Manet: Bar at the Folies-Bergere, 1882, (37.8 in × 51.2 in)
In my view .........and I've only seen reproductions...... this is an insider's, all-knowing view of a pleasure district - in the traditions of Japanese Ukiyo-e and 17th C. Dutch genre painting.
Vermeer, "Procuress", 1656
Kitagawa Utamaro
Manet's barmaid is young, trim, cute, and well-groomed -- though not smiling with either her eyes or mouth. (BTW - neither is the Japanese courtesan shown above - as she is groped by an impatient client)
She looks a bit bored or dismayed -- perhaps she's filling in for a friend who couldn't make it to work that night. She doesn't really belong here -- and yet -- she's locked into the view: front and center - symmetrical and pyramidal - and utterly static. The floral analogue of her sex (the blossoms on the bar near her pubic triangle) are encompassed by over a dozen phallic wine bottles - full, vertical, and ready to pop their corks on her behalf. The poor thing!
And to make matters worse -- we can also see her from behind - where she looks a bit dumpy, stooped, and engaged in conversation with a young man who is distinguished more by eagerness than by character or intelligence. So there are two views. In one she is staring straight ahead at the viewer. In the other view - we see the reflection of her back - and the viewer's face - in the mirror that's behind the bar. Much ink has been spilt regarding the impossibility of this perspective. If she is facing us and the mirror is parallel to the plane of her two shoulders, then we would not be able to see her back in the mirror behind her. No way. But ---- artists have always been breaking the rules of perspective whenever it suits them -- including Manet himself - in a much earlier and equally celebrated painting: Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe.
Manet, "Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe",, 1863
The Bar at the Folies-Bergere has little joy of color, luminosity, or dynamic line - and yet -- the scene is thrilling and alluring. It has the angular excitement of precise, and apparently spontaneous juxtpositions - just like a collage might have. There's a nice contrast between the pyramid structures and symmetry of the foreground, and the swirly, woozy background reflected on the mirror. You can feel the buzz of humanity in celebration of -- well, nothing in particular -- just being somewhat prosperous, alive, and urbane. "Towered cities please us then, and the busy hum of men" (John Milton) Everyone, other than the barmaid who works there, seems to be having a riotous good time - especially those two elegant women seated at the edge of the balcony - and the acrobat hanging from the rafters.
If it were a billboard advertising that establishment, I might be tempted to go - especially if I wanted to engage the services of an attractive young woman. The inverted triangle of her pubes is for sale - just like the many bottled drinks on her counter right beside it. And I would be somewhat comforted by knowing that she didn't care whether she found me boring - since she already is bored.
Manet had the skills of commercial illustration -- to incite the thrill of the moment of purchase. Isn't that primarily how the Modern secular world is distinguished from the eternity-centered world that preceded it ? Its hyper-activity thrilled him -- and then killed him. ( He was dying of syphilis as he worked on this painting)
Manet, "Olympia", 1863
Here's his other famous view of a working woman. No mirror in this one -- but much attention is still given to the viewer. To the left, Olympia is staring right at him. To the right, Olympia's black cat is doing the same thing, and has its fur up.
Woman in a Tub, 1878
This is more in the Ukiyo-e tradition of presenting the quiet and private moments of attractive, young, and available women - like the below:
Utamaro, Hour of the Horse
Most of Manet's depictions of his contemporary upscale urban life are not controversial at all: the boating party, the conservatory, the cafe, the portraits. It's the sort of thing that Impressionists all over the world have been painting ever since.
But his depictions of courtesans, Olympia, Nana, and the bargirl, Suzon, have raised the issue of social norms. Do these depictions seriously criticize those norms - or do they just flaunt the breaking of them? They do seem to present a woman's point-of-view within that most patriarchal of institutions: the sex industry. Olympia and Suzan stare directly back at the male customer/authority and do not hide their feelings of contempt or boredom. Together with Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe, they make gender controversy Manet's primary contribution to the emergence of that confrontational aspect of Modernism that has been artworld mainstream for over a hundred years.
Nana, 1877
"Nana" (1877) also presents a rather awkward situation in the sex trade. The lady is in her underwear while the gentleman peacock seated behind her appears to be casting a rather possessive glance in her direction. (he does not even notice us)
But this piece has attracted much less scholarly interest - possibly because the sex-worker it portrays is not stepping out of her professional role even as her eyes greet the visitor (us).
This preparatory sketch certainly makes the final painting look good - as well as confrontational -
as the final version is so much more interesting as both a design and a narrative.
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Introduction by Richard Shiff
"Nineteenth Century Paris was the chief testing ground for modernity and the central location of modernity's art. Manet was quintessentially Parisian"
That's the first sentence of the introduction - suggesting that some notions of modernity will be key to all twelve of the views that follow.
Over more than a century of interpretation, Manet's consciousness of class has often been acknowledged but rarely used productively - especially not by those aiming to set this painting into a general history of modernist style. T.J. Clark's work in the social history of art established a different course. His book of 1985, "The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers" investigated Manet's imagery in specific relation to the cultural construction of Parisian class identities.
Three paragraphs later, we're told that the social and political theories in the tradition of Karl Marx will be key to these notions of modernity. As old fashioned connoisseurship was purged from the humanities, if an art historian could not connect the interpretation of a painting to "a certain structure of power and privilege", her career might not advance. Arnold Hauser's "A Social History of Art and Literature" was published in 1951.
Clark's analysis of the production and reception of A Bar at the Folies Bergere follow his extensive discussion of Parisian cafe-concert, a social and cultural institution that operated across class divisions, tested ideological limits, and threatened to destabilize any normative representation of class relations.... Clark's influential view constitutes much of the common ground for the twelve essayists in this volume.
Can such a social analysis be called a "view"? It’s more like an examination of context.
On at least one point all scholars seem to agree, Manet took great pleasure in the novelty, diversity, and experiential richness of life in Paris. His artistic concern was to capture in paint that life's particular character and interests, and the very act of doing so identified him as modern. In contrast, traditional or classical painters - even when their images invoked current events and politics - led viewers into a realm of "timeless" value and "generic" beauty. (such designations being used during Manet's era)
Manet, "Beggar with Oysters"
But Manet also took great pleasure in Ukiyo-e as well as Velasquez - both of which date back to the seventeenth century. His variations on the Spaniard's "Philosophers" were a sincere homage. (even if they do make me long for the dynamics of the originals). Yet this kind of "artistic concern" is absent from Shiff's discussion.
When academically trained artists failed to beautify and idealize their live models in expected conventional ways, critics accused them of "copying" nature slavishly, with the implication that they lacked sufficient inventive skill and imagination to convert banal reality into a higher form.
Regretfully, no footnotes were appended here to identify any examples of critics and artists. In our age, now that a photograph may be a "higher form", presumably we may take it for granted that such criticism may be categorically dismissed. But copying nature with little aesthetic sensitivity was probably no more prevalent then than it is now. Which is not to say that idealizing nature with little formal sensitivity cannot also be problem. (Bouguereau well serves as an example)
Manet, portrait of Zola, 1868
Zola suggested that this portrait of him was a good example of depiction without idealization. As Shiff relates, Zola praised Manet for the fidelity of his "copying" and "not knowing how to invent". Shiff also points out, however, that the artist has cleverly manipulated the composition to include a catalog of Manet’s show. More importantly, he has manipulated that composition until it has the harmony, graphic power and drama of those two examples of Manet’s favorite art tacked up on the wall of his studio - Ukiyo-e and Velasquez - as well as his own “Olympia”. It well serves as the portrait of a dynamic and aesthetic intellectual - which is also something of an ideal -- isn't it ?
Velasquez, Triumph of Bacchus, 1628 (detail)
Here's the Velasquez painting whose print was in Manet's studio in the portrait of Zola. All of the characters, even the young god, feel like real people one might encounter on the street. That must have been one of the qualities that Manet appreciated.
Degas, portrait of Duranty, 1879
Shiff then writes:
We can only conclude that the meaning - indeed the good faith - of a given painter's acceptance or denial of his own imaginative and willful composition cannot be determined without engaging some specific cultural discourse ....and ... when the twelve interpretive essays in this volume differ, it is usually not because of a dispute regarding factual data, but more often because of disagreement as to how the nature of the artistic and historical discourses should be construed"
(needless to say, there is no dispute regarding how each of the twelve responded to the visuality of the painting)
Were Manet born 150 years later, he would have been expected to produce an artist statement that read something like: “My paintings explore gender and class identities in a rapidly developing industrial and cultural urban center’". But instead he was tight-lipped about his intentions - emphasizing his spontaneity and the absence of plan when he be began.
To insulate the contemporary art historian from such claims, Shiff suggests that Manet was just rehearsing what was then a standard myth - a myth that is especially apparent to us since our contemporary art world does not share it. Thankfully, Shiff acknowledges that our myths are not necessarily any more self evident. And, I might add, when we refer to the "discourses" in which Manet was participating, we refer to discourses as we have re-constructed them.
By now it seems especially evident that from before Manet to after Pollock, such declarations are ideological, such accounts, mythological.`
Rue Mosnier with Pavers, 1878
Manet's subjects demonstrated the immediate presence of modernity - its environmental presence as well as the pressure it put upon the viability of classical modes of representation, which seemed unsuited to images of urban movement, transience, and the flux that shaped modern society. Manet depicted change not only in the physical nature of the city (Rue Mosnier with Pavers), but also in the social identities of its residents, their patterns of work and leisure, and habits of vision (all of which can be derived from A Bar at the Follies Bergere)
Guardi, Grand Canal, 1765
Similar subjects were painted in earlier centuries, like the peasant village scenes painted by Brueghel. The 17th C. Dutch painted views of entire cities or the public space within a church -- but not life on the street which I suppose was deemed unworthy of representation. William Hogarth who made such life the target of humor rather than aesthetic delectation -- and isn't that what Manet, and the thousand of plein air painters who came after were doing? They weren't just recording the facts of modern life -- they were making them enjoyable -- a purpose of no interest to the art historians of today.
Most similar would be the 18th Century scenes of Venice, like the one shown above. As with Manet, there’s a kind of shorthand sketchiness to the figures. N The main difference, other than depicting canals/boats rather than streets.carriages, is that the Venetian paintings are more spacious and less intimate. Does that make them any less modern?
Thematically, Manet's art directed viewers from the general and timeless (comprehensive allegories and mythologies) to the specific and momentary (encounters with a changing daily life); his work often corrupted classical concepts by evoking them through the appearance of the modern. Manet's application of paint featured -in fact, it constructed - the look of a corresponding abruptness and spontaneity, a quality of the here and now. His paint calls viewers, especially nineteenth-century viewers, to attention. Manet neglected conventional compositional order for the sake of suggesting. directness of vision, hence truth to appearances and sincerity of emotional response. With its idiosyncratic immediacy-the bold, summary brushwork, the spread of blond tonalities, the radical simplification of perspective effects-Manet's painting interrupted the continuity of conventional pictorial space and, by extension the coherence of systematic academic practice and every cultural value it connoted. Many who observed the technique recognized, or chose to assert, a connection between painting Parisian life and a kind of generalized rupture, not only pictorial but social. Here, for example; is the commentary of Ernest Chesneau in 1880: "To representatives of diverse social conditions, the types we encounter each day in Paris, [Manet] has wanted to give the importance that the academies reserve exclusively for mythological or historical figures .. . . [With his] summary technique, [he] appears entirely preoccupied with expressing modern life in its precise reality and divorcing his art from the professional studio conventions transmitted from school to school." Chesneau's phrase "from school to school (d'ecole en ecole)" can also be translated as "from fashion to fashion" (or "from one fashionable clique to another") . If the tradition of painting forged links across social space and time, establishing a common ground even among passing fashions, Manet's involvement with modernity moved beyond-or perhaps to the side of-the spaces charted by either tradition or fashion. Manet's painting was both, and it was neither. Where, then, was a viewer to locate this art?
The key word in this paragraph is the first one: "thematically" -- and all that follows seems well spoken until the end -- as Shiff suggests that "the tradition of painting forged links across social space and time, establishing a common ground even among passing fashions,"
It's not theme or style that establishes common ground -- they're always changing, even among what might be called traditional artists. What intermittently endures is aesthetic appeal - for those who seek it. No matter how different the formal elements of a Japanese screen may be from a Velasquez painting - they both may achieve a certain quality of unity that the questing eye may recognize as beauty. And so they both belong in the same place: the art museum. (By the way, everything that Manet touched does not qualify for such recognition. A large exhibit of his late work came to Chicago last year, and most of it was ordinary if not worse. He gave his salon pieces much more time and effort than the rest. I wrote about that exhibit here)
Given a critical discourse that recognized sketchlike effects as signs of an artist's commitment to both "sincerity" and republican politics, Manet could cultivate his technical abbreviations: bold juxtapositions of darks and lights, heavily worked surfaces seen against thinly painted ones. These were the visible discontinuities that marked his modernity"
To the extent that Modernism in painting is a world religion, it is important to identify the early prophets. For non-believers, however, that sanctification is of no importance.
The situation had an obvious political dimension, at least in the minds of critics adept at drawing analogies: if Manet's work lacked the conventional sense of hierarchy in both subject matter and formal composition, this compound failing, for better or worse , signaled the demise of the old aristocratic order and the political ascendancy of the urban bourgeoisie, a social class, or set of related economic and professional classes, that had the distinction of lacking a tradition. The argument of Louis Courajod, a conservative educator, was characteristic: " The danger of art in France ... lies in contempt for authority, the hatred of the hierarchical system... and a witless intellectual democracy which degrades the highest minds to the level of the lowest"
As it turns out -- Louis Courajod was that farsighted curator who raised funds to buy a great twelfth century crucifixion that the Louvre would not purchase:
(sorry for the digression -- but last month I put this image into my post about El Greco . )
One might notice a certain ambivalence in Courajod's assertion. On the one hand, he deplores the
"hatred for the hierarchical system" -- yet, on the other hand, he deplores the degradation of "the highest minds", a category that would seem to be independent of social hierarchy. That ambivalence might be extended to any analogy rooted in a "conventional sense of hierarchy"
The "political dimension" seeks domination or liberation, not understanding.
