Posts
Come hear the music play
Life is a cabaret, old chum
Come to the cabaret
Put down the knitting, the book, and the broom
It's time for a holiday
Life is a cabaret, old chum
So come to the cabaret
Come taste the wine
Come hear the band
Come blow the horn" - Cabaret (Kander/Ebb) - performed by Liza Minnelli, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzergald, Brenda Lee, Judi Dench, Mantovani, and Max Bygraves among others.
If life really was a cabaret you wouldn't need to put down books, brooms, or knitting to go to it - because you'd already be there. Life is not a cabaret and cabarets are not life*. They are a part of life, sure, but they are also a distraction from life. The Barbican Art Gallery's Into the Night:Cabarets & Clubs in Modern Art did a good job of showing the cabaret phenomenon is not unique to any country, any continent, any era, or even any particular set of circumstances.
Cabarets can appear in politically fraught times (Harlem in the thirties, the Weimar Republic) but they're just as likely to develop in times when a country, or city, is enjoying new freedoms and confidences. Ibadan, following Nigerian independence, or pre-revolutionary Iran are great examples of that.
With the show not in any chronological, or geographical order, I decided my account of it should follow suit. Much as an evening at a cabaret, the various events and happenings should all just flow together. Music, poetry, architecture, art, design, costume, and dance all come together in the cabaret in a whirlwind of decadence, subversion, and, more often than not, copious amounts of booze.
M.
Balda - Le Cabaret du Chat Noir (The Chat Noir Cabaret, interior and
exterior of the second cabaret at rue Victor-Masse) (c.1980)
Preferably cocktails. The first city we're introduced to is Vienna and the first cabaret is The Cabaret Fledermaus which was conceived, in direct contravention to Kander and Ebb's later assertation, as a place where the 'boredom' of contemporary life would be replaced by 'ease, art and culture'. Overlooking the fact that many find art and culture actually quite boring.
Created by the Wiener Werkstatte (Vienna Workshop), its intention was to stimulate the visitor's senses through a coming together of all arts and crafts, high and low, and was, it is believed, named after Joseph Strauss' comic operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat) from 1874. Cabaret Fledermaus hosted satirical plays, shadow theatre, and dancers like Grete Wiesenthal and Miss Macara in elaborate costumers.
The action took place in a converted basement and mixed the styles of the Expressionists and the Vienna Secessionists. You'd arrive, via a black and white striped marble staircase, in a bar lined with over seven thousand milticoloured tiles adorned with fantastical themes. The bar led to a more architecturally austere auditorium and everything, from ashtrays to stationery, had been designed with meticulous attention and with the sense that the visitor would feel as if they were in a very special place.
The opening night, 19th October 1907, featured Gertrude Barrison dancing in an ethereal white costume to Edvard Grieg's 1875 Morgenstimmung and hundreds of postcards were produced representing Fledermaus affiliated artists and sold at the cabaret, the monies accrued going towards investing in further events.
Created by the Wiener Werkstatte (Vienna Workshop), its intention was to stimulate the visitor's senses through a coming together of all arts and crafts, high and low, and was, it is believed, named after Joseph Strauss' comic operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat) from 1874. Cabaret Fledermaus hosted satirical plays, shadow theatre, and dancers like Grete Wiesenthal and Miss Macara in elaborate costumers.
The action took place in a converted basement and mixed the styles of the Expressionists and the Vienna Secessionists. You'd arrive, via a black and white striped marble staircase, in a bar lined with over seven thousand milticoloured tiles adorned with fantastical themes. The bar led to a more architecturally austere auditorium and everything, from ashtrays to stationery, had been designed with meticulous attention and with the sense that the visitor would feel as if they were in a very special place.
The opening night, 19th October 1907, featured Gertrude Barrison dancing in an ethereal white costume to Edvard Grieg's 1875 Morgenstimmung and hundreds of postcards were produced representing Fledermaus affiliated artists and sold at the cabaret, the monies accrued going towards investing in further events.
Moriz Jung - Design for the second programme for the Cabaret Fledermaus (1907)
Josef Hoffman - No 75 (Interior view of the bar of the Cabaret Fledermaus) (1907)
Bertold Loffler - Poster for the Cabaret Fledermaus (1907)
Oskar Kokoschka - No.78 (Two musicians) (1907)
Bertold Loffler - Poster for a performance by Miss Macara at the Cabaret Fledermaus (1909)
In 1909, Miss Macara (seen above in Bertold Loffler's poster) gyrated to Bizet's Dance of the Hindus. "Young and full of propulsive energy", Miss Macara was one of several performers who achieved notoriety at the Fledermaus and soon moved on to the international circuit where, it was observed, new forms of "femininity" where emerging as the new century got into its swing!
