The modern city was a site of leisure and entertainment. Pablo Picasso's The Absinthe Drinker (1901) and Maurice de Vlaminck's At the Bar (1900) deploy expressionistic colors and jabbing brushstrokes to denote the dissolute nature of the women who inhabit these vitriolic depictions of café life, while Magnus Enckell's The Concert (1898) tenders a more genteel view of the cosmopolitan consumption of spectacle. Modernity itself is the subject of some metropolitan scenes, embodied by the electric lights in Maximilien Luce's Neo-Impressionist The Sainte Chapelle, Paris (1902) and Giacomo Balla's pre-Futurist The World's Fair at Night (Luna Park) (1900).

Pablo Picasso, The Absinthe Drinker, 1901. Oil on cardboard, 65.5 x 51 cm. Private collection. © 2000 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.