To put meaning and order into art - to operate beyond finding what is already clearly there - constitutes the art historians task - what he or she has been trained to do. While scholars debunk mythologies of the past and work to give past representations what they regard as an accurate, interpretive viewing, they participate in creating or reproducing the mythologies of the present.
In the last sentence, Shiff concedes that art historians replace old mythologies with current ones - rather than with some kind of objective truth - which is a much higher bar to clear.
But he begins, regrettably, with the assertion that something is "clearly there" - just like the stars are clearly in the evening sky. Everyone's view of a constellation is pretty much the same - but the visual effects of a painting depends so much upon the viewer's state of mind and experience with looking at art. What was "clearly there" in a painting that I saw fifty years ago is quite different from what would be "clearly there" for me today. Actually, what is "clearly there" can change from day to day.
By way of comparison, consider the general historian's task as found in a quick Google search:
The Historian's task is a delicate one. Historians employ analytical categories to understand the past. We also use theories and categories created within an historical context ... We try to navigate both the past and the present in an intricate balancing act to form a coherent bridge of understanding between these two worlds.
The great difference between these two different kinds of historians being that the only views we have of past events are produced by historians or chroniclers -- while the subjects under analysis by the art historian are mostly still available for un-filtered viewing. You can walk into Giotto's Scrovegni chapel and look at pretty much what Giotto saw when his work had been completed.
So what's an art historian good for, anyway?
"It might be argued that a scholar's mythology (faith in the possibility of rational explanation) conflicts with an artist's mythology (faith in the possibility of liberated emotional expression)
Shiff then replies that sometimes the artist and scholar are on the same page -- as when the scholar researches the art market to which an artist was trying to sell. But that does not concern most viewers, does it? (certainly not myself). "Liberated emotional expression" is rather specific to ABX painting. For most art before the nineteenth century, the job of the artist was to present the epic mythologies of the people among whom he lived: Buddhism, Christianity, whatever.
Are today's authors in a better position to know their own motivations than to speculate on those of others? Why study the past ? Should past representations be investigated only as a means of self criticism? ......And this is truth so many of us, including artists and historians, now hold dear: discourse and representation construct the only reality we know. If there is some other reality affecting us, we cannot discern it........Art historians increasingly explicit recognition of their contextual limitations - the author's own situation in discourse and inability to assume a universalizing stance - might be linked to a postmodernist carnival of language and denial of authorial control" ..... Art historians persist nevertheless in collecting facts and documentation, as if to provide, at the very least , a kind of true and satisfying inventory of the "picture".
In the above paragraph, I've compiled Shiff's other statements about his profession. For him, art history, as currently practiced, no longer claims "To put meaning and order into art" - the task which Shiff has given it. To whom would these "inventories" of facts and documentation be satisfying? By what criteria should we prefer one discourse over another? It appears to be a profession that badly needs to be re-purposed - perhaps aiming more for appreciation rather than ideological correctness.
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Carol Armstrong :
Counter, Mirror, Maid:
Some Infra-thin Notes on a Bar at the Folies Bergere
“Manet’s last great work, “A Bar at the Folies Bergere”, has, in late 20th century writing on it, become a sort of epicenter for variations on the practice of the social history of art”
“In different ways and to different degrees, the world beyond the picture’s edges is imported into its field, shoving aside what is actually painted there”
Let’s look behind that passive tense and reveal the importer as Armstrong herself as she “shoves aside what is actually painted there”. As a willful rejection of what the eye can see, it would confirm that “social history of art” is more like a branch of sociology rather than a branch of art history.
What Armstrong imports are the discourses of her academic specialties, feminist theory and gender representation in visual culture. She presents Manet as something of a conceptual artist, in the tradition of Marcel Duchamps and his notion of art as the “infrathin” gap between concept and realization. A brief Duchampian quote serves as an opening epigraph to her essay.
Armstrong has nothing new to add concerning the three basic zones of this painting: the bar, the mirror, and the barmaid who stands between them. The bar is covered with painted representations of consumables for public consumption. The mirror, identifiable as such by its gilt frame and white scumbling, is :”a series of confusions”. The barmaid is presented twice - in two quite different ways.
What’s remarkable is her suggestion that the expressionless face of the barmaid, standing in the gap between the counter (represented reality) and the mirror (confusing reflections) allows the viewer (presumably male) to project himself upon it -- just as “infrathin separation’, according to the Duchamps quote, “has the two senses, male and female”.
Wow! What a nifty conflation of contemporary art theory, ontology, and gender theory.
It draws from the visual inventory of the painting, rather than any visual qualities, so it could be much better presented by a similar arrangement without any aesthetic distractions. The male/female condition is not likely to have ever occurred to Manet or anyone else in his world of art. But hey-- it really is a clever interpretation - and exactly the kind of thing that was discussed in the introduction - possibly because that’s exactly what the editor commissioned her to write.
It’s a work of conceptual art, all by itself - inviting the viewer to share in the cleverness of it all.
Here's a large fragment of text where she arrives at her climactic conclusion:
And if the reflected interaction between the barmaid and the male customer opens onto a narrative reading of the painting predicated on a scenario of identification with the customer, the barmaid cuts that narrative reading short with the flattening of her own fetishistic appearance, and flatly refutes it. Finally, the barmaid's interruptive quality is conducive to the feeling that she is not exactly what we expected the object of our vision to be---it is as if she is not only the object, but also the occlusion of our vision. •
And what was it that we were waiting to see, exactly? Well, not only the painting's dissolve into its illusionistic referent (a dissolve that does not happen), not only a narrative meeting of human gazes (which also does not happen), but perhaps some version of ourselves as well. That, too, we do not get: though spectorial sublimation is denied us, and though our spectatorial collusion in the spectacle is characteristically announced, we are also made to feel, rather uncannily, that we are not there, that as subjects we are as absent and as much a blind spot as the barmaid is herself and as her gaze failing to connect, makes us. Instead of ourselves we find the barmaid, as flat and frontal as the mirror itself, woven with its edge, so that she becomes, quite literally, a stand-in for us, not quite our mirror image, but as much our objective alter ego, as her mirror image is hers, as much our simultaneous counterpart and other as the reflected male customer is simultaneously her (and our) counterpart and other. Both purveyor and object of optical consumption, she folds out twice-to become first her twin and then her mate, her opposite number, so that her difference from and her kinship to the subject of vision, the spectator-consumer, are so linked and elided together as to be indivisible and unopposable. Which is to say that the consumer and the commodity, the subject and object of vision, the spectacle's male and female cases, are sewn together to form a Janus figure.
It is also to say that the barmaid is a sort of doppelganger for us. She is both a psychic double and a figuration of commodity culture's doubling of consumer and commodity, its structuring of the two as mirror images of one another. The barmaid's insertion between counter and mirror places her in an interstitial no-man’s land between the zone of vision’s objects and the visual plane on which identity is mapped in both a psychic and a consumer sense.
And if the reflected interaction between the barmaid and the male customer opens onto a narrative reading of the painting predicated on a scenario of identification with the customer, the barmaid cuts that narrative reading short with the flattening of her own fetishistic appearance, and flatly refutes it. Finally, the barmaid's interruptive quality is conducive to the feeling that she is not exactly what we expected the object of our vision to be---it is as if she is not only the object, but also the occlusion of our vision. •
And what was it that we were waiting to see, exactly? Well, not only the painting's dissolve into its illusionistic referent (a dissolve that does not happen), not only a narrative meeting of human gazes (which also does not happen), but perhaps some version of ourselves as well. That, too, we do not get: though spectorial sublimation is denied us, and though our spectatorial collusion in the spectacle is characteristically announced, we are also made to feel, rather uncannily, that we are not there, that as subjects we are as absent and as much a blind spot as the barmaid is herself and as her gaze failing to connect, makes us. Instead of ourselves we find the barmaid, as flat and frontal as the mirror itself, woven with its edge, so that she becomes, quite literally, a stand-in for us, not quite our mirror image, but as much our objective alter ego, as her mirror image is hers, as much our simultaneous counterpart and other as the reflected male customer is simultaneously her (and our) counterpart and other. Both purveyor and object of optical consumption, she folds out twice-to become first her twin and then her mate, her opposite number, so that her difference from and her kinship to the subject of vision, the spectator-consumer, are so linked and elided together as to be indivisible and unopposable. Which is to say that the consumer and the commodity, the subject and object of vision, the spectacle's male and female cases, are sewn together to form a Janus figure.
It is also to say that the barmaid is a sort of doppelganger for us. She is both a psychic double and a figuration of commodity culture's doubling of consumer and commodity, its structuring of the two as mirror images of one another. The barmaid's insertion between counter and mirror places her in an interstitial no-man’s land between the zone of vision’s objects and the visual plane on which identity is mapped in both a psychic and a consumer sense.
As a woman, perhaps it is easier for Armstrong to feel that the entire painting is the surface of a mirror and the figure standing in the center is the mirror image of herself. Even after that suggestion has been made, however, I still can't feel that way. Not just because I'm male - but also because I expect a painting to present someone else's world, not just a reflection of my own. And I would make the normative assertion that this is the proper way to interact with whatever deserves to be called an art work.
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Albert Boime:
Manet’s “Bar at the Follies Bergere” as an allegory of nostalgia
This is one of the two contributions to this volume that was not commissioned by the editor. Perhaps that accounts for its old fashioned pursuit of intentions relative to the artist rather than the scholar.
Using the novels of Manet’s friend, Emile Zola, Boime has sketched out the world of the colossal entertainment and retail venues of Paris in those decades. They attracted the flaneurs and flanesses of the day - and mirrors were commonly found on their walls. Using first person accounts of Manet’s physical condition, he shows us a flaneur who can barely walk and a painter who can no longer stand at the easel.
Though not especially relevant to his theory, he also shares a fascinating review of “Bar at the Folies Bergere” from a contemporary art journalist, Jules Comte: “As to the incorrectness of the drawing , absolute inadequacy of the form of the woman, .. as to the lack of correspondence between the reflected objects and their images, we shall not insist on these things, they are lacunae which are common to these Impressionist gentlemen , who have excellent reasons for treating drawing, modeling, and perspective with lofty disregard”
Boime’s reading of Suzon’s face is key to his interpretation of the Bar, so I have copied it below:
“Clark, writing a hundred years later, sees her above all as detached, looking out "steadily at something or somebody." This strikes me as right, giving her the pivotal position within the composition .
Her attitude is in a sense determined by the environment: as many scholars of the work have noted, her gaze is alienated from the whirl of pleasure and vivid color surrounding her. But if we cover up that environment and isolate her head, the expression seems perfectly appropriate with the lips on the verge of a smile. Bracing herself against the counter, her reveries have been momentarily interrupted by the flaneur who enters her field of vision. Her somewhat out-of focus expression is therefore transitional, held in suspension while she sizes him up. Her detachment has proven troubling in another way, since she clearly does not wholly coincide with the role she is supposed to play. The gravity and dignity of her posture and even the severity of her coiffure puts her at odds with the flirtatious barmaid of contemporary novels and popular imagery. She is not easily pigeonholed as the typical barmaid of low morals, though many contemporaries, knowing the reputation of the Folies-Bergere, had this knee-jerk reaction. Instead, Manet has invested her with a solidity and poise out of proportion to her quotidian role in the class relations of production, freeing her momentarily from her public performance 'and allowing for her subjectivity-and therefore that of his own as well.
Standing motionless behind the bar for the sole purpose of providing service, she resembles Manet at the moment of demanded performance,immobile and confined. Despite her elegant costume and proximity to the entertainment, she is unable to participate as a spectator in the communal pleasure. Her immediate surroundings are alien to her in a way that the surroundings say of Manet's Olympia and his Portrait of Zola are not. Akin to the shopgirls at the Bon Marche (and in Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames), she occupies an ambiguous social space somewhere between petit bourgeois and working class. What is a site for spectacle and exotic encounters between fashionable Paris and the demi-monde is to her only a job. She revives only when the client approaches-for both male and female, politeness in a service job such as the friendly greeting signifies subservience to the customer and exploitation by the employer. In this case, the customer is an autonomous male and the serveuse is a vulnerable female, thus leading to numerous speculations about the possible sexual exchange transpiring. Perhaps the male customer breaks the monotony of the moment and offers her a foretaste of a different life, something beyond the tedium of her routine. She mediates the transaction that positions her as one more item on the counter for sale.”
Did Boime really “cover up Suzon’s environment and isolate her head” ? Ouch! I’m sorry, but that’s not how any image, iconic painting or not, should be viewed -unless it was created automatically by something like a security camera. A facial expression is affected by everything within the frame. There are sweeping, sagging, horizontal lines that align with the mouth and powerful lower triangles that affect the eyes. So no -- her lips are not on the verge of a smile or any other change. They are locked in place for eternity.
But it does seem possible that : “ Bracing herself against the counter, her reveries have been momentarily interrupted by the flaneur who enters her field of vision. Her somewhat out-of focus expression is therefore transitional, held in suspension while she sizes him up.”
The picture is ultimately about the subjectivity of the barmaid as imagined by a male trying to suppress difference. Manet merges his subjectivity with that of the serveuse. The engagement takes place in the imagination, in the form of nostalgia for the erotic fantasies of the carefree rambler who once could see potential lovers in the crowded street.
The visually absent male passerby catches her eye - remaining non-committal - and both engage in an exchange in their fantasy outside the range of direct vision. Manet can identify with her subjectivity because of his physical condition that has essentially terminated his career as a stroller.
I felt that the painting was more about the Parisian floating world than it was about the artist’s morbid psychology -- especially since the Bar works for me like a travel poster. But if we do speculate on the artist’s psychology, I really appreciate Boime’s reference to an essay by M.M. Gedo who argued that Manet chose Suzon as his alter ego and final symbolic representative - and a “covert Christ image”, at once the Savior in the tomb and the resurrection. (“Looking at art from the inside out : a Psychoiconographic Approach” 1994). (BTW -- what ever happened to M.M. Gedo ? She must have died or retired before the age of the internet began. I my have to examine her book)
Suzon’s front-and-center, symmetrical, commanding, liturgical stature recalls what Gedo has suggested.
Piero Della Francesca (Detail)
Manet himself painted a similar image
Gedo’s interpretation presents us with a conflation of high aesthetic with high purpose — making the Bar an iconic cultural treasure - even were it not already recognized as such.
But without such prior recognition, Boime’s interpretation only offers us a dying dandy reflecting on the loss of his masculinity. Poignant - yes. Important - no. More like pathetic.
Is this"nostalgia" really how the iconoclastic tradition of modern painting started out?
Manet, Portrait of Pertuiset, Lion Hunter
Boime lists the above piece, done in the last year of Manet's life, as another "visual clue"
as to his state of mind. (i.e. sarcastic regarding masculine potency)
It came to Chicago last year for the exhibition of Manet's later years -- and I can report that it is a monstrosity.
If Manet would go to so much trouble to make a big, ugly joke about someone else -- perhaps he would also make a (much better) painting about his own shortcomings.
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David Carrier : Art History In the Mirror Stage
The second author was Jacques Lacan, a Freudian psychoanalyst who wrote about the principles of his therapeutic practice in “Ecrits” 1966. “Ecrit’s has nothing to say about visual art” but “does say great deal about language and its interpretation”. Carrier claims that it is “the key to understanding Clark’s approach” because that approach was based upon the writing of contemporary 19th Century art critics - rather than Clark’s examination of the art itself.
At this point we are three times removed from the painting. There’s the painting -- then the art critics - then TJ Clark - and finally David Carrier. Carrier is not sharing any insights regarding the painting -- but at least he is confronting the academic world that evaluates and interprets it for the rest of us - and that study is perhaps worthy of even more attention. Few of us from outside the UK will take the trouble to see the Bar at the Courtauld Gallery. If we do, we will probably not require an up-to-date interpretation. But the Bar has a special place in European Art 101 and the academic community that teaches it every day in every university.
“What we find in the confused contemporary commentaries on Courbet ---”is an unsureness which the language of aesthetics can hardly articulate, a kind of critical vertigo” -- Clark claims that these confusions inadvertently reveal the shared ideology of these commentators. ----- like the neurotics to whom Lacan listened are incapable of saying what they really mean because doing that would require them to articulate what, in their culture, remained repressed. ----- The texts of these art critics , as read by Clark, reveal shared worries about class conflict and sexuality.--- what he claims to provide is both a clearer view of the paintings and the ideology of such critics”
Moving on to Clark’s discussion of the Bar, Carrier notes that Clark discussed it twice - first in a 1977 essay and then in his 1985 book -- just as Manet painted the barmaid twice -- first in the preliminary sketch shown earlier in this post, and then in the painting now at the Courtauld. Clark tells us that the finished painting is more skilled than the sketch - and Carrier suspects that this is only because “ If a painter does the same scene twice, the first time as a study, it is natural to suppose that he resolved the second time the difficulties of the first version”.
Art historians of today usually avoid making aesthetic judgments, so it may be reasonable to assume that Clark’s comment about “more skilled” was not based upon his own eye. But still it’s possible that Clark actually did critique a painting as he personally saw it. It certainly added some affirmation to his argument about Manet’s effort to “discover and exacerbate inconsistencies in his subject”
“The preliminary sketch seems less skilled according to Clark, but since, as he admits, in both versions the barmaid faces us and the man reflected in the mirror, why does he describe the second version thus?”
As collectors of 16th Century Italian drawings know so well, preliminary studies are often better than finished work. Did Annibale Carracci ever make a painting that feels as fresh and lively as his life drawings?
But the difference between Manet’s sketch and his finished piece is like the difference between an architect's quick sketch on a small paper napkin and his final plans and elevations for a thrilling and beautiful building. Carrier’s query proves, at least for me, why he has no business writing about visual art that is not primarily conceptual. He has no eye for visual excellence.
Carrier then seems to tell us that Clark’s second essay about the Bar is better than his first -- just as Manet’s finished painting is better than the sketch. “Just as Manet can only get the picture right - that is, can only express all the ambiguities of Manet’s Paris which Clark’s social history aims to reveal - the second time, so Clark’s text only interprets the picture right the second time”
But he was “only applying to Clark's account the approach he himself adopts in analyzing the earlier commentaries. Just as he thinks that "the real appearance of Olympia can be made out, in however distorted a form in the critics' early commentaries, so I think that the real appearance of A Bar at the Folies-Bergere can be seen in distorted form in his texts. Unlike him, I deny that there is any neutral narrative describing the picture as it actually is, apart from how it is contextualized. I think it is mistaken to speak of "the real appearance " of such an artwork apart from how it is presented in an art historian's commentary. Of course the picture has a real appearance. But any interesting interpretation of that artifact must make controversial claims about how to describe its appearance.
As you might recall in the introductory essay, we were told that the task of the art historian is to “put meaning and order into art” - but Carrier here gives us a more career-centric job description - and as he later notes: “The institutional framework of our intellectual life provides a place for commentary such as mine, just as a painting depends upon the art market”
In an academic world of “publish or perish”, would-be authors must make claims that are controversial and a bit unsettling to get published. So far, the first three authors in this volume have apparently tried their best. Carol Armstrong told us that the barmaid is both male and female; Albert Boime told us that the scene records Manet’s dismay for his lost manhood; and now James Carrier suggests that the discipline of art history is in Lacan’s “mirror stage” of infantile development. None of which, by the way, puts much meaning and order into my experience of The Bar at the Folies Bergere.
Here I come to the much discussed problems of relativism. Some writers think that an objective viewpoint on texts, pictures, and• social institutions is possible. Others believe that every individual perspective carries with it assumptions which from another viewpoint may be questioned. A version of this debate has developed within art history. Conceptual conservatives ask that we not go outside the pictures themselves, but let them "speak for themselves." Pictures, this metaphor implies, have a self - evident meaning when looked at properly. Such conservatives think that Clark goes outside Manet's picture when he places it in his social history. The critics of these conservatives deny that it is possible for a picture to speak for itself. What. they ask, is the real distinction between what,is within a picture and what is outside of it?.
These spatial metaphors are not easy to interpret. Since pictures are placed by every commentator in some context, the real question is in what context paintings should be placed? Sometimes conceptual conservatives appeal to connoisseurship. Art history, they say , should talk about only pictures, not about the social history that lie beyond the frame. Connoisseurs are interested in Manet's body of work; they study his changing styles of picture-making. But when we go beyond that practice, understanding the principle upholding their criticism of social historians is not easy. The difference between a connoisseur who urges that we focus on the picture itself, relating it only to other pictures by Manet, and the social historian like Clark is that they have different ideas about how to place painting.
Carrier does not identify any of the “conceptual conservatives” or “connoisseurs” so we cannot place their beliefs, as presented here, within the broader context of their work. I would certainly say “let the work speak for itself”, but I do not believe that only one message can properly be received. I am interested in hearing discussions of social context - but certainly do not expect such discussions to replace or even modify my viewing experience. (one example being my response to the depictions of half naked, beautiful young women found on the walls of the Ajanta cave. I was no less thrilled by those images after reading that they were put into the monastery to teach young novitiates what to avoid.) Probably there are many other art writers who would also not identify themselves as either social historians or connoisseurs.
Carrier then tells us that though “Ecrits” is only about texts, Lacan wrote elsewhere about painting: “In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze… that you will see it disappear” - and relates this to Lacan’s theory of the child perceiving his self, for the very first time, in a mirror. Presumably, Carrier is pursuing this digression into Lacan for the same reason he tells us that Clark did: Lacan was then fashionable in American universities. But he doesn't really explore Clark's methodology in explaining Manet. How did Clark get from identifying Manet's critical reception as neurotic to specifying sexual and class repression as the cause of that neurosis?
Instead, Carrier just seems to be using Lacan to ridicule his colleague. Not only would Lacan have interpreted Manet's painting in a different way - but he would see Clark's two attempts at interpretation as a neurotic response to his own repressed feelings - and Carrier gives this essay the title “Art History In the Mirror Stage” to suggest that Clark’s historical approach is infantile.
However confused and neurotic Clark’s interpretation may be, however, at least, Carrier tells us, Clark is locating it within the context of what art historians have written. “And once we allow that there are many different ways of placing it in context, then the claim that there is one single best way of interpreting a picture is highly problematic. “ -- which, as Carrier explains, would be the death knell for a profession that thrives on controversy. That makes sense -- but why should those of us outside the academic community care about what career-centric art historians have to say ?
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Kermit Champa : Le Chef D'Oeuvre
David Carrier was probably thinking specifically about Kermit Champa when he wrote about the “conceptual conservatives” who let paintings “speak for themselves”. Champa identifies Carrier by name as one of those who prefer to examine discourses instead.
“Quicksand is the only word to describe what one feels underneath oneself in attempting to move from the experience of visual “speechlessness” before Manet’s great image to the exercise of verbal interpretation”
The above, the very first sentence in the essay, announces that Champa’s approach is fundamentally different from every other art historian who has appeared in this compilation so far. He will “proceed from rather than aim at the painting”.
Eventually, he will climb out of the quicksand and start writing about that painting, ---but in the meantime -- he devotes the first half of his essay to arguing on behalf of his approach. As one of his obituaries noted, his university pressured him to teach “the New Art History” . Understandably, he’s a bit defensive. It’s also likely that he was asked to explain :why his essay is so different from all the other essays by the editor who commissioned it.
Subject paintings - particularly figural ones -- have from a comparatively early date flaunted (or at least toyed with) textual ambiguity by the very act of withholding resolved narration. Without closure (or even clear opening) the non-narrative figure painting as text contributes, wherever it is presented, a double option to would be critics - take it or leave it or assume unities of narratively devious sorts.
By Champa’s reckoning, he chooses option one (to take the textual ambiguity as given), while most art historians now choose option two (to go ahead and create an explanation based on known context). As it turns out, he will not mention option three again - so we’re left to wonder what he might consider an example.
He concedes that the “The problem with proceeding from option one is that it appears to be prima facie unintelligent, or to be more precise, illiterate.
But the problem with option two is that “At a certain point in any critical discussion ostensible subject and ostensible interpretive strategy seem almost to reverse roles with the latter finally displacing the former almost completely as the locus of inquiry (exactly what David Carrier advocated) - and as Carrier noted “ these discourses are usually incompatible with each other.”
Axiomatically expressed, but hardly uncontroversially so, it would appear that for the benefit of the production of genuinely conversant discourse - in the absence of absolutely fixed common terms, definitions, and perspective - interpretations (of whatever sorts) ought ideally require the primary existence and continuous referenceability of the object interpreted in order to even be termed interpretations. . When this is not the case, the “discourse as subject” phenomenon is imminent.
Ironically, however, the discourse ended up being the subject of more than half of his own essay.
Regarding those who wrote about the Bar prior to TJ Clark, “All three writers seem to want in one way or another to keep paintings in full view as they discuss them. They need the paintings in order that what is said about them can be revisited by the reader/spectator.”
Now regarding the painting under discussion, Champa tells us that he has seen it three times over several decades --most recently at a special exhibit of paintings from the Courtauld at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. Ouch! I now regret that I missed that show -- probably thinking that I’d seen enough of famous French Impressionists to last a lifetime. Last year, when the A.I.C. hosted an exhibit of late Manet, the Courtauld refused to make the loan -- so now I’ll probably never get to see it.
Champa begins his discussion by mentioning the other arts that he relates to this painting. The connection between music and painting seems to have been his signature contribution to art history -- and you can find him on Youtube relating Mondrian to jazz. Regarding the Bar, he notes that it was first purchased at Manet’s estate auction by his friend, Emmanuel Chabrier - who had to bid quite high to acquire it. Champa does not mention any resemblance or influence between Chabrier’s music and Manet’s painting as he once did between German symphonic music and French landscapes painted after 1830.
Then Champa writes about another one of Manet’s modernist friends, Emile Zola. As you might recall, Zola’s novels were quite important to Albert Boime’s interpretation of the Bar. The novel that Champa points to is “L’Oeuvre” (“The Masterpiece”) Apparently Cezanne thought that the lead character, the fictional painter Claude Lantier, was based on himself so he took offense. Champa, however, feels that Lantier was based on Manet - as if Manet’s last masterpiece, the Bar, had been an aesthetic failure instead of a success. It’s a far-fetched theory -- but it’s not so far-fetched to guess that Manet was aware that the Bar would be his last great painting as he worked on it.
Zola’s problems with Manet have in many respects a lot in common with those of a considerable number of late twentieth century Manet scholars. A fundamental unwillingness to accept the lack of any non aesthetic program or social higher functioning of critical intelligence.
