Originating in the eighteenth century as part of the bourgeois public sphere, salons were institutions of modern culture, led by the figure of the salonière, as Emily Bilsky and Emily Braun have argued in Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation (2005). Whereas traditional salons emanated from Tischgesellschaften (table societies) and were linked to inclusiveness and reason (Habermas 1989, 34–5), the modernist salons cultivated play with ludic and erotic identities, ‘disrupt[ing] the public sphere’s ideal of transparency’ (Dean 2001, 245). Modernist salons also became vehicles for ‘advancing and disseminating new art movements’ (Bilski and Braun 2005, 84).