Le Chahut

A cancan dancer kicks high at the center of a café-concert, her skirt lifted as musicians below saw away at their instruments, the whole scene built from the systematic dots of Seurat’s pointillism. Painted in 1889–90, at the height of the artist’s brief career, Le Chahut carries his method to a theatrical extreme: rising lines, exaggerated gestures and a gaiety that critics of the day found as artificial as it was dazzling. With its calculated lines of force and its stiff, hieratic rhythm, it is among the most programmatic statements of Neo-Impressionist theory.