CHARLES GINNER | CAVE PAINTING
Mural Design for ‘The Cave of the Golden Calf’, 1912. Signed and dated: Charles Ginner/ 28.VII.1912. Pen and ink, pencil and coloured crayon, 10 by 14.5 cm. Courtesy of and copyright © 2018 Harry Moore-Gwyn.The Cave of the Golden Calf, London’s first-ever night club, was opened in July 1912 by writer and socialite Frida Strindberg, as a space for artists and other bohemian types looking for a spot which, as the New York Times put it, was ‘brazenly expressive of the libertarian pleasure principle’.
It was in a low-ceilinged basement in Heddon Street in Soho (formerly a draper’s studio) and great attention was paid to its interior design, with primitivist wall paintings by Wyndham Lewis, Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner. The murals, sadly, have long disappeared, but Harry Moore-Gwyn has obtained this recently rediscovered preparatory drawing by Ginner, which he is displaying at Stand 26 of the Fair.
Other artworks displayed in the nightclub included erotic sculptures by Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill, who also designed the club’s motif, a phallic golden calf. Revellers enjoyed live performances of American Ragtime and ‘gypsy dancers’; regular patrons included Augustus John, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Maddox Ford and Osbert Sitwell. Oh, for a time machine.
The club went bankrupt in 1914, after which Strindberg (who owed her surname to a brief marriage in the 1890s to the Swedish playwright August Strindberg) moved on to the United States. The building above was turned into a post office, later depicted on the cover of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust LP.
Ginner went on, with Gore, to be a leading member of the Camden Town Group, but, as Harry Moore-Gwyn points out, ’was never more cutting edge than this’. The ‘Gran Chaco’ of the title is a lowland plain in the Rio de la Plata basin in central South America.
Harry Moore-Gwyn will also be showing a fine series of works by John Nash as well as works by Ginner, Cecil Beaton, Frank Dobson, Duncan Grant and Lawrence Gowing.