Alongside posters by Fritz Lang, drawings of diseuses (a term that's rather fallen into disuse - joke c/o Dan Howse, January 2015), the all important drinks menus, and figures from Oskar Kokoschka's play The Speckled Egg (a fairytale inspired by Indian shadow puppets, of course) you can admire the furniture designed for the Fledermaus by Josef Hoffman. Its 'sinuous forms' were so popular that they were ripped off by many other manufacturers and the design remains in production now.
Alongside posters by Fritz Lang, drawings of diseuses (a term that's rather fallen into disuse - joke c/o Dan Howse, January 2015), the all important drinks menus, and figures from Oskar Kokoschka's play The Speckled Egg (a fairytale inspired by Indian shadow puppets, of course) you can admire the furniture designed for the Fledermaus by Josef Hoffman. Its 'sinuous forms' were so popular that they were ripped off by many other manufacturers and the design remains in production now.
Josef Hoffman/J. & J. Kohn - Chair for the Cabaret Fledermaus theatre (1907)
Giacomo Balla - Study for the sign for the Bal Tic Tac (1921)
Less than a decade later, in Italy, the artists Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero produced a manifesto, Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, which demanded that each and every aspect of the environment should reflect the speed of the machine age. Art, fashion, furniture, theatre, and toys - everything needed to not just be modified but pretty much torn down and reinvented.
When entrepreneur Ugo Paladini set up the Bal Tic Tac in a neo-classical building in Rome, Balla was the guy he called for to make it, the interior at least, modern and futuristic. Balla's design sought to capture the swirling movement of the dancers who would soon fill the Bal Tic Tac, one visitor even remarked that "the walls themselves seem to dance", and used unrelentingly bright lights to create 'a carnival in the sky'.
The Bal Tic Tac was one of the first places in Rome you could hear the new and exciting American jazz music (featuring the equally new and exciting, certainly to Italy, saxophone) and dances like the fox-trot, shimmy, and the one-step were promoted there. Balla would sport a plastic tie illuminated by a light bulb and a sign in the entrance made the intentions of the night very clear:- "If you don't drink champagne, go away"!
Giacomo Balla - Design for a light for the Bal Tic Tac (1921)
Giacomo Balla - 'Cioccolato' (Chocolate) for the Bal Tic Tac (1921)
Fortunato Depero - Table for the Cabaret del Diavolo (c.1922)
Fortunato Depero - Chair for the Cabaret del Diavolo (c.1922)
Fortunato Depero - Diavoletti neri e bianchi, Danza di diavoli (Black and White Little Devils:Dance of the Devils) (1922)
While Balla was fashioning the Bal Tic Tac in his own image, his fellow Futurist artist Depero was set to work designing the Cabaret del Diavolo (Devil's Cabaret) just a few streets away. The writer Gino Gori had commissioned Depero to transform the lower half of a hotel into an opera d'arte totale inspired by Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (c.1308-20) which is, you'd imagine, no small ask.
Depero themed the club's multilevel spaces around Dante's three realms of the dead. Paradiso (Heaven) was illuminated by white lights and filled with angels, cherubs, and stars. Purgatorio (Purgatory) aimed to create a state of limbo with the use of zigzags as well as heart eating angels. Who you'd imagine would be better suited to Inferno (Hell) which, instead, used monochrome furniture and red lighting to create a suitably diabolic mood and was overlooked by the above mural featuring pitchfork wielding devils, serpents, and leaping flames.
With these kinds of temptations, and a calling card with the slogan Tutti ali'inferno!!! (Everyone to Hell!!!), it's perhaps no surprise that the Cabaret del Diavolo pulled in an intellectual crowd and one unafraid of multiple exclamation marks too. The opening night featured founder of the Futurist movement Filippo Tommaso Marinetti performing a 'demonic' speech in the Inferno room, Luciano Folgore's parodies in Purgatorio, and Alfredo Casella and his two 'beauties' performing celestial music in Paradiso. Female invitees were asked to dress in red, green, and blue to match the Diavolo's colour scheme.
Around the same time the Cabaret del Diavolo and the Bal Tic Tac appeared in Rome, across the Atlantic in Mexico City the avant-garde Estridentism (Strindetism) group were being founded by the poet Manuel Maples Arce with the aim of overturning artistic conventions by developing new styles of writing, drawing, and painting that would be both rooted in the popular Mexican tradition and reflective of the modern industrial city.
Mexico was, as it so often has been, undergoing huge political and societal shifts and Arce's Actual No.1 manifesto that was disseminated up and down the nation can only have added to that. Promoting, as it did, a revolt against conservatism that even included the demand 'Chopin to the electric chair'!
A journal was founded, Irradiador, and, in April 1924, they held their first 'experience' which featured poems, music, masks, woodcuts, and paintings (many of them on show at the Barbican), When the Estridentismo movement shifted to Xalapa (in the state of Veracruz, 300 miles to the east) a few years later those left behind in the capital started a new movement. ¡30=30! was named, with obvious transgressive and revolutionary intent, after a popular rifle cartridge and sought to bring radical art and a socialist agenda to the Mexican masses.
In the late twenties they hosted events in a large travelling tent, the Carpa Amaro, although for the Barbican show they've fixated on the more mysterious Cafe de Nadie (Nobody's Cafe) which was seen as the heart of the Estridentismo movement. Ramon Alva de la Canal's image of the cafe is something of an outlier as it shows de le Canal looking back nearly fifty years to the heyday of the Nadie through, possibly, rose tinted spectacles (an inscription at the top reads, in Spanish, "one day we will carpet life with the scattered pearls of new songs") but earlier works by the same artist and a magnificent collection of woodcuts from the likes of Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma, Victor Tesorero, Fernando Leal, and Fermin Revueltas Sanchez give evidence of the dynamism and modernism that was at play in Mexico in the twenties.
With these kinds of temptations, and a calling card with the slogan Tutti ali'inferno!!! (Everyone to Hell!!!), it's perhaps no surprise that the Cabaret del Diavolo pulled in an intellectual crowd and one unafraid of multiple exclamation marks too. The opening night featured founder of the Futurist movement Filippo Tommaso Marinetti performing a 'demonic' speech in the Inferno room, Luciano Folgore's parodies in Purgatorio, and Alfredo Casella and his two 'beauties' performing celestial music in Paradiso. Female invitees were asked to dress in red, green, and blue to match the Diavolo's colour scheme.
Around the same time the Cabaret del Diavolo and the Bal Tic Tac appeared in Rome, across the Atlantic in Mexico City the avant-garde Estridentism (Strindetism) group were being founded by the poet Manuel Maples Arce with the aim of overturning artistic conventions by developing new styles of writing, drawing, and painting that would be both rooted in the popular Mexican tradition and reflective of the modern industrial city.
Mexico was, as it so often has been, undergoing huge political and societal shifts and Arce's Actual No.1 manifesto that was disseminated up and down the nation can only have added to that. Promoting, as it did, a revolt against conservatism that even included the demand 'Chopin to the electric chair'!
A journal was founded, Irradiador, and, in April 1924, they held their first 'experience' which featured poems, music, masks, woodcuts, and paintings (many of them on show at the Barbican), When the Estridentismo movement shifted to Xalapa (in the state of Veracruz, 300 miles to the east) a few years later those left behind in the capital started a new movement. ¡30=30! was named, with obvious transgressive and revolutionary intent, after a popular rifle cartridge and sought to bring radical art and a socialist agenda to the Mexican masses.
In the late twenties they hosted events in a large travelling tent, the Carpa Amaro, although for the Barbican show they've fixated on the more mysterious Cafe de Nadie (Nobody's Cafe) which was seen as the heart of the Estridentismo movement. Ramon Alva de la Canal's image of the cafe is something of an outlier as it shows de le Canal looking back nearly fifty years to the heyday of the Nadie through, possibly, rose tinted spectacles (an inscription at the top reads, in Spanish, "one day we will carpet life with the scattered pearls of new songs") but earlier works by the same artist and a magnificent collection of woodcuts from the likes of Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma, Victor Tesorero, Fernando Leal, and Fermin Revueltas Sanchez give evidence of the dynamism and modernism that was at play in Mexico in the twenties.
Ramon Alva de la Canal - El Cafe de Nadie (Nobody's Cafe) (c.1970)
Ramon Alva de la Canal - El movimiento estidentista (The Stridentist Movement) (1926)
Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma - New York (1922)
Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma - Cabeza de Lenin (Head of Lenin) (1927)
Victor Tesorero - Vista al cielo en la ciudad (View of the Sky in the City) (1928)
Fernando Leal - Viva el ¡30-30! (Long Live ¡30-30!), invitation for the 1929 lecture by Dr Mariano Silva y Aceves (1929)
German Cueto - Mascara III (Mask III) (1924)
Woodcuts were desirable for the artists of the Cafe Nadie and Carpa Amaro because they embraced folkloric traditions and they were easily reproducible and, thus, widely accessible. Images of New York skylines, Soviet leaders, ships, suckling pigs, and almost everything else were pinned to the walls of the Carpa Amaro and live bands performed as visitors browsed them. Instead of woodcuts, the walls of the Cafe Nadie were adorned with masks. Masks made by sculptor German Cueto.
