A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
Artist Édouard Manet
Year 1882
Type Oil on canvas
Dimensions 96 cm × 130 cm (37.8 in × 51.2 in)
Location Courtauld Gallery, London

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (French: Un bar aux Folies Bergère), painted and exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1882, was the last major work by French painter Édouard Manet. It depicts a scene in the Folies Bergère nightclub in Paris. It originally belonged to the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, who was Manet's neighbor, and hung over his piano.

The painting

The painting exemplifies Manet's commitment to Realism in its detailed representation of a contemporary scene. Many features have puzzled critics but almost all of them have been shown to have a rationale, and the painting has been the subject of numerous popular and scholarly articles.[1][2]


The central figure stands before a mirror, although critics—accusing Manet of ignorance of perspective and alleging various impossibilities in the painting—have debated this point since the earliest reviews were published. In 2000, however, a photograph taken from a suitable point of view of a staged reconstruction was shown to reproduce the scene as painted by Manet.[3] According to this reconstruction, "the conversation that many have assumed was transpiring between the barmaid and gentleman is revealed to be an optical trick—the man stands outside the painter's field of vision, to the left, and looks away from the barmaid, rather than standing right in front of her."[3] As it appears, the observer should be standing to the right and closer to the bar than the man whose reflection appears at the right edge of the picture. This is an unusual departure from the central point of view usually assumed when viewing pictures drawn according to perspective.

Asserting the presence of the mirror has been crucial for many modern interpreters.[4] It provides a meaningful parallel with Las Meninas, a masterpiece by an artist Manet admired, Diego Velázquez. There has been a considerable development of this topic since Michel Foucault broached it in his book The Order of Things (1966).[5]

The art historian Jeffrey Meyers describes the intentional play on perspective and the apparent violation of the operations of mirrors: “Behind her, and extending for the entire length of the four-and-a-quarter-foot painting, is the gold frame of an enormous mirror. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called a mirror ‘the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into spectacles, spectacles into things, me into others, and others into me.’ We, the viewers, stand opposite the barmaid on the other side of the counter and, looking at the reflection in the mirror, see exactly what she sees... A critic has noted that Manet’s ‘preliminary study shows her placed off to the right, whereas in the finished canvas she is very much the centre of attention.’ Though Manet shifted her from the right to the center, he kept her reflection on the right. Seen in the mirror, she seems engaged with a customer; in full face, she’s self-protectively withdrawn and remote.”[6]

The painting is rich in details which provide clues to social class and milieu. The woman at the bar is a real person, known as Suzon, who worked at the Folies-Bergère in the early 1880s. For his painting, Manet posed her in his studio. By including a dish of oranges in the foreground, Manet identifies the barmaid as a prostitute, according to art historian Larry L. Ligo, who says that Manet habitually associated oranges with prostitution in his paintings.[7] T.J. Clark says that the barmaid is "intended to represent one of the prostitutes for which the Folies-Bergère was well-known", who is represented "as both a salesperson and a commodity—something to be purchased along with a drink."[7]

Other notable details include the pair of green feet in the upper left-hand corner, which belong to a trapeze artist who is performing above the restaurant's patrons. The beer bottles depicted are easily identified by the red triangle on the label as Bass Pale Ale, and the conspicuous presence of this English brand instead of German beer has been interpreted as documentation of anti-German sentiment in France in the decade after the Franco-Prussian War.[8]

Cultural references

The 1934 ballet Bar aux Folies-Bergère with choreography by Ninette de Valois and music of Chabrier was created from, and based around, Manet's painting.[9] The 1947 film The Private Affairs of Bel Ami faithfully references A Bar at the Folies-Bergère twenty nine minutes into the film with a look-alike actress, set and props as the main characters enter the establishment.

The painting was the inspiration of a song, {possibly by Sydney Carter} in the popular theatre production, The Lyric Revue, in London in 1951. The refrain went "Oh, how I long to be Back in my dear Brittany ... But fate has chosen me For the bar at the Folies-Bergères".

The painting The Bar (1954) by Australian painter John Brack, which depicts a comparatively grim Antipodean bar-room scene, is an ironic reference to A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.[10]

In the 1988 Eddie Murphy film Coming To America, during the party scene at McDowell's house, there is a spoof on the painting above the couch, in which the central female figure is replaced with a dark-skinned woman instead.[11]

Canadian artist Jeff Wall makes reference to A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in his work Picture for Women (1979).[12][13] The Tate Modern wall text for Picture of Women, from the 2005-2006 exhibition Jeff Wall Photographs 1978–2004, outlines the influence of Manet's painting:

In Manet’s painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints. Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet’s barmaid, while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer’s role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet’s painting, Wall updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so that it captures the act of making the image (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.

[14]

References and sources

References
  1. ↑ Malcolm Park, Ambiguity, and the Engagement of Spatial Illusion within the Surface of Manet’s Paintings (PhD diss., University of New South Wales, Australia, 2001).
  2. ↑ Thierry de Duve, "Intentionality and Art Historical Methodology: A Case Study". Nonsite.org Issue #6, July 1, 2012 ; builds and corrects previous work Thierry de Duve, How Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere is Constructed, Critical Enquiry, Vol. 25, No. 1, Autumn 1998, pp. 136-168.
  3. 1 2 "Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère: One Scholar's Perspective", www.getty.edu. Retrieved July 20, 2012.
  4. ↑ Bradford R. Collins, ed., 12 Views of Manet's Bar, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996
  5. ↑ Foucault has given a talk on Manet's Bar at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo on April 8, 1970. He had planned a book on Manet's painting and gave a series of lectures during 1970/1 but the project was abandoned; see Cahiers de L'Herne: Michel Foucault, mars 2011
  6. ↑ Jeffrey Meyers, Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt. New York: Harcourt, 2005. p. 77
  7. 1 2 Doris Lanier, Absinthe, the Cocaine of the Nineteenth Century: A History of the Hallucinogenic Drug and Its Effect on Artists and Writers in Europe and the United States, McFarland, 2004, pp. 102–103. ISBN 0786419679
  8. ↑ Kenneth Bendiner, Food In Painting: From The Renaissance To The Present, Reaktion Books, 2004, pp. 73–74. ISBN 1861892136
  9. ↑ Rambert, Marie. Quicksilver: an autobiography. Papermac (Macmillan Publishers Ltd), London, 1983, p157.
  10. ↑ The Age newspaper: The great art robbery - Article on Brack's painting
  11. ↑
  12. ↑ "Tate Modern National Gallery, London UK; Jeff Wall Photographs 1978-2004". 21 October 2005. Archived from the original on 26 October 2007. Retrieved 2007-11-02.
  13. ↑ Merritt, Naomi. "Manet’s Mirror and Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women: Reflection or Refraction?" Emaj (Electronic Melbourne Art Journal), Issue 4, 2009. Merritt discusses the role of the mirror in this work.
  14. ↑ Gallery Guide text for the exhibition Jeff Wall Photographs 1978–2004, Tate Modern, London, 21 October 2005 to 8 January 2006 quoted in David Campany, "'A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Classroom': Jeff Wall's Picture for Women", Oxford Art Journal 20.1 (2007): 12-14.
Sources

External links

External video
Manet: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) at Smarthistory.
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