered, the whole sensation of a night there, recalled and reassembled in the studio. A snapshot of a dance hall would freeze the dancers at a single beat. Severini wanted the opposite: the spin and the music and the lights and the drink and the odd thing you half-saw across the room, all of it, all at once. The picture is not a record of one instant. It is a record of an experience that happened over an evening, compressed into one image.

He had philosophy on his side for this. The ideas of the French thinker Henri Bergson (1859–1941) were everywhere in Severini’s Paris circle. Bergson argued that real lived time isn’t a row of separate frozen instants but a continuous, flowing durationthat memory holds all together, the past bleeding into the present. You don’t experience a dance as a series of stills; you experience it as one swimming whole, and your memory of it later is even more fused than that. Severini set out to paint exactly that fused whole. Which is why, instead of a tidy scene, you are about to get a controlled explosion.