This work is a fine example of Harry Mayerovitch’s ability to merge architectural structure, social observation, and expressive human character into a cohesive urban painting, reflecting Montreal’s 1950s and ‘60s bohemian cafe culture during a period of transformation and modernity.

Although purchased in 1995 with a descriptive title of Restaurant Interior, many Montrealers in their mid to late 70s recognize this as Café Prag, a basement coffee house, a fixture of Montreal’s 1960s folk/coffee-house scene. Toronto’s Yorkville area had similar venues, notably The Purple Onion, The Village Corner, the Penny Farthing and, of course, The Riverboat. Along with Le Bistro, the Yellow Door, Café André, Café Prag was part of the same bohemian folk-club ecosystem of inexpensive food, folk music, poetry, and student politics that drew its clientele from McGill and Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), and that, for a few years in the mid-1960s, Café Prag constituted the westernmost outpost of a bohemian culture that had begun, a decade earlier, in the smoky jazz-poetry rooms at the Birdland above Dunn’s Delicatessen, where a young unknown McGill-educated poet, Leonard Cohen, was a regular feature in the late 1950s.

The painting is dated 1989 but is clearly a recreation of a mid-1960s study.