LIFE IS A CABARET A Barbican exhibition fêtes the free-spirited pleasures of bohemian performance
The Barbican shines a spotlight on the places where history’s most spirited artists and performers have thrived
With its graphic style, eye-catching colour palette and bewhiskered black cat, the Chat Noir poster has become synonymous with French cabaret. It is also, fittingly, the point of departure for the Barbican’s ambitious new exhibition, ‘Into the Night’, which reveals the important role played by clubs, cafés and other social spaces in the history of artistic production. Starting in the bohemian Parisian neighbourhood of Montmartre in the 1880s – home to Le Chat Noir and its famous shadow plays – the immersive show transports visitors all the way to 1960s Tehran, taking in New York, London, Mexico City, Berlin, Vienna and Ibadan. There are encounters with numerous household names, from the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in Paris to the jazz composer Duke Ellington in Harlem, but there are also introductions to lesser-known designers, performers and writers whose work was too fragile, ephemeral or experimental to have been properly documented. ‘This exhibition has allowed me to celebrate artists who may never be part of the canon, simply because there aren’t tangible objects to remember them by,’ says the curator Florence Ostende. ‘Many of them were doing completely different work from what you’d find at the salons and academies.’
Clubs and cabarets have long served as catalysts for creative experimentation, allowing performers to express themselves freely, outside the confines of a particular art form. In the 1890s, for instance, Paris’ notorious Folies Bergère became the testing ground for the American dancer Loïe Fuller’s pioneering performances, described by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé as simultaneously an ‘intoxication of art’ and an ‘industrial achievement’. Dressed in swathes of silk and using a projector-based technique of her
own invention, Fuller would light up her costumes in an everchanging spectrum of colours to create fluid, abstract designs that mutated as she danced. While there is no surviving film footage of her in action, a series of ghostly looking lithographs by ToulouseLautrec and vibrant posters by the painter Jules Chéret capture her dynamic, serpentine movements. Another avant-garde female performer was the Danish-born Gertrude Barrison, whose bold form of expressionist dance captivated audiences at Vienna’s Cabaret Fledermaus following its opening in 1907. Her quest to liberate herself from the rigorous codes of ballet, which she claimed had ‘very little soul’, typified the emancipated ethos of the Wiener Werkstatte – the co-operative of forward-thinking designers who founded the cabaret with the mission of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk, or synthesis of the arts. Visually, the group eschewed strict academic traditions in favour of embracing the allure of the decorative and Expressionist movements; the Viennese artist Fritz Zeymer’s brightly coloured, highly ornamented drawings of Barrison on stage are a good example of this more whimsical, folkloric style.
While Cabaret Fledermaus was not to stand the test of time, closing in 1913 due to financial difficulties, it was in many ways the spiritual antecedent of Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire (indeed, an Oskar Kokoschka play that had premiered in the former went on to become a success in the latter). Now remembered as the birthplace of Dadaism, Cabaret Voltaire was established in 1916 as a refuge from the outside world – a place where literature, poetry, art, theatre and dance could converge in an anarchic protest against the absurdity of war. One of its major innovations was the emergence of ‘sound poetry’, a form of verse recital that reduced human speech to mere noises and rhythms, perhaps echoing the inherent lack of logic in the violence that was raging across Europe at the time. Emmy Hennings, the cabaret’s impoverished co-founder and a poet herself, encapsulates its democratic spirit. ‘She could talk at length about the verse of Apollinaire, and yet she was also a singer, a troubadour, a puppeteer…’ says Ostende. ‘For me, she epitomises what cabaret is all about: the merging of high art with vernacular entertainment.’
Despite this utopian ideal, the reality is that many women have, like Hennings, been excluded from the annals of so-called high culture, preventing us from making a proper assessment of their contribution to the history of art or showbusiness. The German painter and illustrator Jeanne Mammen, for example, deserves far greater international recognition for her lyrical, sensual depictions of women living and working in Berlin between the wars. Inspired by her visits to underground clubs, in particular those that welcomed gay and lesbian communities, Mammen’s works on paper have a carnivalesque feel, albeit with an undercurrent of sadness and alienation. She captured several of the Weimar Republic’s most radical female performers, including the dancer Valeska Gert, who caused a scandal by enacting the experience of orgasm live on stage in 1922.
Countless other trailblazing women make appearances in the exhibition, including Josephine Baker, an entertainer who began her career in cabarets and went on to become the world’s first African-American film star. Her story, like that of so many of the performers featured in the show, is testament to the way informal, egalitarian spaces can foster creativity, collaboration and – aptly for the Barbican – the convergence of all forms of art.
‘Into the Night: Cabarets & Clubs in Modern Art’ is at the Barbican Art Gallery (www.barbican.org.uk) from 4 October to 19 January 2020. Join Harper’s Bazaar for a curator-led tour of the exhibition with Florence Ostende on 9 October at 6pm; for more information and to book tickets, visit www.bazaarartweek.co.uk.