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The Cave of the Golden Calf had such a scandalous reputation that a high society divorce case once cited the mere act of attendance as evidence of dubious character. The doorway to the notorious Mayfair club stood at the top of a steep set of steps and was illuminated by a single electric light bulb. A panel set in the wall showed the titular calf in a state of tumescence, flanked by phalluses hanging limp.
Opened in June 1912 by Frida Strindberg – writer, bohemian and ex-wife of playwright August – the Cave of the Golden Calf was named after the idol erected by the Israelites at Mount Sinai, and cultivated an appropriately pagan image. The London establishment pronounced itself England’s first and only artistic cabaret and its heady decor was provided by artists of the moment: Spencer Gore, Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, Charles Ginner.
Strindberg’s introduction to London’s creative circles had come via her tempestuous relationship with the painter Augustus John, who memorably referred to her as “the walking hell-bitch of the western world”. Surrounded by avant-garde decorations, including exotic hunting scenes and a drop cloth painted to resemble raw meat, guests at the Cave were treated to shadow plays, opera, experimental dance, comedy sketches and poetry, which was barely audible above the raucous chatter.
The spirit of the Cave, if not its ravishing interiors, lived on in the magnificently indecorous creative gatherings of the latter half of the 20th century, when Thames-side warehouses at Butler’s Wharf were squatted by such artists as Derek Jarman and Andrew Logan. It was there in 1975 that Logan held his Alternative Miss World. Participants in this “pansexual beauty pageant” included Miss St Claire Perry of Essex, better known to current audiences as that shrinking violet of the art world, Grayson Perry.
A decade later, performance artist Leigh Bowery co-founded the club night Taboo in a space off Leicester Square. The door policy was notoriously fierce: “Dress as though your life depends on it – or don’t bother.” Bowery did just that, manipulating his figure with extraordinary designs that padded, squashed and transformed him like a living sculpture. His club looks were later exhibited at the Anthony D’Offay Gallery, where Bowery appeared in a series of extreme costumes, watched by visitors through a one-way mirror. Both Bowery and his friend Sue Tilley (cashier at Taboo) became important models for the painter Lucian Freud.
The Cave of the Golden Calf, and many equally racy institutions, are celebrated in Into the Night, an exhibition at London’s Barbican exploring clubs, cabarets and bohemian life. From Belle Époque Paris to Weimar-era Berlin, from the Harlem Renaissance to Tehran in the 1960s, most establishments represented in the show were only open for a few years, leaving little record of their existence beyond flyers, posters and scandalised news reports.
Nevertheless, these short-lived, after-dark enterprises still managed to be “platforms for new forms of artistic expression”, according to curator Florence Ostende – creative hotspots that were far more stimulating than the studio, academy or salon.
“Decades before pop art emerged, these clubs are meeting points between entertainment and the avant garde,” says Ostende. That entertainment was often radical stuff. In the 1890s, American dancer Loie Fuller mesmerised audiences at the Folies Bergère in Paris, with serpentine performances, manipulating vast lengths of silk in her costume while bathed in coloured electric light. The result was spectacular, inspiring a series of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec.
In Berlin, meanwhile, Otto Dix was among the many entranced by dancer Anita Berber, whose heavy makeup – including a heart-shaped daub of lipstick over whited-out lips – was crowned with a heavy fringe of fiery red hair. Thus adorned, with the addition of a diamond in her navel, Berber took to the stage of the Weisse Maus cabaret. Her clingy red dress in Dix’s magnificent 1925 portrait is modest by comparison. Hooked on morphine, opium and cocaine, Berber died before she was 30, having portrayed the extremes of contemporary life – including sex work and drug addiction – on stage.
As so often, the figures committed to canvas were female, and those wielding the paintbrush male. And it’s the artists who tend to be remembered, not the performers who thrilled them. Ostende argues for these avant-garde dancers and cabaret artists to be afforded their proper due. But what is a club without people? What secured these nightspots a place in art history was not the great cocktails – it was the clientele and that curious combination of right place, right time. Creative work can be isolating. Clubs are where the individual creative act can become part of something bigger. In these bohemian haunts, the distinction between performer and audience was flexible: the experience was theatrical: everyone was part of the scene.
Cabaret Voltaire opened in Zurich in 1916 and lasted only five months. A bolthole for artists who had fled to Switzerland during the first world war, the cabaret was birthplace of the Dadaist movement, a response to the horror of this age of conflict. “Artists needed to meet, to feel safe, to bring an element of satire,” says Ostende. “It allowed them to make that world feel more bearable.”
The idea of underground clubs and parties as sites of metamorphosis and freedom is explored in another current London exhibition, Transformer, accessed via a subterranean ramp beneath 180 The Strand. Installed amid post-industrial debris in the basement, staged photographs by Chen Wei capture the liberation of the Chinese rave scene. Isolated within coloured clouds of dry ice, revellers appear in beatific trancelike states.
“In China, and increasingly elsewhere, there are restrictions on assembling,” says curator Susanna Davies-Crook. “Where space and human activity is tightly controlled, nightlife has always been an outlet.” The show also features the avant-garde drag performer Victoria Sin. “The already transgressive space of the club,” says Davies-Crook, “can camouflage activity that bends the status quo”.
Meanwhile, the nearby ICA is home to a retrospective of work by the Berlin art collective Honey-Suckle Company, which formed amid free parties and techno in the heady years after the fall of the Wall. What was it about the rave scene that made it so important as a creative movement? “Gigs have a different structure,” they explain. “After the show, everyone disperses – whereas raves went on all night, so there was more time and space. In Germany, people from all musical directions, backgrounds and preferences could meet at raves and experience new music.”
Such open-minded intoxicated gatherings have been part of the art landscape for centuries. In the 1730s, William Hogarth and his contemporaries exchanged ideas at Tom and Moll King’s in London: ostensibly a coffee house, in reality a notorious drinking den and unlicensed bawdy-house. In 1764, Sir Joshua Reynolds – later first president of the Royal Academy of Arts – formed a clique simply known as the Club, with the essayist Samuel Johnson and philosopher Edmund Burke. The Club met over dinner on Monday nights at the Turk’s Head in Soho and survived, in various configurations, for more than 200 years.
What of the Cave of the Golden Calf? As with most of these notorious establishments, its time on Earth was short, even if its influence lived on. Police raids and political unrest were bad for business and Frida Strindberg closed the club in 1914. As war broke out, she sailed for the US, taking all the artworks with her. The artists, it seems, were never paid.
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