The Jumble Shop, New York 1960s

The Jumble Shop opened as an antique shop in New York City in 1921, with owners Frances Russell and Winifred Tucker also serving tea and cake to friends in the front room. It soon became apparent that more people wanted to hang out there than buy antiques and the first dinner was served in 1922. Eventually more space became necessary, and the owners moved across the street to 28 West Eighth street in Greenwich Village, keeping the antiques as décor and retaining the Jumble Shop sign. Greenwich Village in the 1920s was the epicenter of the Bohemian lifestyle, like Paris’s Montparnasse. Artists, writers, sculptors and thinkers flocked there to embrace liberated lifestyles, jazz, and underground salons. The Jumble Shop started to host art exhibitions with pictures selected by a committee led by American painters Guy Pene du Bois, H.E. Schnackenberg and Reginald Marsh. Other distinguished patrons of the café were artists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis. The American dancer and teacher Martha Graham and composer Deems Taylor were regulars, as was sculptor Daniel Chester French, most famous for the Seated Lincoln in Washington DC’s Lincoln Memorial. Another American sculptor James Earle Fraser had a studio in Macdougal Alley, just behind Eighth Street, and he ate lunch there every day. His most iconic work called End of The Trail depicts a Native American and his horse, both weary in body and spirit at the end of their journey, is on display in the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. When Fraser moved out of his studio, the Jumble Shop knocked down walls and expanded into it, creating a Tap Room with a wooden bar removed from an empty nearby saloon. Cafes like the Jumble Shop became important places for artists to unwind with their peers. The pioneering American abstract expressionist Lee Krasner said in a 1964 oral history recorded by the Smithsonian’s Archives of America Art: “The Jumble Shop was a place in the Village where you could sit down in the evening and nurse a glass of beer and talk about your art problems.’ As well as art exhibitions, a debating society called The Club was run by Jumble Shop patrons. Literary out-of-towners also found their way there, such as the French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, American writer and novelist Patricia Highsmith and J D Salinger, the celebrated author of ‘Catcher in the Rye.’ The Jumble Shop continued to be a celebrated haunt for the avant-garde arts community in the 20s and 30s, serving as one of Greenwich Village’s creative salons. But as the years went on, Greenwich Village began to lose its Bohemian spirit and artists moved away. The Jumble Shop lasted until 1967 when its bankruptcy notice was posted in the New York Times. This 1960s menu cover features a rendering of The Card Players, a series of oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), whose influence on the Jumble Shop circle of artists was profound. One version of The Card Players was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price estimated at $250 million (about $350 million in today’s prices). Gallery quality Giclée print on natural white, matte, 100% cotton rag, acid and lignin free archival paper using Epson Ultrachrome HD archival inks. Custom printed with border for matting and framing. Each order includes a print of the interior menu. All printed in USA.