Art This article is more than 4 years oldMake it a double: Cabaret Fledermaus bar recreated for Barbican show
This article is more than 4 years oldCopy of short-lived Vienna venue is star of exhibition on artistic role of cafes and clubs
For fun-loving aesthetes in early 20th-century Vienna it was the place to be, a venue for expressionist dance, absurdist puppetry and experimental theatre, perhaps enjoyed with a “cabaret smash” from the cocktail menu.
More than a century later there are no drinks on sale but the wildly colourful bar of the short-lived Cabaret Fledermaus has been recreated for an exhibition exploring the artistic role of cafes, cabarets and clubs around the world.
The show at the Barbican art gallery in London shines light on the jazz clubs of Harlem, the Mbari clubs of Ibadan, Nigeria, and incubators of radical thinking such as the Cave of the Golden Calf in London and the Café de Nadie in Mexico City.
More than 300 works are on display, the showstopper being the remarkable recreation of the Fledermaus bar by teachers, students and archivists at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
“It is incredible, they worked tirelessly,” said the show’s curator, Florence Ostende. “They just had a black and white photograph and a colour postcard and they had to zoom in on every single detail to reconstruct the design.”
The original bar and its recreation are works of art in their own right. The bar was designed by Josef Hoffmann for the Wiener Werkstätte, a cooperative artistic workshop, and the recreation features about 7,000 ceramic tiles of different colours and motifs.
“When we started the discussion everyone thought we were crazy,” said Ostende. “You want to recreate one of the most iconic pieces of the Wiener Werkstätte? Nobody has done that before, it’s impossible. You don’t have enough archive, enough evidence. It was a real challenge.”
The Cabaret Fledermaus, with its Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) design, opened in 1907 but it endlessly struggled to make money and was forced to close in 1913.
Ostende said the show was about celebrating the importance of places such as Cabaret Fledermaus that had often ended up being footnotes in art history.
Spanning from the 1880s to the 1960s, 12 venues around the world are featured, offering an alternative history of modern art, according to the curators. They range from Le Chat Noir in Paris, with its theatrical shadow plays, to Rasht 29, a meeting place of avant-garde painters and poets in Tehran, which opened in 1966.
Other interior recreations in the show include a room from Theo van Doesburg’s L’Aubette in Strasbourg, a huge entertainment complex labelled the “Sistine Chapel of abstract art”, which opened in 1928.
Every Thursday evening during the exhibition’s run, the Aubette space will become a music venue co-curated by the jazz trumpet player Mark Kavuma.
Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art is at the Barbican art gallery from 4 October to 19 January.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJmiqa6vsMOeqqKfnmR%2FcX2YaKacrF9lgHC5wKScZqGkYq5usM6umaWdXZiuo63Rnqtmnpyasaa%2BzJqsrGWSlr9uvsScqZ6ZpJqxbrLOq2SbmaKXtqStzWaqoaen