#000003
Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art
The catalogue to the Barbican's 2019 exhibition, and one of those art books that quietly rewires how you see a whole period. Its argument is that the cabaret, the café, and the nightclub were not just where modern artists unwound — they were laboratories of modern art itself: total environments where painting, design, music, dance, and performance collided without the museum's hierarchies. It runs from the Chat Noir in fin-de-siècle Montmartre to Vienna's Fledermaus, Harlem's jazz rooms, Mexico City, Weimar Berlin, and 1960s Tehran and Ibadan — a genuinely global map. Richly illustrated, it makes the case that a great deal of the twentieth century's radical art was born after dark.
more…less ▴
The book
Edited by Florence Ostende (the exhibition's curator) with Lotte Johnson, and published by Prestel with Barbican Art Gallery in 2019. It accompanied the show that ran at the Barbican (October 2019–January 2020) and then the Belvedere in Vienna (February–June 2020), bringing together more than 200 works alongside life-size recreations of avant-garde interiors.
Its strength
A deliberately decentered, multi-authored survey: contributors include Phillip Dennis Cate on Montmartre and Chika Okeke-Agulu on the Mbari clubs of Nigeria, among many others, so it resists the usual Paris-to-New-York axis and treats nightlife in Ibadan or Tehran as equally generative.
How it reads
As both scholarship and atmosphere — praised as a lavish, wide-angle account, though the very breadth means each scene gets a relatively brief treatment. A strong introduction to the idea that sociability and space, not just individual genius, drive artistic change.
For more context
On the Weimar end, the world of Otto Dix and George Grosz; on cabaret's design history, the Wiener Werkstätte and its Cabaret Fledermaus.
Sources
- Type
- Exhibition catalog
- Publisher
- Prestel (Barbican)
- Place of publication
- Munich; London; New York
- Year
- 2019
- ISBN
- 978-8-7913-5888-8
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine