Night Club Dancers, Paris

Following his studies at the Minneapolis School of Art (now Minneapolis College of Art and Design), Minnesota native Clement Haupers studied in Paris at the Grande Chaumiére and at Académie Colarossi, two schools that catered to visiting American artists. While there, he frequented the raucous and risqué Parisian nightclubs, making lively, spontaneous drawings of the female dancers and other performers. Their partial nudity and the artist’s on-the-spot execution bring to mind similar depictions of nightlife and performers by French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the 1890s.