It opened to the public in 1928 and Van Doesburg declared it was "the beginning of a new era in art" (which, you'll be starting to notice is very much de rigueur upon the opening of a new arts centre of any kind). L'Aubette's USP was a synthesis of all art forms via the means of abstraction and Van Doesburg's most forward thinking space was his Cine-Dancing. A combination of dancehall, restaurant, and cinema - which don't really seem to go together at all.
Jean (Hans) Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp - Stained glass model for the window in the stairwell at L'Aubette (1927)
Sophie Taeuber-Arp - Aubette 63 (1927)
Jean (Hans) Arp - Untitled (After a fresco at L'Aubette) (c.1950)
Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janco - 'L'amiral cherche une maison a louer (1916)
It all looks quite bonkers now but it's definitely a preferable kind of bonkers to that which left more than 20,000,000 people dead. As sure as the war spread out of Europe so too did more positive things, like the concept of the cabaret. In Ibadan and Osogbo, in Nigeria, the Mbari clubs celebrated the country's recent independence from the UK by providing an exciting location for open air dances, music, and theatre with murals designed by Nigerian artist Uche Okeke inspired by traditional Igbo body painting designs.
If that wasn't confusing enough, Van Doesburg utilised diagonal lines
and colour to channel the energy of dancing bodies, urban streets, and
the dissonance of contemporary music. The public found it too much and,
within a decade, the designs were altered to make a more user friendly
experience. Mr and Mrs Arp and Van Doesburg were all closely aligned
with the Dada movement and had been involved with the activities of Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire which, of course, was also covered at the Barbican.
Founded by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, Cabaret Voltaire's lasting fame stands in direct contrast to its short lived existence. But in just five months it managed to give birth to Dada. A crazy art for a crazy time. During the Voltaire's existence the longest battle of World War I was fought in Verdun. Just less than a million people died and, after the Somme, it was the deadliest battle of the entire war.
As nationalist sentiment found its inevitable destination in brutal violence and senseless killing, Switzerland's neutrality made the country a refuge for artists, intellectuals, and those (at least those with the means) who had no wish to either kill or be killed. Jean (Hans) Arp is quoted as saying that he felt in reciting, versifying, pasting, and singing with all their souls that they may, somehow, be able to save mankind from the furious folly of the times but as we all, sadly, now know that's not how it worked.
Like the other cabarets, the Voltaire mixed up the different arts. There was literature, theatre, dance, and visual art and there was also, apparently, pandemonium, shouting, laughing, and, most decadently of all, 'gesticulating'. Arp's works hung on the walls next to those of Picasso (sadly none of his on show here), there were poems by Wassily Kandinsky and Amedeo Modigliani, while Hennings sang anti-war songs and put on puppet shows and Ball appeared on stage in a cardboard costume 'bathed in sweat' like "magical bishop". Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck came out with a form of poetry that had sounds rather than words and people partook of wild African inspired masked dances. A 'farce of nothingness', it was believed, was the only sane response to the insane human behaviour that was wreaking devastation across Europe and spreading farther afield.
As nationalist sentiment found its inevitable destination in brutal violence and senseless killing, Switzerland's neutrality made the country a refuge for artists, intellectuals, and those (at least those with the means) who had no wish to either kill or be killed. Jean (Hans) Arp is quoted as saying that he felt in reciting, versifying, pasting, and singing with all their souls that they may, somehow, be able to save mankind from the furious folly of the times but as we all, sadly, now know that's not how it worked.
Like the other cabarets, the Voltaire mixed up the different arts. There was literature, theatre, dance, and visual art and there was also, apparently, pandemonium, shouting, laughing, and, most decadently of all, 'gesticulating'. Arp's works hung on the walls next to those of Picasso (sadly none of his on show here), there were poems by Wassily Kandinsky and Amedeo Modigliani, while Hennings sang anti-war songs and put on puppet shows and Ball appeared on stage in a cardboard costume 'bathed in sweat' like "magical bishop". Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck came out with a form of poetry that had sounds rather than words and people partook of wild African inspired masked dances. A 'farce of nothingness', it was believed, was the only sane response to the insane human behaviour that was wreaking devastation across Europe and spreading farther afield.
Marcel Slodki - Poster for the opening of the Kunstlerkneipe Voltaire on 5 February 1916 (1916)
Max Oppenheimer - Voltaire (1916)
Hugo Ball in Cubist Costume (1916)
Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janco - 'L'amiral cherche une maison a louer (1916)
It all looks quite bonkers now but it's definitely a preferable kind of bonkers to that which left more than 20,000,000 people dead. As sure as the war spread out of Europe so too did more positive things, like the concept of the cabaret. In Ibadan and Osogbo, in Nigeria, the Mbari clubs celebrated the country's recent independence from the UK by providing an exciting location for open air dances, music, and theatre with murals designed by Nigerian artist Uche Okeke inspired by traditional Igbo body painting designs.
