Coffee and the Arts

Start here if you are new

Follow this short route before choosing a particular art form:

1. Begin with art and literature. Use this overview to connect the visible objects of coffee drinking with the meanings writers and artists give them.
2. Move to paintings and sculptures. Choose this route if you enjoy looking closely at objects, materials and the arrangement of a scene.
3. Then try coffee and films. Watching how a cup is handled, offered or ignored provides a useful contrast with a still image.

You do not need specialist knowledge to begin. Pick one work, notice what coffee actually does in it, and follow the route that leaves you with another question.

This hub belongs within culture and travel. Its focus is the artwork and the experience of engaging with it, rather than itineraries or claims about where a particular writer supposedly sat.

Coffee and the arts at a glance

Use this table to choose by the kind of attention you enjoy giving a work.

These are routes through the subject, not sealed categories. A useful comparison may begin with a painted coffeepot and end with a poem about a spoon.

Art and literature: begin with the connection

The most productive starting question is not simply, “Where is the coffee?” Ask what role it plays. Is it something a character wants, something people share, or an ordinary object made newly noticeable?

Coffee across art and literature is the best route when those connections interest you more than any single medium. Read it before the specialist pieces if you want a framework for comparing works without treating every cup as the same symbol.

Keep several possibilities separate. Coffee may be the explicit subject of a work, part of its setting, or an image through which something else is expressed. An account of a writer drinking coffee while working is a different kind of evidence again: biography does not automatically explain the finished writing.

The distinction also helps prevent over-reading. First establish what is present, then consider what it might mean. “A cup stands between the figures” is an observation; “the cup represents their emotional distance” is an interpretation that needs an argument.

Paintings and sculptures: look before assigning meaning

A coffeepot as a study of form

Paul Cézanne’s Woman with a Coffeepot, dated about 1895 by the Musée d’Orsay, offers a clear place to begin. The museum describes the woman, cup and coffeepot as simplified forms arranged through strong horizontal and vertical lines.

Rather than searching immediately for a hidden message about coffee, look at the relationship between those objects. Compare the upright pot with the seated figure, then notice how the tabletop is presented. The museum’s reading emphasises the study of form over psychological characterisation.

For sustained looking, choose coffee in visual art. This is the route for exploring how a familiar drinking object becomes part of a composition, or how an object’s material and scale change the way we encounter it.

Not every cup is a coffee cup

Identification matters. Meret Oppenheim’s Object of 1936 is a fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, but MoMA identifies the vessel as a teacup. It is relevant to the wider artistic treatment of drinking objects, not evidence that the work specifically depicts coffee.

Use that example as a checking habit. Before describing a painted drink as coffee, consult the collection record, title or supporting scholarship. A brown liquid, a saucer or a café interior may invite a guess without settling the question.

For sculpture and other three-dimensional work, add a material question: could the object still perform its ordinary function? Oppenheim’s work makes that question particularly uncomfortable, inviting you to imagine the difference between touching fur and drinking through it.

Literature: read beyond the quotation

T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, published in Poetry in 1915, contains the line “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”. The reference is specific and small, but the scale of the statement is a whole life.

One possible reading is that the spoon makes repeated social routines feel like a measure of time. That interpretation becomes more persuasive when considered alongside the speaker’s recurring questions and hesitations, rather than treating the line as a cheerful endorsement of coffee drinking.

Choose coffee in literature when you want to spend time with language, narrators and context. It is the useful next read for moving from an isolated quotation to the passage or work that gives it meaning.

Try reading a coffee reference twice. First, follow the literal action: who prepares, serves or drinks? Then examine the wording: what does the narrator notice, repeat or leave unsaid?

Keep the speaker separate from the author. A fictional voice can express anxiety, vanity, longing or humour without serving as a direct statement of its creator’s beliefs or daily habits.

Literature and film: compare the scene, not just the subject

Coffee in literature and film is the cross-media route. Choose it when your main interest is how a moment changes when it is narrated in words or presented through moving images and sound.

You can make a useful comparison without choosing an adaptation. Take a written coffee scene and an unrelated film scene, then ask both the same questions: who initiates the meeting, who controls its pace, and what ends it?

For the written scene, mark the details the narrator selects. For the filmed scene, note what you can see and hear without explanation. Then consider how each work directs your attention.

Avoid assuming that a shared object produces a shared meaning. A cup placed between two people could be read as hospitality, routine or an obstacle, depending on the surrounding work. The comparison becomes worthwhile when you explain the differences rather than simply collecting matching references.

Film: watch what happens around the cup

Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) is a particularly direct starting point. It brings together eleven black-and-white short pieces organised around encounters involving coffee and cigarettes.

In an interview reproduced by Focus Features, Jarmusch explains that he deliberately repeated dialogue, motifs, camera arrangements and structure. That makes repetition a useful viewing approach: notice what remains familiar between encounters and what each performance changes.

The director also describes performers playing exaggerated versions of their public personas. Do not mistake those performances for straightforward documentary records of the people involved.

Use coffee on screen for the film-focused route, especially if you want to examine performance and the construction of a scene. Keep the literature-and-film piece for comparisons between forms.

On a first viewing, follow the conversation. On a second, choose one physical detail: the cup’s position, a movement towards it, or a pause before someone drinks. Ask whether your attention to that detail changes your reading of the exchange.

This is a viewing exercise, not a rule that every gesture must conceal a message. Sometimes the most useful observation is simply that the coffee gives the performers something to do while they talk.

Music: listen for the story behind the drink

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Coffee Cantata, BWV 211, provides a clear musical entry point. The Netherlands Bach Society dates its creation to around 1734 for concerts at Café Zimmermann in Leipzig.

A cantata is a vocal work made up of several movements. Here, the story concerns Liesgen and her father’s attempts to make her abandon coffee. She ultimately ensures that any prospective husband must allow her to continue drinking it.

The useful listening question is therefore not only whether the music celebrates coffee. Consider how the father and daughter’s competing wishes are presented, and how musical delivery shapes the comedy.

Choose coffee and music when you want a listening-led route through the subject. It is the next read for considering text, voice and performance together rather than gathering song titles alone.

Begin with a translated text alongside a performance. Then listen again without reading, concentrating on the contrast between the voices and the way phrases are shaped. You need not read a score to form and test an interpretation.

Read beyond the familiar European examples

The examples above are starting points, not a complete account of coffee’s artistic meanings. UNESCO’s listing for Turkish coffee culture and tradition, inscribed in 2013, explicitly describes coffee’s place in literature and songs alongside hospitality, conversation and ceremonial occasions.

The listing concerns a living cultural practice. It is not an award to a particular artwork or a claim that every literary coffee reference carries the same cultural meaning.

For further exploration, use that distinction to ask better questions. Which preparation or serving practice does a work show? Does its setting make the invitation to drink significant? What knowledge might its original audience bring that a later reader does not?

Do not reduce those questions to atmosphere alone. A beautifully described pot or cup may belong to a specific social practice, and understanding that practice can sharpen a reading without dictating a single answer.

Build your own looking, reading and listening session

Choose one work rather than attempting a catalogue. Use this simple method:

1. Identify it. Record the creator, title and date from a museum, publisher, archive or official performance source.
2. Describe the coffee connection. Separate what is explicitly present from what you have inferred.
3. Examine one detail. Choose a shape, phrase, gesture, sound or repeated action.
4. Propose a reading. Explain how that detail affects your understanding.
5. Test it against the whole work. Look for anything that complicates your first impression.

Keep your notes in two columns if helpful: “what I can establish” and “what I think it means”. That small separation leaves room for enthusiasm without turning an appealing interpretation into an unsupported fact.