The work proved controversial within the Municipal Council of Paris, causing debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to exhibit such 'barbaric' art, with the Cubists being defended by the Socialist deputy Marcel Sembat.

[2][3][4] Dancer in a Café was first reproduced in a photograph published in an article entitled Au Salon d'Automne "Les Indépendants" in the French newspaper Excelsior [fr], 2 Octobre 1912.

The rest of the canvas consists of a series of crescendos and diminuendos of greater or lesser abstraction, of convex and concave forms, of hyperbolic and spherical surfaces, that stem from the teachings of Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne.

The Divisionist brushwork, mosaic-like 'cubes', present in his Neo-Impressionist phase (circa 1903 through 1907) have returned giving texture and rhythm to vast areas of the canvas, visible both in the figures and background.

The manifold surface has a complex geometry of reticulations with intricate series of (almost mathematical looking) black lines that appear in sections as underdrawing and in others as overdrawing.

[8] "The style of the clothes is meticulously up-to-the-minute" writes Cottington of Metzinger's three entries at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, "the cut of the dresses, and the relatively uncorseted silhouettes they permitted their weavers to display, owe much more to Poiret than to Worth—indeed the check of one figure in the Dancer and the polka dots of the Woman with a Fan anticipate the post-war geometries, if not the colour harmonies, of Sonia Delaunay's fabrics, while the open-collared sportiness of the dress and cloche-style hat in The Yellow Feather look forward to the 1920s.

[10] In June 1911 Poiret unveiled "Parfums de Rosine" in a grand soirée held at his palatial home (a hôtel particulier avenue d'Antin), a costume ball christened "la mille et deuxième nuit", (the thousand and second night), attended by the Parisian high-society and the artistic world.

[14] In 1912, Vogel began his renowned fashion journal La Gazette du Bon Ton, showcasing Poiret's designs, along with other leading Paris designers such as the House of Charles Worth, Louise Chéruit, Georges Doeuillet, Jeanne Paquin, Redfern & Sons and Jacques Doucet (the Post-Impressionist and Cubist art collector who purchased Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, directly from Picasso's studio).

[15] In 1911 he rented and restored a mansion built by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV, 1750, called Pavillon du Butard in La Celle-Saint-Cloud (not far from Albert Gleizes' studio and close to the Duchamp residence, where the Section d'Or group gathered) and threw lavish parties, including one of the more famous grandes fêtes dated 20 June 1912, La fête de Bacchus (re-creating the Bacchanalia hosted by Louis XIV at Versailles).

Isadora Duncan, wearing a Hellenic evening gown designed by Poiret,[16] danced on tables among 300 guests and 900 bottles of champagne were consumed until the first light of day.

[19][20] Salmon writes about one of them in L'Air de la Butte: "Poiret who opens his home to artists of his choice, who prepare, in his gardens, a party in the spirit of 1889".

[22] In 1906 Nicole Poiret, with her brother Paul and friend Isadora Duncan fought a tense battle for the liberation of women, which began by the abolition of the corset.

[23][24] Laurencin had shown together with Metzinger and other Cubists in Room 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants (at the suggestion of Guillaume Apollinaire), which provoked the 'scandal' out of which Cubism emerged and spread throughout Paris, France, Europe and so on.

Three months after La fête de Bacchus Metzinger exhibited Dancer in a café at the Salon d'Automne, held in Paris at the Grand Palais from 1 October to 8 November 1912.

Despite Metzinger's conceptualism of Cubist painting—the reflexive function of complex geometry, juxtaposed multiple perspectives, planar fragmentation suggesting motion and rhythmic play with various symmetry types—there does manifest itself in Danseuse a certain spatial depth or perspective reminiscent of the optical illusion of space of the Renaissance; in the way, for example, the wall-mounted lighting fixtures become smaller with distance, and so too the man at the upper left appearing smaller in the background than his counterparts in the foreground.

[29] There are, however, objective factors that prevent the illusion from succeeding completely: (1) the canvas is two-dimensional while reality is three-dimensional, (2) the uniqueness of the view-point (humans have two eyes).

The "busy geometry of planar fragmentation and juxtaposed perspectives has a more than reflexive function," notes Cottington, "for the symmetrical patterning of its reticulations (as in the dancer's décolletage) and their rhythmic parallel repetitions suggest not only movement and diagrams but also, metonymically, the mechanised object-world of modernity.

Turning his attention fully towards the geometric abstraction of form, Metzinger allowed the viewer to reconstruct the original volume mentally and to imagine the object depicted within space.

In the article Metzinger notes the similarities between Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, stressing the distance between their works and traditional perspective.

[33] Apollinaire, possibly with the work of Eadweard Muybridge in mind, wrote a year later of this "state of motion" as akin to "cinematic" movement around an object, revealing a "plastic truth" compatible with reality by showing the spectator "all its facets".

"[38] There are two methods of regarding the division of the canvas, according to Metzinger and Gleizes, (1) "all the parts are connected by a rhythmic convention", giving the painting a centre from which the gradations of colour proceed (or towards which they tend), creating spaces of maximum or minimum intensity.

(2) "The spectator, himself free to establish unity, may apprehend all the elements in the order assigned to them by creative intuition, the properties of each portion must be left independent, and the plastic continuum must be broken into a thousand surprises of light and shade."

It was also a central idea of Jean Metzinger's Note sur la Peinture, 1910; Indeed, prior to Cubism painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view-point.

The concept of 'mobile perspective' is essentially an extension of a similar principle stated in Paul Signac's D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, with respect to color.

The history of the Salon d'Automne is marked by two important dates: 1905, bore witness to the birth of Fauvism (with the participation of Metzinger), and 1912, the xenophobe and anti-modernist quarrel.

Recall too, it was Vauxcelles who, on the occasion of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, wrote disparagingly of 'pallid cubes' with reference to the paintings of Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Léger and Delaunay.

The major contributors were André Mare, a decorative designer, Roger de La Fresnaye, Jacques Villon and Marie Laurencin.

In the house were hung cubist paintings by Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger (Woman with a Fan, 1912).