The Austrian born artist Susanne Wenger created abstracted sculptural facades of both human and animal figures, a TV documentary was made (in 1964) by co-founder Wole Soyinka (another co-founder was Things Fall Apart author Chinua Achebe), and folk operas and traditional dances were performed all with the intention of promoting an ethos of individual creativity that was in dialogue with Western modernism but firmly rooted in African soil.
In Ibadan, the activities and entertainment took place in the courtyard of a Lebanese restaurant in the city's central market while in Osogbo, the Yoruba opera company found a home and, in both clubs and cities, experimental African literature was disseminated. Paintings by Twins Seven-Seven (!), Jacob Afolabi, and Dames Nwoko became textbook examples of the Mbari mission to give modernism an African accent. Bright colours mixed with unusual viewpoints and unorthodox perspectives to create an art that was bold, experimental, and intriguing.
In Ibadan, the activities and entertainment took place in the courtyard of a Lebanese restaurant in the city's central market while in Osogbo, the Yoruba opera company found a home and, in both clubs and cities, experimental African literature was disseminated. Paintings by Twins Seven-Seven (!), Jacob Afolabi, and Dames Nwoko became textbook examples of the Mbari mission to give modernism an African accent. Bright colours mixed with unusual viewpoints and unorthodox perspectives to create an art that was bold, experimental, and intriguing.
Twins Seven-Seven - Devil's Dog (1964)
Jacob Afolabi - Slavery (1965)
Demas Nwoko - Untitled (Mother and Child) (1961)
Uche Okeke - Christ (1961)
Valente Malangatana Ngwenya - Untitled (1961)
Colette Omogbai - Agony (1963)
The Mozambican artist Valente Malangatana Ngwenya's work was described, by German writer and scholar Uli Beier, as "wild and powerful, but it is more than that. Far from being repelled by scenes of horror, we are brought under an irresistible spell. Malangantana's work contains a strong element of sympathy and suffering. He is full of stories".
Malangatana had been closely involved in the struggle against Portuguese rule (finally won in 1975) and if it's difficult to interpret the exact meaning of his works in relation to the fight against colonialism now, it's easy to see how powerful and precise the message would have been at the time. Colette Omogbai's 'Agony' is described as conveying "great emotional intensity" and it later ended up in a collection in Bayreuth, Bavaria.
Of course, all these cabarets (from Osogbo to Mexico City, from Vienna to Zurich) had been inspired by Paris's iconic Chat Noir. Founded in 1881, in Montmartre, it featured an ornate darkened interior with faux-Gothic, Japanese, and Neoclassical curiosities, 'whimsical' contemporary art, poetry performances, political debates, and satirical songs. It was considered by many to be 'the Louvre of Montmartre' because of the quality of its art collection which included works by Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas.
A sign on the door exhorted visitors to 'be modern' as they entered a world of shadows plays, fantasy, and commentary on contemporary life. All overseen, of course, by the famous black cat (chat noir). An image now so ubiquitous it regularly competes for space on artistic and cosmopolitan female student walls with Audrey Hepburn looking sophisticated in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Fernand Lunel (attrib.) - Interior of the Chat Noir (c.1889)
Theophile-Alexandre Steinlan - Reouverture du cabaret du Chat Noir (Reopening of the Chat Noir Cabaret) (1896)
As well as cutting edge French art and prototype versions of both Question Time and Have I Got News For You, the Chat Noir boasted dancers like Loie Fuller, an American based in Paris who'd perform using poles (not like that) and lengths of silk to the music of Claude Debussy and Richard Wagner. Fuller was so interested in the aesthetic effects made possible by emerging technologies that she befriended physicist, chemist, and discoverer of both polonium and radium, Marie Curie.
As well as, later, setting up her own laboratory to help create effects so spectacular that the symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme, on seeing her dance, claimed "at once an artistic intoxicant and an industrial achievement". Pioneer film makers like Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers came to film her and Toulouse-Lautrec's 1893 series of lithographs of Fuller in action, including her signature show-stopping Serpentine Dance, were seen by many as among his finest works.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - Miss Loie Fuller (1893)
Jules Cheret - Folies Bergere, La Danse de Feu (The Fire Dance) (1897)
Not me though. They left me cold. But, hey, I can't like everything! Henri Riviere's shadow figures were pretty cool though. Even Pierrot - who can be a bit annoying. Other shadow theatre productions were inspired by Gustave Flaubert's prose-poem about the life of St Anthony and his time overcoming demons and temptations while living as a hermit in the Egyptian desert. It seems like quite a lot to try and portray with shadows.
