See also: Cabaret Voltaire (homonymy)
The Cabaret Voltaire is a place of culture located at 1st of small Spiegelgasse, Zurich (Suisse) the street or remains Lénine . Credit for only six months between February and July 1916, it will close its doors for disturbance of the peace at night and moral din.
The name is a joke based on the contradiction of the words Cabaret (the night and its defects) and Voltaire (Philosopher). This formula is premonitory when it is considered that this place will make emerge the movement Dada, and that the representations which will proceed there will be as well hysterical as artistic.
Creation of the cabaret
Since 1914, an association of young artists, (taxed with dangerous Socialists and anarchists by the authorities) move coffee coffees under the name of Cabaret Pantagruel.
Hugo Ball, which belongs to this association fall one day on a small bar, the Dutch Smallholding. He asks his owner to use an unused room and on February 5th 1916, he opens the doors of a place which will become mythical thereafter.
A place of artists
The painter Marcel Janco, who trotts himself in the Zurich old man hears music in a nightclub; it meets there Ball which plays there of the piano. After having sympathized, he proposes to him to put it in liaison with his friends such as the poet Tristan Tzara and the painter Jean Arp, who will make the success of the cabaret and thereafter movement Dada.
As Ball does not have money to do work, he asks his friends artists to lend works to him to decorate the walls with the cabaret. Thus exposed some figures of before guard such as their artists and their friends will find: Modigliani, Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky, Leger, Matisse and others.
It is in this stripped place and sinks, decorated with futuristic paintings , Cubistes and expressionnists, which will find of young artists inhabitant of Zurich of all tendencies to take part in musical and literary representations.
the historical context explains also the emergence of before artistic guard at this place. Since in 1916 the war makes rage in all Europe; Zurich is an atoll of freedom in which will find themselves taken refuge, revolted, thinking men and artists .
Birth of the movement Hobby-horse
According to the description of Marcel Janco extracted from Hobby-horse, monograph of a movement , One understands that hobby-horse is only one word to crystallize a movement which already exists. " Dada already had we it in the skin, since always but in a quite different way. It is well " Larousse" in hand that, in a coffee of Zurich, the word was discovered and invested of all its capacity. "If the word hobby-horse becomes explicit only on July 14th 1916 during the reading of the Manifeste Hobby-horse of Hugo Ball, the first truths premises of the movement are done with the creation of the Poèmes without words read in the cabaret the furious on June 23rd 1916 and representations of Richard Huelsenbeck.
cabaret Voltaire is also the name of the first inhabitant of Zurich publication of the future Dada group, published by Hugo Ball on May 24th, 1916
Quotations
Hugo Ball
- Mesdames and Sirs, the Voltaire cabaret is not a box with attractions as there is such an amount of of it. We are not gathered here to see numbers of rustle and exhibitions of legs, nor to hear rengaines. The Voltaire cabaret is a place of culture. Advertisement at the time of the inaugural evening of February 5th, 1916 to make conceal the enormous uproar.
Marcel Janco
- a small room from fifteen to twenty tables with a plate of ten square meters, place which can contain approximately 35 to 50 visitors. As of the first evenings, there was full house. The spectators beat their full late in the night what attracted us well troubles with the neighbors and the hour of fence of the middle-class men. Extracts from Hobby-horse monograph of a movement published in Willy Verkauf in 1957
Internal bond
External bond
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File of Humanity on the cabaret Voltaire
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