Paul Strör artwork • painting • previously for sale At the Apachenbar, Paris

Little is known about the life and work of the Austrian painter Paul Strör. Born in 1884, he must have visited Paris regularly in the early decades of the 20th century, then the Mecca for young artists. Scenes from the everyday life of the upper class and the fashionable (Parisian) city and nightlife were his speciality. The Apache bar was a curious phenomenon in 1920s Paris. They danced the Apache dance, a wild, rough dance that originated in the Parisian underworld (Apaches'). For a long time he was danced only by criminals in the clubs of the Parisian underworld ('caveaux des innocents'), but in the 1920s he became fashionable and murderers and mobsters rented themselves by the hour to ladies of the better class to dance the Apache in Apachebars. This was very lucrative for them.