Possibly behind only the Chat Noir and the Cabaret Voltaire, and certainly the inspiration for Kander and Ebb's 1966 Broadway musical and Bob Fosse's 1972 film with Liza Minnelli singing that song, are the cabarets of the 1918-1933 Weimar Republic. I wrote, last January, in some detail about the art of Weimar Germany after attending a Tate Modern show which looked at how Magical Realism was heavily intertwined with the Weimar culture so I won't linger too long on artists like Rudolf Schlichter, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Jeanne Mammen who all featured in that Tate show. But it's worth, I feel, revisiting the story of how, following the horror and death, of World War I and the collapse of the German Empire, the population of German cities, Berlin especially, grew exponentially.
With censorship relaxed, nightclubs and cabarets proliferated in the German capital and, as elsewhere, these cosmopolitan hang outs were very keen to embrace mass culture and create, what the contemporary critic Siegfried Kracauer called, a 'cult of distraction' from the hardships of daily life. Hannah Hoch's 'Worse and Better' (1925) parodied popular revues, Valeska Gert (a 'New Woman') used dance to portray figures from the margins of society and forced cabaret goers to look whores, prostitutes, down-and-outs, and degenerates in the face as equals, Anita Berber (as painted by Dix) performed a dance called 'Cocaine' to the music of Camille Saint-Saens in a leather corset that left her breasts exposed, Mammen painted moments of lesbian desire that would have been seen as outrageous at the time, and Karl Hofer and Grosz also got in on the ogling, from a defiantly male gaze, with their own topless portraits.
Rudolf Schlichter - Damenkneipe (Women's Club) (c.1925)
Jeanne Mammen - Cafe Nollendorf (c.1931)
Otto Dix - Anna Berber (1925)
George Grosz - Schonheit, dich will ich preisen (Beauty, Thee Will I Praise) (1923)
Karl Hofer - Tiller Girls (before 1927)
Hannah Hoch - Der warme Ofen:Figurinenentwurf fur die Anti-Revue 'Schlechter und Besser' von Kurt Schwitters, Hans Stuckenschmidt und Hannah Hoch (The Warm Oven:Figurine design for the anti-revue 'Worse and Better' by Kurt Schwitters, Hans Stuckenschmidt and Hannah Hoch) (1924)
Hans Stuckenschmidt und Hannah Hoch - Stage design for the anti-revue 'Worse and Better' by Kurt Schwitters, Hans Stuckenschmidt and Hannah Hoch) (1924-25)
George Grosz - Menschem im Cafe (People in a Cafe) (1917)
Max Beckmann - Nackttanz (Striptease) from Berliner Reise (Trip to Berlin) (1922)
The women were formidable enough to hold their own, though. The 'New Woman' would visit bars and nightclubs, wear 'masculine' clothes, and sport short hair. Both the women and men would enjoy large amounts of booze and drugs. Exuberance and despair were both easy, and uneasy, bedfellows. A slogan, plastered on advertising booths by the government at the time, warned "Berlin, stop and think, you are dancing with Death".
With a capital D. That's how serious a threat this behaviour was considered. To give us a feel, although a very sanitised one, of what it must have been like to visit some of these cabarets the curators at the Barbican have mocked up rooms from three different locations featured in the show. There's the shadow theatre from Chat Noir in Paris (where you can hear music from Satie and Debussy, both frequent guests), there's the tiled bar of the Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna where patrons could order a 'Pick Me Up', a 'Cabaret Smash', or a 'Kiss Me Quick' (although sadly for this exhibition the bar was not open), and there was the cinema room from L'Aubette in Strasbourg where you could sit down and watch clips of Charlie Chaplin films.
I didn't linger long (if the bar had been serving drinks that may have been a different matter) but I thought it was a nice touch. It'd be nigh on impossible to recreate the atmosphere in an art gallery, especially as I was alone - another solo mission, but at least I could both appreciate the design chops of those behind these cabarets and also take a break from reading. Which I sometimes worry I do too much of, instead of looking, when I visit exhibitions.
Coming out the other side and into the home straight there were just three more cities, and cabarets, yet to visit, and the first one was my home town of London. The Cabaret Theatre Club, aka Cave of the Golden Calf, opened its doors in 1912 so it predated my move to London by eighty-four years (and my birth by fifty-six) but I would, at least, be able to find it with ease now.