What one encounters is an absolute refusal to permit idiosyncratically original modern painting to be what it seems, a, pre-eminently in Manet’s instance, to be, namely, original and stamped with unmistakable signs of individuality. Aesthetic and social radicalism must go hand in hand.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone so outspoken would be hired by a university today. It’s an individualistic philosophy that fit well the Abstract Expressionists - and nothing ever since.
Significantly, the decade that contained the appearance first of the Bar and then of L’Oeuvre (rather like the 1980’s) was marked by a persistently increasing number of intellectual defections in the direction of one or another species of anarchism and mysticism. The privileging of the irrational and unnamable and the psychologically troubled leads, almost inevitably, to Freud's psychoanalysis and the theosophists complex models of the great order of being.
Regarding the 1980’s --- is Champa referring to Lacan, the neo-Freudian ? Otherwise, I’m puzzled.
At base, figures are Manet’s way of seizing his viewer's attention rapidly - a fictive pictorial immediacy is what Manet seems to want and what he usually gets.
It is amazing how fresh, immediate, and even natural the Bar is at first sight --like all of Manet's best works, it looks right before it looks wrong, and the latter sensation never completely subverts the former.
These are the kind of comments that follow seeing the actual painting on the wall. I’ve never done that.
“Quicksand is the only word to describe what one feels underneath oneself in attempting to move from the experience of visual “speechlessness” before Manet’s great image to the exercise of verbal interpretation”
The above, the very first sentence in the essay, announces that Champa’s approach is fundamentally different from every other art historian who has appeared in this compilation so far. He will “proceed from rather than aim at the painting”.
Eventually, he will climb out of the quicksand and start writing about that painting, ---but in the meantime -- he devotes the first half of his essay to arguing on behalf of his approach. As one of his obituaries noted, his university pressured him to teach “the New Art History” . Understandably, he’s a bit defensive. It’s also likely that he was asked to explain :why his essay is so different from all the other essays by the editor who commissioned it.
Subject paintings - particularly figural ones -- have from a comparatively early date flaunted (or at least toyed with) textual ambiguity by the very act of withholding resolved narration. Without closure (or even clear opening) the non-narrative figure painting as text contributes, wherever it is presented, a double option to would be critics - take it or leave it or assume unities of narratively devious sorts.
By Champa’s reckoning, he chooses option one (to take the textual ambiguity as given), while most art historians now choose option two (to go ahead and create an explanation based on known context). As it turns out, he will not mention option three again - so we’re left to wonder what he might consider an example.
He concedes that the “The problem with proceeding from option one is that it appears to be prima facie unintelligent, or to be more precise, illiterate.
But the problem with option two is that “At a certain point in any critical discussion ostensible subject and ostensible interpretive strategy seem almost to reverse roles with the latter finally displacing the former almost completely as the locus of inquiry (exactly what David Carrier advocated) - and as Carrier noted “ these discourses are usually incompatible with each other.”
Axiomatically expressed, but hardly uncontroversially so, it would appear that for the benefit of the production of genuinely conversant discourse - in the absence of absolutely fixed common terms, definitions, and perspective - interpretations (of whatever sorts) ought ideally require the primary existence and continuous referenceability of the object interpreted in order to even be termed interpretations. . When this is not the case, the “discourse as subject” phenomenon is imminent.
Ironically, however, the discourse ended up being the subject of more than half of his own essay.
Regarding those who wrote about the Bar prior to TJ Clark, “All three writers seem to want in one way or another to keep paintings in full view as they discuss them. They need the paintings in order that what is said about them can be revisited by the reader/spectator.”
Now regarding the painting under discussion, Champa tells us that he has seen it three times over several decades --most recently at a special exhibit of paintings from the Courtauld at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. Ouch! I now regret that I missed that show -- probably thinking that I’d seen enough of famous French Impressionists to last a lifetime. Last year, when the A.I.C. hosted an exhibit of late Manet, the Courtauld refused to make the loan -- so now I’ll probably never get to see it.
Champa begins his discussion by mentioning the other arts that he relates to this painting. The connection between music and painting seems to have been his signature contribution to art history -- and you can find him on Youtube relating Mondrian to jazz. Regarding the Bar, he notes that it was first purchased at Manet’s estate auction by his friend, Emmanuel Chabrier - who had to bid quite high to acquire it. Champa does not mention any resemblance or influence between Chabrier’s music and Manet’s painting as he once did between German symphonic music and French landscapes painted after 1830.
Then Champa writes about another one of Manet’s modernist friends, Emile Zola. As you might recall, Zola’s novels were quite important to Albert Boime’s interpretation of the Bar. The novel that Champa points to is “L’Oeuvre” (“The Masterpiece”) Apparently Cezanne thought that the lead character, the fictional painter Claude Lantier, was based on himself so he took offense. Champa, however, feels that Lantier was based on Manet - as if Manet’s last masterpiece, the Bar, had been an aesthetic failure instead of a success. It’s a far-fetched theory -- but it’s not so far-fetched to guess that Manet was aware that the Bar would be his last great painting as he worked on it.
Zola’s problems with Manet have in many respects a lot in common with those of a considerable number of late twentieth century Manet scholars. A fundamental unwillingness to accept the lack of any non aesthetic program or social higher functioning of critical intelligence.
What one encounters is an absolute refusal to permit idiosyncratically original modern painting to be what it seems, a, pre-eminently in Manet’s instance, to be, namely, original and stamped with unmistakable signs of individuality. Aesthetic and social radicalism must go hand in hand.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone so outspoken would be hired by a university today. It’s an individualistic philosophy that fit well the Abstract Expressionists - and nothing ever since.
Significantly, the decade that contained the appearance first of the Bar and then of L’Oeuvre (rather like the 1980’s) was marked by a persistently increasing number of intellectual defections in the direction of one or another species of anarchism and mysticism. The privileging of the irrational and unnamable and the psychologically troubled leads, almost inevitably, to Freud's psychoanalysis and the theosophists complex models of the great order of being.
Regarding the 1980’s --- is Champa referring to Lacan, the neo-Freudian ? Otherwise, I’m puzzled.
At base, figures are Manet’s way of seizing his viewer's attention rapidly - a fictive pictorial immediacy is what Manet seems to want and what he usually gets.
It is amazing how fresh, immediate, and even natural the Bar is at first sight --like all of Manet's best works, it looks right before it looks wrong, and the latter sensation never completely subverts the former.
These are the kind of comments that follow seeing the actual painting on the wall. I’ve never done that.
I really appreciate Champa’s reference to two other paintings from earlier in the century that prominently feature a young, strong, attractive, well dressed, female figure standing in front of her image in a mirror. I wish I could see all three side by side on a wall.
I also appreciate Champa’s observations that not only are all the bottles unopened, but there also are not any serving glasses. Is this really a bar ? He describes the barmaid as “hieratic” as if she were performing mass at an altar instead of serving drinks at a bar - and the spectator is a supplicant. He tells us that she “repeats the head and torso of the dead Christ -- and he’s not the first to make that connection.
When mirrors lie and bars can’t serve what is left?-- the spectacle of painting as painting.
Again -Champa returns to the kind of art that dominated the artworld of his youth: abstract expressionism.
Electric light passes into manets representation via emphatic white-brighness, the emphasis on high values of hues and the lightning of greys. His medium is drier than ever ( approaching pastel) and it accepts a great deal of last minute grey/white overpainting and accenting - more fresco-like than any of his other paintings - holds and amplifies the wall like like no other imagistically concentrated painting after Velasquez surrender at Breda. He painted many pictures more materially sensuous, but never one so completely delectable, while at the same time so troubling.-- i’m feeling more or less conventional religious vibrations as well -or to put it more accurately, I’m feeling Manet’s feeling of them.
What are we to make of manet’s picturing of a young, sexually attractive, fashionably dressed redhead, positioned in priestly manner tending a bar, that is obviously not a bar in the normal sense ? In fact, as Manet arranges it, it’s much more like an altar. Arguably symbolic flowers emerge from the vase on the bar and from the barmaid’s bodice. Her potions (ointments?) are more or less symmetrically positioned to her left and right. As we see her, she is not what she is seen in the mirror as being (we see only her back, figuratively, her past). Perhaps she is repentant - a Magdalen rather than the prostitute most scholars would have her be. Perhaps she is there to heal us, the socially and spiritually disoriented urban bourgeois spectators and Manet, the physically failing artist. Perhaps, too, he has passed into her (which is why we don’t see him in the mirror so that he and she are both healers possessed of different potions or lotions but with equivalent powers and promises ( or at least comparable degrees of compassion.) -- a complex socio- psychological and aesthetic unity - a unity that first irritates and then soothes. I think Matisse would have understood what I am saying.
Electric light passes into manets representation via emphatic white-brighness, the emphasis on high values of hues and the lightning of greys. His medium is drier than ever ( approaching pastel) and it accepts a great deal of last minute grey/white overpainting and accenting - more fresco-like than any of his other paintings - holds and amplifies the wall like like no other imagistically concentrated painting after Velasquez surrender at Breda. He painted many pictures more materially sensuous, but never one so completely delectable, while at the same time so troubling.-- i’m feeling more or less conventional religious vibrations as well -or to put it more accurately, I’m feeling Manet’s feeling of them.
What are we to make of manet’s picturing of a young, sexually attractive, fashionably dressed redhead, positioned in priestly manner tending a bar, that is obviously not a bar in the normal sense ? In fact, as Manet arranges it, it’s much more like an altar. Arguably symbolic flowers emerge from the vase on the bar and from the barmaid’s bodice. Her potions (ointments?) are more or less symmetrically positioned to her left and right. As we see her, she is not what she is seen in the mirror as being (we see only her back, figuratively, her past). Perhaps she is repentant - a Magdalen rather than the prostitute most scholars would have her be. Perhaps she is there to heal us, the socially and spiritually disoriented urban bourgeois spectators and Manet, the physically failing artist. Perhaps, too, he has passed into her (which is why we don’t see him in the mirror so that he and she are both healers possessed of different potions or lotions but with equivalent powers and promises ( or at least comparable degrees of compassion.) -- a complex socio- psychological and aesthetic unity - a unity that first irritates and then soothes. I think Matisse would have understood what I am saying.
I don't know about Matisse - but this makes sense to me. At first, I was annoyed by the unavoidable confrontation with an officious yet attractive figure who looks bored or distracted. But later I was soothed by the lively yet gentle feeling of the composition.
As Champa interprets it -- there's nothing great, profound, moral, or philosophical about the theme. It's the daydream of a dying man. Boime said much the same - he called it "nostalgic" - and I see their point. Coming at the end, it suggests a life that's been selfish, foolish, and superficial. As an important figure in the history of Modern Art, Manet's paintings must be placed into that context. Champa does it by emphasizing individualism - though he does not attempt to distinguish that from selfishness.
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Bradford C. Collins : The Dialectics of Desire
This essay depends on two convictions. The first is that while all human expressions are a response to some stimulus, those we would call substantive are replies to a particular aspect or aspects of an individual’s discursive field. Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergere, I will argue, articulates his dialogic response to a current and long standing tradition of images of women wherein an illusion of psychological and therefore physical intimacy is afforded the male spectator……..
Is there any stimulus that cannot be located within some kind of discursive field? Why would brushing a mosquito off your leg not qualify ? Why would any Sunday painter’s portrait of her beloved kitten not qualify? And yet…somehow we know that Collins is only going to be concerned with the trending discursive fields as related to ver famous artists. Because Collins knows that he is not expected or qualified to be the kind of original thinker who determines which artists and which discourses deserve attention.
Also - one might note the causal relationship proposed between psychological and physical intimacy. Does either one ever necessarily imply the other? That has not been my experience, and I’m not sure that I am alone in that regard.
The second conviction… is that all human actions are strategic, that is, aimed at satisfying some need…. In the case of the Bar at the Folies Bergere, I will argue a humanist conclusion: The painting, like this essay, served to satisfy certains transhistorical psychological needs - the author’s Hegelian desire for “recognition” as well as his (Manet’s and mine) Lacanian need for a narcissistic mirroring of the “imaginary” self.
The scare quotes alerting us that “recognition” is being used as jargon should also bracket the word “strategic” —- unless Collins really believes that every human act involves “the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them.” (a dictionary definition). It’s been my observation that very, very few human actions have ever qualified.
The conclusion one might draw from his introduction is that this essay will be a jargon heavy recitation of ideas then trending in the humanities, c. 1995 - blissfully free of the author’s own independent thinking. Not very promising.
But I found the discussion interesting, anyway - first, as an invitation to consider other outstanding European representations of attractive young women - and then as a presentation of Jacques Lacan’s notion of “desire”
The sketch (of the Bar) stands in a log line of French paintings that utilize a mirror to provide the male spectator a more complete inventory of a female subject’s physical charms: Ingres. Tissot, Alfred Stevens
Alfred Stevens, 1872
This one is quite appropriate for any discussion of the "mirror stage" - isn't it?
Stevens is not in the Art Institute of Chicago, and I probably walked right past his piece at the Met. It looks painfully like an illustration.
But I suppose I have seen him in the work of his accomplished student: William Merritt
The essence of what I call the Venetian tradition is the acquiescence of an attractive female subject, shown nude or potentially so, to the erotic desires of the male spectator. Many of the women in such art - those pictured in Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Goya’s The Nude Maja, or Tissot’s Quiet, for example, meet the male spectator’s gaze with an expression that combines quiet warmth, directness, and sincerity…. Although one could argue that this returned gaze is simply a device to signal the female’s ready inclination to participate in the male’s sexual fantasies...one could argue that their overt availability is itself a signal of a deeper , , more satisfying psychological intimacy.. This is, of course, not always the case --in a number of academic nudes by the likes of Bouguereau and Cabanel.. A slightly lascivious cast of the female gaze suggests that the issue is fundamentally if not entirely sexua
Titian, Venus of Urbino
"quiet warmth, directness, and sincerity.. with more satisfying psychological intimacy." ?
