In the Little Café 1911

Moriz Jung created this print, "In the Little Café", in Austria, at the beginning of the 20th century. It offers a glimpse into the social dynamics of Viennese café culture. The image creates meaning through caricatured figures and exaggerated expressions. The waiter’s forced smile as he carries a tray of coffee and the server girl, numbered 533, leaning on his back as she laughs, point to the social norms that govern labor within this space. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a place of strict social division and hidden antagonisms, and the café served as a space where those tensions could be masked, if never fully resolved. It was also a site of cultural production where artists and intellectuals produced new ideas and theories in uneasy company with bankers and aristocrats. To understand this artwork better, we can examine sociological studies of Viennese culture at the time, and also look at historical accounts of the city's economy and class structure. Art is never produced in a vacuum. Its meanings are always contingent on its social and institutional context.