Lutz Ehrenberger's 'Kabarett zur Hölle' — 'Cabaret to Hell' — is the Jazz Age caught with its mask half-off: the German illustrator (1878–1950), a virtuoso of Weimar glamour and gentle wickedness, ushers us into a nightclub run by the Devil himself, where a crimson-robed Mephisto presides over a knot of elegantly costumed revellers, gilded folds and the sweep of a staff lit by the warm, sinful glow of the footlights. Marooned in a generous cream passe-partout and a fine gilt frame, the image becomes a lit stage seen through a proscenium of mount-board, intimate and theatrical at once. The figures lean into one another with the conspiratorial elegance of people who know the century — and perhaps their souls — belong to the night, every fold of fabric a small aristocratic boast, every gilded edge a wink at damnation enjoyed for its own delicious sake. Ehrenberger draws sin the way others draw flowers: lightly, fondly, with a fashion-plate's languid line that makes perdition look like the most stylish party in town. The wide cream margin does not merely frame the scene so much as quarantine its glamour, holding the little inferno at a courteous arm's length so that we may admire it the way one admires a jewel under glass — close enough to covet, far enough to never quite be invited in, the whole thing humming with the perfumed melancholy of a cabaret we arrived at a hundred years, and one underworld, too late.
- Medium
- Print after the watercolour
- Framing
- Fake-gold frame with passe-partout, glazed
- Artwork size
- 200 mm × 275 mm
- Framed size
- 410 mm × 510 mm