The head by itself might say that -- but it's rather small and off to one side. The lady presents her genitals at the center of the work - and the energy of the composition frankly invites the viewer to dive deep within --- just as the girl in the background is diving into the dark depths of a large trunk. The woman's personality is just part of the pleasant ambiance - like the carpets on the wall, the clean white sheets, and the view out the large open window.
This is a patriarchal goddess of sexual desire - and I would not expect her to join me in a heartfelt conversation after sexual energies have been spent and the money has been paid.
James Tissot, "Quiet", 1881
This time the welcoming face has been set into a family scene with a somewhat alarmed child at the center. Apparently the spectator is a stranger to her. The mother's arms are protectively crossed over her leg. I do not feel that she is available for anything more intimate than pleasant small talk - like
"Such a beautiful dog! - is she a collie? "
Goya: The Clothed Maja, 1800-1805
Goya: The Naked Maja, 1797-1800
Not to say that I've ever owned an inflatable sex doll -- but that's what this looks like. Then, the facial portrait was painted in afterward - and it doesn't really fit - like a head-in-the-hole life size bathing beauty gag board in a carnival.
I don't think the viewer is expecting to meet someone -- this is more like a trophy - for the man who pays her rent.
The clothed maja offers much better conversation. She's the one with the warmth, directness, and sincerity. There's nothing guilty or furtive about her.
Ingres: Portrait of Monsieur Bertin
And speaking of warmth, directness, and sincerity - isn't this portrait a fine example?
It looks like he's ready to hear your problems and then actually do something about them.
So I'm not sure that a gender identity or romance is required for these qualities.
William Bouguereau, "Priestess of Bacchus", 1894
This might be what Collins had in mind for a "slightly lascivious cast of the female gaze"
Her look seems to say "We can do whatever you like... I really don't care".. She's blissfully stoned.
Bouguereau, Priestess, 1904
Here's another priestess staring you straight in the eye -- though I doubt that she would figure in very many male sexual fantasies.
My point being ..... there's quite a variety of female gazes in the academic painting of that time.
An analysis of both the finished painting and its generative process suggest that the precise theme of Manet’s work is an unexplained disappointment of carefully cultivated male expectations.
Why Manet would have chosen to treat the recreational theme of the work in this deflationary manner is the question that we must answer.
This is the first essay so far in this book to present disappointed male expectations as the "precise theme of this painting" So shouldn't he retreat into a more personal declaration like: " MY IDEA of the precise theme is....." ?
As I noted at the beginning, for me the recreational potential of an evening at the Folies Bergere is not deflated at all. I’d prefer pretty girls to look bored rather than present professional smiles.. and that’s why I called the painting an insider’s view.
Which male expectations have been disappointed? Collins would look beyond selfish male sexual needs to something more fundamental: the psychological --- and Manet’s interest in "the basic problematic of male-female relations" - the "failure of men and women to communicate" - not because women are stupid - but because of "their Otherness.".
An analysis of both the finished painting and its generative process suggest that the precise theme of Manet’s work is an unexplained disappointment of carefully cultivated male expectations.
Why Manet would have chosen to treat the recreational theme of the work in this deflationary manner is the question that we must answer.
This is the first essay so far in this book to present disappointed male expectations as the "precise theme of this painting" So shouldn't he retreat into a more personal declaration like: " MY IDEA of the precise theme is....." ?
As I noted at the beginning, for me the recreational potential of an evening at the Folies Bergere is not deflated at all. I’d prefer pretty girls to look bored rather than present professional smiles.. and that’s why I called the painting an insider’s view.
Which male expectations have been disappointed? Collins would look beyond selfish male sexual needs to something more fundamental: the psychological --- and Manet’s interest in "the basic problematic of male-female relations" - the "failure of men and women to communicate" - not because women are stupid - but because of "their Otherness.".
Renoir- The Swing, 1876
Tissot - Holyday, 1876
Collins does not bring aesthetics into his discussion - but I might add that all the paintings mentioned in this essay, including "The Bar" though perhaps not the "Naked Maja", offer psychological satisfaction regardless of the expressions on the faces. And these two paintings do not appear to be as distant in aesthetic quality as the reputations of the two artists would suggest. Renoir is an icon of modern painting -- while Tissot currently has nothing on display at either the Met or the Art Institute of Chicago.
The emphasis on a notion of psychology that is broader than mere sexual attraction, finally lets Collins introduce that one topic that was on every academic’s mind back then: Jacques Lacan.
The concept of desire is central to Lacan’s attempt to rescue the pessimistic thrust of Freudian theory from the psychoanalytic professions emphasis on its therapeutic potential.
As necessary as psychological theories may be for the therapeutic profession, I'd prefer the humanities leave them alone - and allow paintings or literature to be as normative or wacky as they may be.
The Freudian experience starts … by postulating a world of desire. It postulates it prior to any kind of experience, prior to any considerations concerning the world of appearances and the world of essences. Desire is instituted within the Freudian world in which our experience unfolds. It constitutes it, and at no point in time, not even in the most insignificant of our manoeuvres in this experience of ours, can it be erased. The Freudian world isn’t a world of things,it isn't a world of being, it is a world of desire as such. (Lucan)
Apparently, Freud’s followers identify that desire as sexual - but according to Lacan :
"The deficiency that stands behind all desires, is the " lack of being - lack of being whereby the being exists.”
This seems much more open ended than just sexual desire - though if it’s all inclusive, it’s trivial.
For Lacan, this lack of being usually translated as a want to be more accurately a deficiency of being not only drives all human actions but is responsible for the very origin of self-consciousness. Lacan considerably revised Freud’s notions on the formation and nature of the ego. According to Freud the ego presumably formed during the infants narcissistic stage is responsible for reconciling the ids instinctual appetites with the requirements of the external fworld. Lacan on the other hand argued that the ego is simply the dissatisfied alienated self-awareness formed in what he calls the mirror stage of development. Somewhere between six and 18 months the infant becomes aware either through seeing his image reflected in a real mirror or presumably the figurative mirror of the mothers gaze - of his own body as a totality The unity of this reflection and his mastery of it fills the infant with triumph and joy. The child does anticipates both the mastery of his body that she has not yet objectively achieved and a feeling of wholeness that she can never realize
The Ego’s function is not mediation but a fundamental misconception of reality of what is possible for the subject.
The mirror image not only establishes an impossible but compelling ideal it also inaugurates the alienation that language will complete not only because it presupposes a distinct speaker and listener but because a signifier is the absence of the signified
I appreciate this distinction between the theories of Freud and Lacan, if, indeed it is accurate. But I hope that Collins does not believe that Lacan’s mirror theory has anything thing to do with all the mirrors in French paintings from the nineteenth century.
Thus in the relationship between man and woman, for example, desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the desire of the other; if he wants to possess or to assimilate the desire taken as desire - that is to say he wants to be desired or loved or, rather, recognized in his human value.
This sounds good — I, too, want to be desired more than possess someone I desire — but I do wonder how a human can be capable of a non-human desire. Apparently, Lacanian theory allows for that possibility - as does traditional Taoism - though there it only applies to pre-natal and very young infants.
This sounds good — I, too, want to be desired more than possess someone I desire — but I do wonder how a human can be capable of a non-human desire. Apparently, Lacanian theory allows for that possibility - as does traditional Taoism - though there it only applies to pre-natal and very young infants.
There to desire the desire of another is in the final analysis to desire that the value that I am or that I represent be the value desired by the other. I want him to recognize me as an autonomous value. In other words all human Anthropogenetic desire —that is the desire that generates self-consciousness the human reality —-is finally a function of the desire for recognition therefore to speak of the origin of self consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight for recognition.
I just want to be desired — regardless of the reason. Smell - looks - finances - personality - taste - smarts- whatever works. Autonomous value ? That’s ok too - but I’m certainly not looking for that kind of recognition from anyone other than myself.. I’m not sure how I felt about that when I first had any self awareness. I’m guessing that I badly needed my mother’s attention. (and I got it!)
Collins also gets personal at the end of his essay - telling us that he receives various gratifications from writing this essay - just as Manet did from painting the Bar and his male viewers received from viewing it. A feeling of mastery over the subject matter seems like a good motivation - but doesn't that sometimes conflict with a desire for professional recognition, if that is also important?
This essay seems to be aiming more for professional recognition than at comprehending a particular painting. The jargon heavy introduction alerted us to the author's desire to engage current academic discourse. That's how he fulfills the responsibility of his job. He's a good university employee. So it's not too surprising that he expects the barmaid in Manet's painting to be doing her job as well. and when she doesn't smile, his considers his disappointment to be the precise theme of the painting.
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MICHAEL PAUL DRISKEL :
ON MANET'S BINARISM
VIRGIN AND/OR WHORE
The thesis of George Mauner's Manet, Peintre-Philosophe (1976) is not fully presented in this volume. Mauner sought to reveal a dyadic philosophy embedded in the Bar - and Driskel immediately dismisses "the validity of his approach" by asserting "it was a cardinal rule after 1850 - one promoted by the avant garde and even endorsed by many in the rear guard - that significant art should avoid the conflation of the visual and the literary".. Beaudelaire's L'Art Philosophique is presented as an endorsement of that opinion.
As Driskel asserts : "this (Baudelaire's) . shift in emphasis from the space/time dichotomy to one of plastic expression / discursive presentation is among the most significant in 19th century art theory... thus if Manet consciously constructed a complex and coherent philosophical discourse for his paintings,.. it goes against the very grain of modern art with which we assume he identified"
And yet...... Driskel agrees that "dualistic organization pervades Manet's art and is strikingly exemplifed in the Bar" (even if that organization was not consciously constructed as such)
This troubles me -- because I am doubting that a dualistic organization cannot be found in anything, work of art or not, if one wishes to find it.
But if that invented organization invokes the various concerns or discourses that were competing for attention back when the artist was working, then it might pull the reader further into the time and place where the art was created - and who doesn't like to time travel ?
Jacques Derrida is presented as the godfather of this process - the prime example being his book, Glas, wherein he discusses two contrasting discourses within columns that face each other on the page, inviting readers to interconnect them however they choose - as assisted by marginal notes. That's kind of what Driskel does with the two barmaids presented in the Bar: the hieratic "virgin" who faces the viewer and the stooping "whore" whose back is reflected in the mirror. It's a dyad common to patriarchal societies where an unmarried woman is either one or the other.
Statue of the Immaculate Conception, Paper mache
Sister Eulalie Lagrave and Sister Scholastique Gosselin, 1848
Little did I know -- but the Virgin Mary became even more popular in 19th C. France than she had ever been before. In 1854 she was promoted above all other humans (except for her Son) with Ineffabilis Deus, the papal decree that she was born without original sin. This was the period when Bernadette had her vision at Lourdes and pious nuns like Sister Lagrave carried her image to the furthest reaches of civilization. (Winnipeg).
The above certainly exemplifies a gentle, airy, sweet. spaced out, cloistered purity.
France, early 14th Century, probably Normandy
On the other other hand, this old friend from the Met shows us a more sturdy mother- the kind who orders around servants, has a rather powerful left arm, and doubtless accommodates a husband.
Ingres, Virgin Adoring the Host, 1854, Musee d'Orsay
It was within this Marian revival that Manet painted his bar -- and Ingres painted his six versions of the Virgin Adoring the Host - as celebrated by Augustin Jean Hurel, who wrote "there is in these virgins, who contemplate and adore..a sentiment of ardent faith and maternal charity that transfigures them"
(Hurel was a friend of Manet, and as a priest, administered his last rites)
Raphael "Sistine Madonna", 1514 (detail)
"In contrast to Raphael's graceful, curvilinear vision of the Madonna, Ingres rendered his with an austerely rectilineal compositional structure, careful symmetry, and absolute frontalilty"
Driskel does not identify any specific Raphael Madonna, but if we compare his Sistine Madonna with the Ingres posted above it, the notable difference, for me, is as follows:
As with the Medieval sculpture mentioned earlier, the Raphael Madonna feels more like a living person facing the uncertainty of life. The Ingres Madonna feels like a wax doll. She's more like an idea than a living creature. Raphael's Madonna makes choices and has character. Ingres' Madonna is a solemn devotee - and righteously aware of it.
Yet apparently, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon felt that Ingres had painted his Virgin much like his Odalesques, while Theophile Thore, felt that the Virgin's face belonged "more to a courtesan than a Virgin" -- which leads directly to Driskel's dichotomy of the virgin and the whore.
*
Titian, "Vanity" , 1515
Driskel then compares the Ingres Madonna with Manet's Bar. They both have a horizontal barrier between the viewer and the main figure (an altar for the Virgin, a countertop for the barmaid). The barmaid is more symmetrically disposed than the Virgin - but Ingres places the chalice at the center, while the "equivalent" for the barmaid, the wineglass with rose, is placed off center.
More importantly for me, the Madonna invites you into her quiet, eternal sacred space, while the noisy, bustling space of the Folies Bergere is behind you (as a flat reflection on the mirror) and the barmaid is in your face, ready to take your order" "coffee, tea, or me?"
Hippolyte Flandrin,"Mother of Sorrow", 1845, lithograph by Jules Laurens
Raimondi, "Pieta" after Raphael
Driskel tells us that " the position of the arm and shoulders of Manet's barmaid also resonate with another art historical reference" -- namely the Raimondi shown above - which also appears to have inspired the Flandrin version above it.
But how similar, really, are those two poses ? The barmaid leans forward onto the bar with her hands turned down and outward. The Madonnas lean back with their palms facing up and forward. We can be quite sure that if Driskel could have found a Madonna posed more like the barmaid, he would have shown her to us. And he's a bit sly as he seamlessly moves from "resonate with" to "chose a format associated with" to "borrowing from Marian imagery". Resonate ? yes. Borrow ? Not so likely.
He concludes that: "it should be apparent that the image of a single female standing in a pose of direct address to the viewer, with arms outstretched and facing outward, was one of the most emotionally, politically, and socially charged visual signs in nineteenth century France".
And despite how the Barmaid differs, I can't think of any other mythological character, other than the Virgin, that such a pose might have suggested. Certainly neither Eve nor Venus.
******************
Constantin Guys, Women on a Balcony
The other half of the dyad, the Whore, gets less attention. I'm especially curious about casual prostitution, as might have been practiced by barmaids at the Follies Bergere in that time and place. Isn't there any contemporary literature about that?
We're told about Alphonse Esquiros who wrote that "society had constructed a concept of feminity that placed the Virgin Mary and the prostitute at its two defining poles" - but that's too close to Driskel's thesis. What about other writers with different views?
Gavarni, (1804-1866), " Une lorette et un bourgeois se croisent dans la rue
A fine example of a certain kind of female gaze.
Gavarni
The other discourse we're given concerns the "Lorette" -- semi-respectable women who supplement their income by selling sexual services - especially in the vicinity of Notre Dame de Lorette.
"Placed under the trope of irony, Manet's barmaid is a visual equivalent, if not a literal representation, of a lorette."
I have some difficulty, however, imagining Suzon (Manet's barmaid) in either of the scenes depicted above. She appears more like a college girl working a part-time job. I wonder if writers from that era ever wrote about that kind of young woman.
Then Driskel invokes a connection between prostitutes and modernity via Baudelaire's essay about one of his favorite artists, Constantin Guys. And he places that connection within a graphic chart of similarities and oppositions -- which he proposes as a "field of meaning in which Manet's painting was situtated"
Whore/narrative/asymmetry/obliqueness/depth (Modernity) is opposed to Virgin, symbol, symmetry, frontality,surface (Tradition)
Driskel does not claim that Manet consciously imagined such a scheme -- but "he willfully appropriated the iconography of the Immaculate Conception and placed it in an ambiance where he knew prostitution was commonplace."
Having established a field of meaning - do we really have to speculate on whether appropriation was willful or not? Driskel has already done more than any of the previous essays to construct a likely social context in which the Bar was created - which is not say that this context is adequate. Manet was not only a flaneur and cradle Catholic - he was also devoted to visual art - with a special interest in the European Renaissance tradition as exemplified by Velazquez, but also the Japanese tradition of Ukiyo-e. He fits admirably into both - as well as that multi-cultural encyclopedic context that selects across time.
Driskel ends the essay with an amusing if unnecessary suggestion that Manet may have " considered his canvas a hymen.. "upon which tradition and modernity are delineated and confounded" Presumably it was available for repeated penetration by the viewer without tearing. A possible metaphor for all the arts.
********************************************************
JACK FLAM
LOOKING INTO THE ABYSS
Jack Flam's contribution to this discussion is his recognition that the mirror reflects nothing facing the bar other than the balcony and floor opposite the balcony on which the barmaid is standing. Don't balconies always have a guard rail to keep people from falling off ? Behind the viewer (us) who is facing the barmaid, there is nothing except a sheer, and probably fatal, drop all the way down to the floor of the Follies Bergere. The viewer's position is just as precarious as the acrobat whose feet appear in the upper left corner.
So far -- neither I, nor any of the other six commentators had given any notice of this. Why not?
Speaking only for myself - I guess it's because I'm not accustomed to attending to anything that's behind my back as a viewer -- only what's in front of my eyes. And I never expect the logic of a real situation to apply to a painting, no matter how realistic it may appear. I'm only interested in what the artist's imaginary space has made me feel.
The central figure, the barmaid, is indeed confrontational - in your face. But does the painting make you feel like your situation is so precarious that if you take even one step backward, it could be the last move you'll ever make? Perhaps the real, life size painting on the wall of the Courtauld would make me feel that way - but the reproductions on my monitor screen do not. Has Flam focused his attention on one anomaly of Manet's staging to the exclusion of Manet's painted surface as a whole ? Does it feel precarious at first (or second, or third ) glance - or only after you have done some rational calculation based on data rather than visual effect?
Flam then proceeds to a discussion of realism.
"The Bar offers the most striking instance in Manet's art of the primacy of mental vision over actual sight" -- more than just the "spacial ambiguity" of "The Execution of Maximillian" or "The Railroad", both marked by a severe compression and contraction of space"
Manet, "Execution of Maximillian", 1869
No strange mirrors here - but just like the barmaid, the executioners are protruding from the wall and uncomfortably intruding into the viewers space. The POV for their upper torsos seems to be the same height as the gapers leaning over the opposite wall - but it seems to be about waist high for the legs - as if the bottom of the wall was the horizon line.
Manet, The Railway, 1573
It's the irregular grid of the fence that makes the space feel strange here. The POV appears to be on the left side, so you make eye contact with the adult and see the child from the left. The bottom rail of the fence conforms to that, but the evenly spaced bars want to be seen from the middle - as do the horizontals in the distance.
Neither of these two paintings offends the perspective of a single POV as much as the earlier Dejeuner Sur L'herbe (1983) with the way-too-large distant figure. But why should this notion of realism concern us anyway? "Reality" has always been far more important to philosophers than to painters and art lovers.
As Flam tells us, Manet's friendship with Monet shifted his "ongoing dialogue with the history of painting" - but he does not characterize that shift. Instead he tells us that "so much of Manet's enterprise had been involved with reconciling the realism associated with everyday life with a desire to create imaginative pictures that had a deeper significance" - which presumably never ended. Couldn't that be said of any artist who paints recognizable things - each of which, like the mirror in Manet's Bar - is a "bridge created between imagination and reality".
Flan questions whether the Barmaid is a prostitute because of the "extraordinary and systematic complexity of the painting -- a world full of disjunctions" -- so presumably everything can be questioned. Is this really a barmaid ? (I've suggested that it's her friend filling in for the evening shift). Is this really the Follies Bergere ? (or a fantastic, fever dream recollection?) Is there really any point to trying to verbally identify anything in this painting ? Wouldn't it make more sense to turn that mental function off -- and just wordlessly soak in the image ? (which is how we usually look at paintings in an art museum anyway - isn't it?)
Regarding Manet's "ambiguity towards women, and towards desire itself", Flam offers this quote from his friend Baudelaire's "The Painter of Modern Life":
"Rather, she is a divinity, a star, which presides at all the conceptions of the brain of man; a glittering conglomeration of all the graces of Nature, condensed into a single being; the object of the keenest admiration and curiosity that the picture of life can offer it contemplator. She is a kind of idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching, who holds wills and destinies suspended on her glance"
I guess that's what you might call "the feminine mystique" - still alive and well a hundred years later when Betty Freidan attacked it. Did it begin in the "Modern Life" of Paris in the 19th Century? I don't think so.
What did begin then was the stream of consciousness novel, as introduced by Edouard Dujardin with "Les lauriers sont coupés" ( 1887) - where an interior monologue is combined with an exterior view - as in Manet's Bar painted in the previous decade. Flam develops that connection and suggests that the Man in the Top Hat is the only aberration in the painting that is beyond a compositional distortion and "fairly begs us to interpret him symbolically". That seems about right.
It also seems that the flagrant self centeredness of this painting was something new in gallery art -- and within a generation it would be understood as the triumph of the Modern.
Regarding iconographical points of reference:
*the combination of mirror, girl, flowers , and worldliness of place and objects are "standard features" of the vanitas theme - enhanced by the tremulous brush strokes
*the rose was a symbol of love, beauty, and an emblem of Venus.
*the Man in the Top Hat plays the role of Death in a Danse Macabre
Antonio De Pareda, 1636 , Allegory of Vanity
I'm not convinced that anything other than a skull is a standard feature in a Vanitas -- and as we see above, even that is optional. Perhaps all that's required is a mood of uneasiness -- that nothing in the world has true value. It's kind of an opposite of desire - and Titian presented an attractive young woman to represent both. Manet's Bar seems to combine both. The scene is exiting rather than contemplative -- but the pretty girl is not presenting her feminine charms.
Vanitas themes have never appealed to me. If everything in the world has no real value -- wouldn't that have to include the vanitas painting itself ? Ecclesiastes is pretentious and just plain wrong. Everyday, there is something new under the sun. Life on earth, including human civilizations, has been evolving for billions of years. It's an exciting cosmic event - and it's not over yet. Seize the moment! That's what visual art does, and it's a cornucopia of wonders.
"In the Bar at the Folies Bergere, Manet transcends the limits of naturalism by deconstructing naturalistic space from within its own conventions and in a sense deconstructing realism itself"
Going back to ancient Roman murals, and probably before, painters have been doing this for millennia.
Contemporary scholars, however, sure like to use the word "deconstruct".
In recent years, the Bar has been written about in a mode of social art history that is especially favored by American and British art historians. To a much greater degree than is generally acknowledged, they have imposed their own specific local circumstances upon the interpretation of this and other paintings of the period, especially with regard to concerns about class and in their somewhat puritanical attitude towards relations between the sexes in late nineteenth century Paris.
Can't argue with that - except to note that both the editor. Bernard Collins, and the introduction by Richard Shiff have frankly acknowledged this imposition.
Flam notes that scholars did not identify the barmaid as a prostitute until the 1940's - and he prefers to consider the painting as poetry rather than sociological document. As do I - but evidently he is more concerned with the Bar's poetics as a storyboard rather than as a painted surface. We also might note that some scholars, like Driskel in the previous essay, do not insist that the Barmaid is selling sex, but only that viewers in the era of "Lorettes" would have thought that to be a strong possibility. Flam also questions whether those who comment on the painting should refer to the barmaid as Suzon, the name of the woman who posed for the artist (and also tended bar at the Folies) . And again, I would agree - feeling that the priest-like barmaid in the painting is a type - not a specific person.
Flam's final (borrowed) observation is that the Barmaid is wearing the same gold bracelet as Olympia - a trinket once worn by his own mother who kept a cutting of the artist's baby hair in the attached locket. The barmaid's bracelet is more loosely painted - but I think I can make out the that blue locket hanging by a small chain from the clasp. It's a detail too tiny to affect the impact of the painting - or be noticed by anyone other than the meticulous scholar - but still the artist made the effort to include it anyway. I love my Mom, too. (BTW - aren't those detail areas lively?)
Here is his concluding paragraph:
"Perhaps in this valedictory painting, Manet both personified and personalized desire in this woman, by decorating her with this bracelet. Perhaps within this context of reflection answering reflection with reflection, she is also a surrogate for the artist, both detached and engaged, absent but always present. Like the artist, she stands at the edge of an abyss, contemplating the transience of all pleasure and all things"
Quite poetic. If colophons could be appended to European paintings, as they have been to Chinese scrolls, this would be a good one.
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Tag Gronberg : Dumbshows
"Metaphors of silence - of silence as the product of muting - have played an important role in the interpretation of Manet's work. Werner Hoffmann, for example, compares Manet's Nana with the "conversation pieces" between boulevardier and cocotte found in French Nineteenth Century popular illustration"
Regretfully, no examples of such illustration have been provided This is the closest that I could find. The characters are gesturing to each other even if their lips are closed. (and there's even a painting on the wall that represents the young gallant's fondest dream: the woman lying on her back, clothes removed, and knees open). By contrast, "The barmaid - represented as rigid and static with blank expression, silences the implied sly repartee -- as well as the laughter invited by double entendres and sniggering asides"
Gronberg does share this record of the kind of entertainment then available at the Folies-Bergere - which includes acrobats and sharpshooters - as well as boulevardiers and barmaids. (see the top-center frame on the second image - it's almost a side view of Manet's Bar)
Barmaid: What would monsieur like to take?
Boulevardier: I dare not tell you.
Gronberg tells us that these two scenes from the Reichsoffen originated in a single painting that was cut in two and repainted in 1878. She sees it as a failed attempt at painting a public establishment that was eventually retrieved in the Bar at the Follies Bergere. Compared to the Bar, they both feel like rough sketches.
In Georges Bataille's monograph on Manet .. silence is interpreted as the significant characteristic of Manet's work as a whole: "what he insisted upon was painting that should rise in utter freedom , in natural silence. Manet's painting strikes dumb .. a kind of time honored rhetoric symbolized by the model in his heroic pose with his chest thrust out"
Pursuing Bataille's provocative association of "muting" with a rejection of the the "heroic" male figure, ..my essay constitutes an attempt to focus on precisely these two male characters: the acrobat and the the boulevardier - which the Bar at the Folies Bergere makes so difficult to see.
Is she really going to ignore the two main figures, the front and back views of the barmaid ?
Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873
The reputation of Georges Bataille has been redeemed by Lacan and other post-structuralists - otherwise I'm not sure that many would care about what he had to say about Manet.
He barely mentions the Bar in his monograph:
Un Bar at the Folies Bergere is an explosive festival of light, overruling and absorbing the girl's motionless beauty; but a sly, underhand moral complacency weighs heavy on this picture. In Ball at the Opera we find the same equivocal mingling of restraint and licentiousness. The color magic of all these paintings potent enough to make up for the meagerness of the subject."..Georges Bataille
None of the essays in this volume have yet suggested anything close to a "sly, underhand moral complacency" Being complacent about sexual morality themselves, perhaps they could not notice it. Mostly they have seen the mingling of hieratic with chaotic.
