Exhibition
Laura Freeman is intoxicated by the artistic creativity of the world’s greatest night clubs
WHAT good is sitting alone in your room? Come, hear the music play! Life is a cabaret, old chum! Come to the cabaret!’ I defy you to visit this exhibition without humming Sally Bowles under your breath. This skirtswishing, swing-dancing, saxtooting show whisks you around the world’s greatest nightclubs, from Weimar Berlin to 1920s New York, from revolutionary Mexico to Nigeria’s Mbari Club in the 1960s.
Here you came to dance jazz and the one-step, the java-trot and the cakewalk
Arrive in jeans and you’ll feel underdressed. This is an exhibition to dress up for. An emerald domino cape, perhaps, inspired by the costumes Josef von Dikévy designed for the Cabaret Fledermaus (‘bat’ in German) in Vienna in 1908? Or the cloche hats, drop-waists and pearls worn by the jitterbuggers in William H. Johnson’s frenzied portraits of Harlem dancers in backbending action? Or even one of the sinister Dadaist masks with straw beards and broken noses made by Marcel Janco for the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during the First World War?
There is masses to see here, as curators Florence Ostende, Lotte
Johnson and Hilary Floe conjure the smoke-wreathed stages of 12 riotous nightclubs. With such a wealth of material—from the sleek, silver ash-trays made for the Fledermaus to the macabre and magical shadow puppets of the Chat Noir in Paris—you might want to whip round once, before joining the throng at four or five of your favourite spots.
‘If you don’t drink Champagne, go away!’ read the illuminated sign outside the Bal Tic Tac in Rome. From its opening in 1921 to its closure two years later, this avant-garde joint, masterminded by the Futurist artist Giacomo Balla, was thought the most elegant place in Italy. The walls and ceilings were frescoed with ‘speed-lines’, ‘force-lines’ and ‘noise-lines’, painted playing cards and musical notes. Here you came to dance jazz and the one-step, the java-trot and the cakewalk, and ‘unbridled dances from Senegal’. Balla himself could be seen in the crowd wearing a celluloid tie illuminated by a light bulb.
When the Cabaret del Diavolo (The Devils’ Cabaret) opened
in 1922, the invitations cried:
‘Tutti all’inferno!!!’ (‘Everyone to Hell!’). In this Futurist vision of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the beautiful and the damned entered though ‘Paradiso’, with its star-covered ceiling painted with ‘flights and fancies of angels, rockets of stars and ribbons of cherubs’, before descending to ‘Purgatory’ and then into the basement ‘Inferno’. There’s a terrifying tapestry here of demons battling with pitchforks by Fortunato Depero (1922), which one can imagine coming disturbingly to life after one too many cocktails.
At the cabaret, pleasure and perversity jive cheek-to-cheek. Thrill the punters, but trouble them, too. Dire warnings awaited cabaret-haunters in Weimar Germany: ‘Berlin,’ commanded government posters, ‘stop and think. You are dancing with death!’
Artists Otto Dix, George Grosz and Karl Hofer painted distorted visions of the hedonism, the hotfooting, the high-kicking, the cross-dressing, the neon and the naked skin of the cabaret venues of the Golden Twenties. ‘Depraved’, howled the commentators. ‘Obscure and obscene.’
Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925) captures her with lowered, kohl-lined eyes, her red hair daringly cropped and fringed. At the Weisse Maus cabaret, Berber performed wearing only her make-up and a diamond in her navel. In one routine, Cocaine, she played a prostitute and drug addict in a leather corset that exposed her breasts. In Dix’s portrait, she is off-stage, off-duty, smudged and poignantly schoolgirl-looking in her red blouse.
The exhibition’s coup de théâtre is a recreation of the bar of the Fledermaus, which dazzled guests at its opening in 1907 with a multi-coloured mosaic of more than 7,000 tiles decorated with vines and pipers, cockerels and songbirds, bouquets and beer-swiggers.
As for me? I’ll meet you in Prohibition-era New York at the Cotton Club, the Lenox Lounge, the Bamboo Inn, Tillie’s Chicken Shack or any of the clubs of Harlem’s Jungle Alley.
An exhibition highlight is E. Simms Campbell’s A NightClub Map of Harlem (1934), a gleeful field guide to the clubs and crab men, the hot peanut sellers and hottest chorus lines of Lenox and Seventh Avenues. In tiny vignettes, we are introduced to low-lifes and high-rollers, bouncers, crooners and tapdancers, girls the colour of ‘café au lait’ and men with the snakiest hips. Below the Club Hot-cha is the advice: ‘Nothing happens before 2 a.m. Ask for Clarence.’
What more enticement do you need? Put down the knitting, the book and the broom and, as Liza Minnelli so memorably sang from under her bowler hat, come to the cabaret! ‘Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art’ is at the Barbican Art Gallery, Silk Street, London EC2, until January 19, 2020 (0845 120 7550; www.barbican.org.uk)
Next week Lucian Freud’s selfportraits at the Royal Academy