It was on Heddon Street, off Regent Street, which is more famous now as the place where David Bowie posed for the cover of his 1972 LP Ziggy Stardust. Founded by Austrian impresario Frida Strindberg, the Cave of the Golden Calf (let's use that name, it's way cooler) promised 'a gaiety that does not have to count with midnight' and 'surroundings which alter the reality of daily life' and 'reveal the reality of the unreal'.
Groovy man! The decor was supervised by Spencer Gore, a painter of the Camden Town Group and on the walls his murals were joined by those created by the likes of Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, and (new name to me) Charles Ginner. The eponymous golden calf, a Biblical symbol of paganism, was represented in a foyer based sculpture by the highly problematic Eric Gill!
Inside, you could find Chinese shadow theatre, barefoot 'Greek' dancing, Morris dancing, gipsy songs, and tango teas! In 1913, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti presented a 'Futurist Supper' in which he expounded on 'The Art of Noise'. The author Oswald Sitwell was impressed. He described the evening as a "superheated Vorticist garden of gesticulating figures dancing and talking while the primitive forms of ragtime throbbed".
Spencer Gore - Study for a mural decoration for the Cave of the Golden Calf (1912)
Wyndham Lewis - Kermesse (1912)
Wyndham Lewis - Drop curtain design (1912)
Alas, not many others felt the same way and a year later, in 1914, the
club closed up and Strindberg left the country without paying many of
the performers. It was a time when most of England, save a few pockets of bohemian types in the centre of London, chose to eschew modernism but the USA was a new country and modernism, it seems strange to think now, was part of its very essence. Charged further, of course, by the Great Migration that began during World War I and saw hundreds of thousands of African-Americans move from the South to the large Northern cities.
Many settled in Harlem, New York which was soon go on to become seen as the centre of black American culture (or, as journalist Roi Ottley had it "the nerve center of Black America) and spawn what became known as the Harlem Renaissance. A movement which, via music, fashion, and books, sought to challenge racist stereotypes and redefine black identity while at the same time chipping away at the edges of accepted gender roles and sexual inclinations.
At the heart of it all was jazz. Zora Neale Hurston, the film maker and anthropologist who'd moved to Harlem from Alabama, said of the jazz of the era:- "it constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies". Which sounds pretty full on. The art of Harlem at the time reflected the movement, the energy, and the buzz of both the music and the city. E. Simms Campbell provided a map of the area and even that could only squeeze in a handful of the more than five hundred speakeasies that had appeared in Harlem just one year after Prohibition had ended.
As well as night spots like Connie's Inn, Smalls Paradise, the Cotton Club, Club Hot-Cha (where 'nothing happens before 2am), and Gladys' Clam House (where the openly lesbian Gladys Bentley would, in men's clothes, sing the blues) the map also included fried chicken joints and police stations and was covered in phrases like 'clap clap clap', 'tap tap tap', and, Cab Calloway's catchphrase, 'HO-DE-HI-DE-HO'.
As well as night spots like Connie's Inn, Smalls Paradise, the Cotton Club, Club Hot-Cha (where 'nothing happens before 2am), and Gladys' Clam House (where the openly lesbian Gladys Bentley would, in men's clothes, sing the blues) the map also included fried chicken joints and police stations and was covered in phrases like 'clap clap clap', 'tap tap tap', and, Cab Calloway's catchphrase, 'HO-DE-HI-DE-HO'.
E. Simms Campbell - A Night-Club Map of Harlem (1934)
Aaron Douglas - Dance (c.1930)
Edward Burra - Savoy Ballroom, Harlem (1934)
W.E.B. Du Bois (ed.), cover by Joyce Carrington - The Crisis, no 36, September 1928 (1928)
Jacob Lawrence - Vaudeville (1951)
People may have been partying, dancing, drinking, and eating greasy food but it was as much a drowning of sorrows as a celebration. Despite the Harlem of the twenties and thirties launching the careers of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Lena Horne the Cotton Club refused entry to black people. Poverty and racism went hand in hand and though black performers, particularly ones on the way up, were fine, black customers were still a step too far for many club owners.
Blues poems, like Langston Hughes' Misery, articulated this state of affairs while Ellington's 'Symphony in Black:A Rhapsody of Negro Life' didn't shy away from depicting financial hardship alongside the glitz of glamour of the Harlem cabaret scene. If an African-American riff on the very white, very European cabaret seemed breathtakingly original at the time (which it surely did) it's become something viewed retrospectively, by many, as a celebration of style over substance now.
Almost sanitised and idealised. The Harlem Renaissance is seen quite differently today as it would have been at the time. More surprising to today's observer would surely be the fact that Tehran, the capital of Iran, had in the late sixties its own vibrant, inventive, and Persian flavoured cabaret scene. Rasht 29 was, alas, a private club and the art on show representing it is so curious and so interesting that that seems even more of a shame.
Established in 1966 by architect Kamran Diba, artist Parviz Tanavoli, and musician Roxana Saba, Rasht 29 attracted poets, designers, and film makers to avant-garde screenings and readings and they'd hang around into the wee small hours chatting culture and, just possibly, whispering about politics and sedition (although that might just be my fervid imagination), and listening to the sounds of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Janis Joplin.
It's a long way from the hardline Islamic republic of Iran we imagine today but those involved were not seeking to ape Western styles but, instead, to create a fusion of Western ideas with historic Persian stories and imagery. Saqqakhaneh was the name of a movement that many of the contemporary artists formed to try to create this fusion and the pieces they made, and showed, and sometimes used as payments for meals range from Kamran Diba's groovy, if slightly unoriginal, I'm a Clever Waterman to more traditional images of flowers by Monir Farmanfarmaian (who had lived in New York in the fifties and hobnobbed with the likes of Willem de Kooning and Louise Nevelson) and on to Parviz Tanavoli's bizarrely titled, and curiously constructed, installation pieces that rank as some of the very best things on show at Into the Night and certainly piqued my interest.
Established in 1966 by architect Kamran Diba, artist Parviz Tanavoli, and musician Roxana Saba, Rasht 29 attracted poets, designers, and film makers to avant-garde screenings and readings and they'd hang around into the wee small hours chatting culture and, just possibly, whispering about politics and sedition (although that might just be my fervid imagination), and listening to the sounds of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Janis Joplin.
It's a long way from the hardline Islamic republic of Iran we imagine today but those involved were not seeking to ape Western styles but, instead, to create a fusion of Western ideas with historic Persian stories and imagery. Saqqakhaneh was the name of a movement that many of the contemporary artists formed to try to create this fusion and the pieces they made, and showed, and sometimes used as payments for meals range from Kamran Diba's groovy, if slightly unoriginal, I'm a Clever Waterman to more traditional images of flowers by Monir Farmanfarmaian (who had lived in New York in the fifties and hobnobbed with the likes of Willem de Kooning and Louise Nevelson) and on to Parviz Tanavoli's bizarrely titled, and curiously constructed, installation pieces that rank as some of the very best things on show at Into the Night and certainly piqued my interest.
Kamran Diba - I'm a Clever Waterman (1966)
Leyly Matine-Daftary - Still-life (1962)
Monir Farmanfarmaian - Lily of the Valley (1968)
Parviz Tanavoli - Heech and Hands (1964)
Parvaz Tanavoli - Cage, cage, cage (1966) (repaired 2009)
Parvaz Tanavoli - Boohoo, boohoo, boohoo, or her, or a gazelle (1966)
I'd love to attend an exhibition devoted entirely to Tanavoli, or to Rasht 29, or to the Iranian art scene of the sixties at some point. I'd like to find out what's going on with the watering cans, buttons, and birds that Tanavoli used to create these eye catching images. We learn of how, with Iran rapidly industrialising, Tanavoli would scour blacksmiths, potteries, and welding shops for his raw material but we don't really learn why or to what end.
Which is fine. It may be a simple aesthetic choice on the part of the artist and it wasn't as if the rest of the exhibition had been lacking in generosity when it came to offering up information, societal history, and examples of the art and music that made these thematically varied but spiritually attuned cabarets such special places as well as showing both why they mattered so much to people at the time and why they, or at least their spiritual ancestors, still matter now.
I thoroughly enjoyed it - but I also learned a lot. Which would seem to be the ethos behind the best cabarets so that felt very appropriate. Alas, after leaving the Barbican I didn't go to a reading of avant-garde poetry, I didn't neck an extravagant and decadent cocktail, and I didn't go to watch ladies dancing with their boobs out. I went home and had, if I remember rightly, macaroni cheese for dinner and a cup of tea. But in my heart of hearts, and in my soul, I was in a cabaret of my own mind and that's a cabaret that, as long as I live, will never close down*. I love a cabaret.
I thoroughly enjoyed it - but I also learned a lot. Which would seem to be the ethos behind the best cabarets so that felt very appropriate. Alas, after leaving the Barbican I didn't go to a reading of avant-garde poetry, I didn't neck an extravagant and decadent cocktail, and I didn't go to watch ladies dancing with their boobs out. I went home and had, if I remember rightly, macaroni cheese for dinner and a cup of tea. But in my heart of hearts, and in my soul, I was in a cabaret of my own mind and that's a cabaret that, as long as I live, will never close down*. I love a cabaret.
Faramarz Pilaram - Untitled (Composition 8) (c.1960-65)
Parvaz Tanavoli - Revolution in Industry (1963)
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