Rebuilding Vienna's Cabaret Fledermaus

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Listen to a selection of music from the clubs and cabarets we explore in Into the Night: Clubs and Cabarets in Modern Art.

In October 1907, on the corner of Kärntner Straße 33 and Johannesgasse 1 in Vienna, a new kind of club emerged in a converted basement of a residential building. Cabaret Fledermaus was conceived as a place where the ‘boredom’ of contemporary life would be replaced by ‘ease, art and culture’.

It was created by the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop), a group of artists and designers founded by architect Josef Hoffmann, artist Koloman Moser and businessman Fritz Waerndorfer. Their aim was to stimulate the senses through a synthesis of modern architecture, painting, poetry, music and dance creating a space where ‘none of the arts were excluded’ and craftsmanship was championed.

Visiting Cabaret Fledermaus

An illuminated sign on the corner of the street, designed by Bertold Löffler, directed visitors to the entrance of the club. Descending a dramatically striped black and white marble staircase, visitors found themselves in a spectacular bar space, lined with over 7,000 tiles depicting fantastical motifs.

Josef Hoffmann had commissioned Löffler and Michael Powolny, co-founders of the Wiener Keramik workshop, to create the tiles; their collaborative work resulted in an exuberant explosion of colour on every wall. The bar led to the auditorium, whose elegant design was relatively minimal by comparison. The rounded, whitewashed room featured a simple, traditional stage and a mezzanine level with boxes for the audience.

Together, the Wiener Werkstätte converted the unassuming basement into a dazzlingly elegant space, manifesting the decorative aesthetic of the Vienna Secession and the sensuality of the emerging Expressionism movement. Meticulous attention was paid to everything from the cutlery and ashtrays to the stationery and pins for the waiting staff to wear, which featured the cabaret’s logo of a woman smelling a flower incorporated into the monogram ‘KF’. The design of the Cabaret Fledermaus manifested the influence of the decorative aesthetics of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists (including Hoffmann) who sought to move away from academic tradition while also exploring the sensuous ideals of emerging Expressionism.

Live performance was at the cabaret’s heart: it hosted short satirical plays, evocative shadow theatre, avant-garde dance, poetry readings and musical performances ranging in tone from humour to decadence. In particular, the stage offered a platform for epoch-defining female performers such as Grete Wiesenthal and Marya Delvard, supported by extravagant sets and elaborate costume designs.

Reconstructing Cabaret Fledermaus

Cabaret Fledermaus closed its doors in 1913 due to financial difficulties and there are only a few records that remain of what this dazzling club space would have looked like. There are three surviving photographs, postcards by the Wiener Werkstätte and floorplan and elevation sketches by Le Corbusier from 1907, when he was in close contact with Hoffmann while staying in Vienna.

With so few visual resources to work with, bringing Cabaret Fledermaus back to life in our gallery space for Into the Night was always going to be a challenge. We spoke to the team from the University of Applied Arts Vienna to learn more about how they brought the vibrant Cabaret Fledermaus from postcard to reality.

Can you share any information about the historical significance of any of the designs on the tiles?

As early as 1905–1911, the Wiener Keramik Löffler/Powolny created a room of colorful Majolica tiles for Palais Stoclet in Brussel, one of the Wiener Werkstätte‘s most prestigious projects. The tiles, designed for use in a children’s bedroom, featured images of cherubs with flutes and drums.

The Cabaret Fledermaus was Löffler and Powolny’s most comprehensive and elaborate tile project. Motifs range from standard Wiener Keramik designs - i.e. already existing motifs - to quirky new creations. These include demonic eyes, an abstract depiction of a monkey, and a caricature by Peter Altenberg, all of which are only known from this particular project. The ‘Amor venator’, on the other hand, which in the 1980s had been attributed to the Cabaret Fledermaus, is now thought to belong to the repertoire of the Salzburger Volkskeller - according to new research carried out by Gerd Pichler in his doctoral thesis, Bertold Löffler: Life and Work (Vienna, 2017, S. 43). In 1909, the renowned Vienna art critic Ludwig Hevesi described the colourful walls as an ‘ingenious feat of decorative imagination’.

The style of the tile designs can be traced back to the unique visual vocabulary of Löffler and Powolny respectively. Bertold Löffler, who had been raised and educated by Koloman Moser, combined ‘sophisticated primitivism and decorative mannerism’ (Gabriele Koller) in his planar designs. Bertold Löffler, meanwhile, used different style variants alongside each other, ranging from geometric purism, Neoclassicism, Modernism, Neo-Biedermeier, and folk art elements.

_{(see Bertold Löffler: Vagant zwischen Secessionismus und Neobiedermeier, ed. Erika Patka, 2000)}