Here's a detail area from the Ball at the opera. I would not call this a quiet dumbshow at all. These two characters are vividly interacting.
The designed vibrancy of the paint and brushwork is remarkable.
Same could be said about this small area from the Bar - which feels even more sensual. Matisse comes to mind.
Ultimately my concern with Bataille's interpretation will have less to do with proposing another "explanation" of Manet's picture than with considering the implications of using metaphors of silence in order to identify the Bar as a paradigmatic Modernist work"
One might note that Bataille proposed that every painting becomes "silent" when it is removed from its original religious or political context and put into an art museum. Thus, I suppose, every painting can be made Modern - though Gronberg might not agree.
As she begins her discussion of the Boulevardier, Gronberg sets aside Bataille, and quotes Baudelaire regarding the fashionable men's clothing of the day - which is no longer colorful, but is characterized by "grimacing folds which play like serpents about mortified flesh" with a "mysterious grace"
This leads to Winckelmann's discussion of the Vatican Laocoon as a standard by which the "moderns may become great and perhaps unequaled". Poor Laocoon's agonized, heroic flesh is precisely what modern male fashion attempts to conceal, in order to "mask man's constant need to reassure himself with the sight of the "heroic" male body".
Is Gronberg still addressing the Bar at the Folies Bergere? She seems to be exercising feminine scorn for the fragile male ego and castration anxiety. Has she recently been through a divorce?
Regarding the acrobats, many interesting details are given concerning the Hanlon-Lees, a popular English troupe that combined clowning with acrobatics. They were quite popular in Paris and a poster for their show is seen in reverse in the window of one of the Reichsoffen paintings shown above. Conscious of how their bodies appeared, the less developed members of the clan wore special outfits that made them look more muscular. But none of that appears in the A Bar at the Folies Bergere since Manet only shows two stocking feet standing on a trapeze - and according to Gronberg, they aren't even the feet of a man. Just as with the Boulevardier, Manet has concealed the expressiveness of the male body: "A Bar at the Follies Bergere thus constitutes a composition in which representation of the male body offers little distraction to the gaze directed at woman". Manet reaffirms the "Great Masculine Renunciation", so named by the psychoanalyst John Flugel who noted in 1930 that at the end of the 18th Century, men stopped wearing flamboyant clothing - conceding that privilege to women so that they could then be mocked as vain. Those hypocritical sons of bitches!
Returning to Bataille's conclusion that the Bar is "an explosive festival of light", Gronberg notes that the spectacular male body has been totally erased. But what about the barmaid? How can any viewer avoid her? She dominates the canvas like a school teacher at the front of a classroom.
Characterized as silent and mute, it is now the picture surface that acts a a means of fantasizing a purely pleasurable gaze, devoid of anxiety. Precisely because Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere so effectively demonstrates such ideas of paint as desirably silent, it becomes important to question not only what and how the picture represents, but also what interest might be at stake in the critical and art historical language that takes such pains to maintain the work's status as an exemplary Modernist masterpiece.
Gronberg closes her essay with the above words. They would serve much better, however, at the beginning of an essay that actually does attempt to answer those questions. Such an essay might well begin by developing that metaphor of silence that Gronberg feels is so important. Apparently she is assuming a familiarity with much more than just Bataille's monograph on Manet. And apparently there is something about Modernist Art or Manet or mainstream art history that profoundly annoys her - but she dares not, or cannot, articulate it.
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JAMES D. HERBERT
ILLUSION OF THE REAL
None of the essays in this collection has puzzled me as quickly as this one.
"As measured by the amount of attention garnered from art historian, Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere has been, especially of late, a privileged painting. The canvas has elicited repeated consideration, in large part, because it has forestalled resolution on a critical issue: is this picture a transcription of actual happenings at a certain Parisian music hall, or is this surface an accumulation of the traces of Manet's sophisticated manipulations of the illusions of painting.?"
Can't Herbert allow that it may be both - as the title of this essay suggests: "Illusion of the Real"?
( I would go a step further by doubting that any representational painting could ever avoid being both - including everything from Vermeer to Cezanne)
The primary thesis is usually is not what makes these essays interesting --- it's all about the details --
and yet --- James D. Herbert does not appear to be reflecting on what he writes.
Herbert begins by distinguishing between reality (The Folies Bergere in 1880) from meta-reality (its social context) as revealed by T.J. Clark.
Inferior paintings blindly reiterated the illusions performed by popular culture and thereby conceal the reality of a "definite set of class relations" while Manet's Bar disclosed the meta-reality of the music hall's interplay of illusion and the real.------ not everyone could see the places where reality and illusion intersected -- it's only "for the chosen few"
Degas, Rehearsal of the Ballet on the Stage, 1874 (Met)
"In a particularly lucid manner, Degas's Rehearsal of the Ballet on Stage (1874) manifests just this sort of privilege" -- because, as a popular guidebook of the time informs us, "If you are a financier, investor, diplomat" or appear important in some way, the backstage of the opera is open to you".
Why is this image especially lucid about privilege? Isn't this what any stagehand or other service staff might see? Wouldn't a few francs into someone's hand get you backstage at a rehearsal as well?
Yet rank realized itself not so much in having access to certain spaces as in possessing the capacity, within restricted social sancta such as backstage of the Opera, to perceive, comprehend, ultimately master one's surroundings. A "man of the world" as Charles Baudelaire defined the term in 1863, was a "man who understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses ... He wants to know, understand and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe. Like the convalescent, he "is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things"; and if he has the gift of genius, he can apply his "power of analysis which enables him to order the mass of raw material which he has involuntarily accumulated" (from the Painter of Modern Life)
Where would scholars of early French Impressionism be without Baudelaire's little book? Did any man in that era really try to understand "everything that happens on the surface of our globe?" That's a very tall order! It's a fantasy - and I'm not sure that Degas was all that unfocused. He liked elegant , slender young women and he loved the ballet -- so backstage was a good place to pursue those enthusiasms.
By they way, the above painting appears to have two points-of-view: one looks down at the stage to the right of the necks of the double basses - while to the left, the viewer is looking straight across stage as if eye-level with the ballet master. Is this any less a manipulation of illusion than Manet's Bar ?
Renoir, The First Outing, 1877
In social practice, not everyone enjoyed the attributes, as did Degas of access and discriminating perception... to ladies was ascribed, to borrow a phrase from Mary Ann Doane, a peculiar susceptibility to the image.. The debutante in Renoir's The First Outing is rapt, absorbed in the performance... she has been lured psychologically if not physically across the proscenium; the spectacle has taken her in ... "There is a certain assigned to women in relation to systems of signification - a tendency to deny the processes of representation, to collapse the opposition between the sign (the image) and the real" (Mary Doane)
Mary Cassatt, Woman in Black at the Opera, 1879
Why has Herbert's discussion veered off into feminist theory? What do popular attitudes towards a woman's ability to distinguish reality from illusion in 19th C. Paris have to do with Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere ? And who, other than Herbert, would suggest that Renoir's "The First Outing" exemplifies that attitude?
Fortunately, Herbert offers Cassatt's "Woman in Black at the Opera" as a counter-example - and that is much more credible. As the luminescent balcony sweeps right into the lady's binoculars, you get the feeling that she is bright and attentive. Compared with her, Renoir's debutante appears much younger, less experienced, and just thrilled to be in a big theater. (I doubt that the curtain has yet been raised - the audience has not yet settled down)
Setting aside Herbert's digression for a moment,
let me offer a digression of my own:
a comparison of how Renoir and Cassatt painted the distant crowd.
That's my favorite part of each painting.
The Renoir reminds me of Jim Dine's recent tempestuous work,
while I really like Cassatt's expressive angularity.
Returning to Herbert's digression - he compares the naivete of Renoir's debutante with Flaubert's Emma when she visits the theater in Madame Bovary: "She gave herself up to the flow of the melodies and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were being drawn over her nerves -- all her attempts at critical detachment were swept away by the poetic power of the acting. The subscribers scouting backstage at the opera, the likes of Degas, would never have made such categorical mistakes"
First -- may we note that being "swept away by the poetic power of acting" is quite different from being unable to distinguish illusion from reality.
And then - I would like to confess that this is precisely how I receive art, music, and literature -- if I am able. Achieving critical distance may be required for Herbert's profession as it is now practiced - but it has apparently distorted what is in front of his own eyes. He lets critical theories (especially those that are trending) inform his viewing experience rather than the other way around.
Renoir was no "man of the world".. he also failed to distinguish seductive images from their production. More generally there is a sense in which Renoir and (to a lesser extent Monet) , both provincial recently arrived in the big city, hopelessly confused illusion and reality. (as opposed to Degas' "Powers of analysis")
Degas made a very good painting --
but what great power of analysis is required to paint what's backstage at the opera?
And then, surprisingly enough, Herbert tells us that "reality and illusion in Degas' pictures were as much social constructions.... as was the position of articulation from which they were perceived".
The dancer in fourth position may at first appear to be a real case of the ballet's creation of an illusion--- yet in other paintings by Degas this same ballerina strikes this same pose seen from the same angle in entirely different settings"
details from "Rehearsal of the Ballet on Stage" (Met) and "The Ballet Class" (D'Orsay)
I do believe these are the dancers to which Herbert refers,
and they do appear to be derived from the same drawing,
as if Degas had a catalog of studies
to use where needed.
That doesn't make his paintings any less "real", does it ?
The Manet of the Bar at the Folies Bergere claims fraternity with the Degas of the Rehearsal of the Ballet more than with the Renoir of the First Outing.
"The First Outing" is not about the opera, it's about a naif who visits it for the first time and is immersed in the unruly crowd rather than the performance on stage. All three paintings are primarily concerned with how it feels to be a young woman in places created for the the public entertainment of men -- as three cis-gendered men would like to think about them. So yes -- all three might have joined the same fraternity of lusty old goats.
I also felt that this is how Manet was presenting himself in that painting - the all-knowing man of the world - and Herbert takes it one step further -- as "surface" refers to the surface of the canvas as well as the surface of life in Paris at that time - giving Manet, as the artist, the privilege of negotiating between them. And he has confronted us with his privilege by making his painting appear so puzzling - comprehensible only to him. Many iconic modernist and post-modernist artists have played the same game.
Herbert suggests that Degas eventually asserted his privilege as well: "thick skeins of pigment and medium build up on the canvas to disrupt the ostensible transparency of the Realist picture plane. Lines and patches of color, moreover, appear to break free of the object they are meant to portray to assume a life of their own" The same could be said about Monet -- but the effects they created are not puzzling - are they? The "ostensible transparency of the realist picture plane" has been violated so often throughout the history of painting - it's as if it doesn't matter.
Herbert continues his discussion of illusion and reality as mediated by the privileges of class and gender. He notes his sources in philosophers like Lacan and Derrida and Feminist theorists like Jane Gallop and Teresa de Lauretis -- which is not especially surprising. Since he no longer needs to mention any other paintings or any new information about the Bar, I will skip past several pages of his essay.
He asserts that "The privileging of the "men of the world " was an operation actively performed in the nineteenth century and in paintings such as A Bar at the Folies Bergere" - but the only privilege shown in this painting is that service which any customer may expect from any vendor in a retail environment. (and as the painting shows us - some of those customers are women).
He comes to a conclusion as follows:
Thus alternative readings of Manet's paintings no more consign art and art history to the realm of pure illusion than established accounts succeed in matching themselves to the real. Let us therefore ask of the texts of art history, as of paintings, not whether they meet the impossible standards of correspondence to reality (a question of ontology), but rather what interests they serve through their interplay of the real with the illusory (a question of politics). As viewers of A Bar at the Folies Bergere, as authors and audience of the art history written about it, we should not be lulled into taking for granted either Manet's privileges or our own by subscribing to the illusion of the real.
Then I would ask what interests are served by introducing issues of social privilege into the discussion of paintings? As a trending practice, those who practice it may claim membership in that elite academic community that asserts authority over the discussion of visual art - and is compensated both economically and socially. In return, what does it contribute to such a discussion other than politically correct jargon? Herbert's essay offers scant evidence of anything. Has he ever even viewed the painting?
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JOHN HOUSE : IN FRONT OF MANET'S BAR
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In this context A Bar at the Folies-Bergere attacked the norms in complex and far-reaching ways. Most evidently, it denied a coherent, legible authorial position, by denying empathetic access to the image of the barmaid and yet juxtaposing it with a provocatively engaged image in the reflection, and furthermore, in the most basic terms, by denying the author / viewer any secure foothold within the ~ pictorial space. Beyond this, the stereotype of the barmaid's sexuality is questioned by the way in which the image is painted. The gaze of the figure, penetrating deep into our space, is counteracted by the barrier of the bar and its contents, whose palpable physicality creates a problematic threshold. The mirror reflection challenges any attempt to read the picture anecdotally or to define the "nature" of the barmaid. Its anomalies propose an alternative “reality" and its markings and disfigurements challenge the integrity of the principal image.
The forum for these challenges was the walls of the Salon. The picture was made to be seen and judged as art; on an immediate level, its transgressions were artistic. By its insistent frontality and its clear, luminous tonality, it proclaimed its difference from the measured spatial organization and mellow tonality of the pictures around it. But these transgressions also, and more fundamentally, challenged ' the values that underpinned the normative vision of a legible and coherent universe. As a whole, in its form as well as its subject, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, in its complexities and calculated inconsistencies, presented a social world-the promiscuous world of boulevard entertainments-which was an epitome of the uncertainties of modernity in the city.
John House's concluding paragraphs have been placed at the very front of this discussion of his essay because they seem reasonable as well as tethered to an actual experience of viewing the painting -- in sharp contrast to the essay that preceded it.
As an historian, his primary concern is the context in which the piece was made and presented - and I resist this approach because "context" is so much less real, exciting, and accessible than the painting itself. And it's not really possible to separate the context of 19th Century Paris from the world in which the historian lives. (as frankly noted in the introduction). For academics of our time, the issue of "modernity" is key to any discussion of Manet - as well as his entire period of European history. It's undeniable that Manet engaged with some social and political issues of his time - but it's also true that he engaged with art from other times and places. How did he prioritize these concerns?
The first paragraph, shown above, appears succinct and accurate. House does not offer examples of any other paintings that "deny us a clear and legible authorial position", but I assume that we could find such among the Surrealists. And the proliferation of essays about the Bar is strong evidence that the authorial position is far from clear. However, I do question whether "the stereotype of the barmaid's sexuality is questioned by the way in which the image is painted". Earlier in the essay, House argued that the barmaid's bosom is partially concealed by a loosely painted bouquet of flowers - thereby frustrating that male gaze which desires to contemplate pert young breasts. But don't those flowers emphasize cleavage -- and anyway - were breasts really privileged over any other markers of female sexuality in that time and place? House points toward the cartoon, shown much earlier in this post, of a boulevardier staring down at the breasts of a cocotte - but I wonder whether that one example is sufficient. Wouldn't the pelvic triangle and the vase of roses have proclaimed female sexuality as well?
In the second paragraph, I cannot determine "luminous tonality", having never seen the actual painting. But I would question whether Manet was concerned with the "uncertainties of modernity in the city" .. rather than just the uncertainties of life in a more timeless and general way. By the way, in contrast to just about every other writer in this book, John House never once mentions "The Painter of Modern Life" or its author, Charles Baudelaire. Which is a good thing! That one book should not be allowed to speak authoritatively for French Impressionist painting any more than Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" should speak for the Renaissance Italians.
Alfred Roll, "14 July, 1880"
The new official view of modern Paris emerges vividly in Alfred Roll's "14 July, 1880", a vast tableau of the first official 14 July celebrations of the Third Republic, purchased by the state at the 1882 salon - the year Manet exhibited A Bar at the Folies Bergere. The picture includes many of the emblems of the city that had seemed so threatening under the previous regime - the public sale of alcohol, drunken revelers, the comprehensive mixing of the classes, and just to the right of the bandstand, the figure of a single woman in a public space. All this can be accomodated, controlled, by the dual forces of Republic and army, of peace and war, which enclose and contain the revelers: the m o ment shown is when the crowd stops to salute the parading of a newly presented regimental flag, framed by the monument to the republic and the banner on the flagpole declaring PAX. This presentation of flags symbolized the regeneration of the French army after the disasters of the Franco-Prussian War.
Aesthetically, this piece is quite a contrast with the Bar, isn't it? It feels like the front page of a newspaper - - stuffed with all the information that can fit. It feels small-minded, descriptive, and superficial. It looks like everyone is supposed to be having fun - but it makes me feel tired and bored.
Leon Lhermitte, "Paying the Harvesters", 1882
Two other pictures at the 1882 Salon vividly posed the problem of the nature of the "natural" in modern society: Roll's 14 July 1880 and Leon Lhermitte's The Wages of the Harvesters. In a
sense the two presented decisively different versions-Lhermitte's in
terms of due rewards for honest toil in the countryside, Roll's in terms
of the peaceful coexistence of classes in urban, republican festivities.
The bases of order in Lhermitte's are ostensibly natural; despite the
presence of the paymaster, all the figures know their rightful, "natural"
place. In Roll's, the order is unequivocally social and cultural. Yet,
in the context of the politics of 1882, both could be assimilated into
an overriding discourse of the "natural": the city as an organism
could accommodate class diversity to the mutual benefit of all, while
rural labor offered its due rewards. Indeed, Louis de Fourcaud insisted
that both pictures should be seen in the same terms, as being "so
logically and so freely composed that [they seem to have come into
being all on [their] own"; standing in front of Lhermitte's picture, "it
seems as if one has reality itself before one, the composition is so
natural and the painter has taken such care to conceal himself.
Of course both of these visions of order were fictions. The proclaimed order of Paris obscured the ever present threats of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness, and the propagandist image of rural stability was an increasingly ineffective attempt to counteract the effects of migration to the towns and-cities in the face of the developing "great agricultural depression," a result of agricultural diseases at home and increased competition from overseas.
Of course both of these visions of order were fictions. The proclaimed order of Paris obscured the ever present threats of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness, and the propagandist image of rural stability was an increasingly ineffective attempt to counteract the effects of migration to the towns and-cities in the face of the developing "great agricultural depression," a result of agricultural diseases at home and increased competition from overseas.
It's painful to compare Lhermitte with Manet - or even with his fellow realists like Millet or Courbet. Aesthetically, his piece is dead and dusty-- belonging in a museum of history, not art. There is something whimsical about the tired old reaper's enormous blade ripping right up the rear end of the younger woman who sits beside him - though the artist may not have noticed that - just as he did not feel the cumbersome, lifeless quality of his arrangement.
I see no "discourse of the natural" in either painting - and if "the context of politics in 1882" summoned it, House provided no evidence in either the text or footnotes. The quote that he does offer, by Louis de Fourcaud, concerns aesthetics ("logically and freely composed") while mentioning nothing about subject matter.
I've long felt sympathetic towards the poor old French Academy - the much abused foil in the triumphant story of Modern Painting. But there is something very wrong about an academy of art that trains, exhibits, and congratulates painters who cannot distinguish fact from poetry. (just as the contemporary academy does not distinguish theory from poetry)
With no additional paintings offered for comparison, there's little more I can say about this essay. Like Jack Flam, John House noticed that the viewer of the barmaid is suspended in thin air (or precariously close to the edge of the balcony) - and I appreciate that observation since it had never occurred to me.
El Greco, Fable
By the way -- here's another example of an authorial position that is far from clear and legible -- at least to me.
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Manet's Man Meets the Gleam of Her Gaze
A Psychoanalytic Novel
by Steven Z. Levine
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I must to begin with, insist on the following:
in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say,
I am a picture ..... Jacques Lacan
Who IS PICTURED here? A middle-aged, 'middle-class, suburban Jew from Harvard who studied with Freedberg and Fried and, years later during a divorce at Bryn Mawr, began to read some Freud. Freud's name in Hebrew and his are the same, at least he thinks so. A son of these fathers, he has written mostly on Monet, Manet having been preempted by Fried, the subject he is here trying to confront like a man: "In Manet's last ambitious work, A Bar at the Folies Bergere (1882), the preemption of beholding is made explicit by the reflection in the bar mirror of a male customer standing directly in front of the barmaid, or rather by the unresolvable conflict between the tendency of the composition to position the actual beholder precisely there and the laws of optics ostensibly governing the reflection in the mirror that would have the beholder stand well over to the right." An alternative reading, Fried notes, "'that inconsistencies so carefully contrived must have been felt to be somehow appropriate to the social forms the painter had chosen to show,'" is T. J. Clark's, the Other/Author who presides here in the name of the totemic father, whose tribal law largely regulates today's licit intercourse with Manet's maid, the goal, in spite of this manifold preemption, of the son's avid gaze.
Once, at the Metropolitan Museum, he briefly shared the same podium as Clark and Fried and made remarks he has since forgotten on Freud's "Family Romances". There the son enacted his Oedipal ambivalence in choosing in fantasy, by way of parricide and homoerotic love, the father(s) of his desire. Fried is absent from this volume; Clark is too. These filial words are for them-and manifestly against them too. Now he tries to write like a man, but as yet he has said nothing of mothers.
He imagines that Freud's infamous parricide sanctions his own, Lacan's as well, for he was dazzled by the glittering Parisian revision of Freud before daring to expose himself in the mirror of Freud's own texts, some of them written in Charcot's Paris only three years or so after the exhibition of Manet's Bar. Indeed something like the hysterical paralysis of Charcot's female patients is evoked in Caroline de Beaulieu's joke at Manet's expense: "M. Manet himself has truly painted with a remarkable assurance and truth of tone a number of very well distributed bottles and a very successful compote of tangerines; the merchantess is so surprised at this that she is paralyzed on the spot." The paralysis of her surprise is a function of the immobilizing power of illusion: "What is it that attracts and satisfies us in trompe-l'oeil? When is it that it captures our attention and delights us? At the moment when, by a mere shift of our gaze, we are able to realize that the representation does not move"'with the gaze and that it is merely a trompe-l'oeil." The immaterial picture that momentarily transfixes the critic's gaze thus loses its paralyzing appearance of truth when she resumes the mobility of her gait. To fend off the arresting allure of the picture and to find the mobile painting in its place is the moral of this story as well.
The subject here is the author, not Manet's painting -- and it's not even autobiography -- but rather autobiographical fiction.
OK - I still might want to read it if it went deep and wide into an interesting involvement with A Bar at the Folies Bergere -- but these introductory paragraphs point us in a different direction: towards the self congratulation of an art historian’s academic career. It appears to be some kind of triumphant dance celebrating elite origins (Freedberg and Fried are top names in the field) and an ongoing validation through the application of Lacanian methodology. Jacques Lacan certainly was important in the humanities 25 years ago. And don't forget that our protagonist once shared a podium at the Met with Clark and Fried!
I agree with the editor's self aware skepticism towards the claims for objectivity by himself and his colleagues. But at least some of the art historians in this volume have taught me things about
the world of art in 19th century Paris. What can one learn from Levine's exercise in academic narcissism? His principle character is not a “man" - i.e. a responsible adult - but only a clown - albeit a smart, clever, ambitious, and well educated one. I am not inclined to give him one more second of my attention - and feel cheated that he has been given space in this book. (I will ask Amazon for a partial refund)
And who taught him to "fend off the arresting allure of a picture"? You don't fend off visual allure -- you resonate with it.
Btw - I enjoyed the funny though bone-headed quip by Caroline de Beaulieu - and wish I could read more of her commentary.
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GRISELDA POLLOCK
"The View from Elsewhere"
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So comprehending or contextualizing Manet's Bar is not going to be attempted here.
Instead the writer, in response to "the political necessity of this moment" (c. 1995) will be producing "a position for viewing and seeing the painting in question and its cultural conditions of existence which will stretch the contradictions inherent in the technology of gender serviced by both modernist painting and modernist/social art history"
Academia is highly political - both as a workplace and as its role in American society. It pressures its members to conform to its dominant ideologies. The positive narrative of Modernism is one of those ideologies -- feminism is another. This essay documents a then current conflict between those two.
Whether it can clarify or resolve that conflict is not my concern - so I will not study further in this essay.
But I am concerned with how the essays in this book demonstrate how discourse in the visual arts is mangled, distorted, and distracted by that intensely political environment.
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Considering this painting now - after reading (or ignoring) the twelve essays in this book, I would say that it feels more personal - and more spiritual - than " an insider's, all-knowing view of a pleasure district" as I characterized it at the very beginning of this post.
As several of the writers have suggested - it does feel like a priest presiding over an altar - and there is a sad resignation about it that reminds me of the classic folk ballad "House of the Rising Sun" (or... is it "Son" ?) : "it's been the ruin of many a poor boy, Dear God, I know I was one". Yet it still remains an exciting, lively, alluring image.
It's as if to say "I've loved the nightlife - though perhaps I should not have led it" Among the many things that the painting presents is a big, black, centered "X" that runs out to each of the four corners. And as two of the writers have observed, the viewer is precariously backed up against the very edge of the balcony with nothing to prevent him from falling down to the main floor. Is he suspended over the pit of Hell?
Repentance conflated with nostalgia is not going to get his soul past St. Peter - or qualify him as a pioneer of Modern Painting. But that seems to be what is happening here.
One thing that none of the twelve discussed in any depth - even the feminists - were the prominent images of two sophisticated women facing us from the opposite balcony. Manet liked and admired adventuresome, lively, sophisticated women - and not just the young ones in the service industry.
As this volume demonstrates, many of the conceptual concerns of contemporary art academics can relate to "A Bar at the Folies Bergere" - but the painting's visual quality is tangential to all that.
Not only is it unnecessary to see the actual painting - a high definition screen image is not required either. All that's really needed is a schematic line drawing - plus, perhaps, a monochrome photograph of the barmaid's unsmiling face.
And yet -- even in reproduction, the painting has a remarkable power and liveliness that sets it apart from the other paintings we've been shown from the 1882 Salon. Manet did not intend to schematically present some ideas -- of this we can be sure. He intended to make a painting for those, like himself, who take pleasure in some of the best examples from both European and Asian image making. (the proof depending upon the viewer's ability to recognize it). None of the 12 writers in this volume have explained how their interpretations need and use that visual quality. Except ---- for Kermit Champa: "It is amazing how fresh, immediate, and even natural the Bar is at first sight --like all of Manet's best works, it looks right before it looks wrong, and the latter sensation never completely subverts the former." (he's such an anomaly, I almost forgot about him).
Regarding Manet as "the painter of modern life", his conventional moniker, we might re-consider just what in this painting would have seemed unusual to a middle class, urban sophisticate in Amsterdam two hundred years earlier - which also had fashionable venues where liquor and women were available. Are the difference significant enough to distinguish one age from another?
Rather than calling Manet a Modernist - I would apply that term to the more commercially successful painters/illustrators of that time -- the ones, like Bouguereau, who appealed to the rampant materialism that remains the highest goal of the industrial/capitalist civilization of the modern age and beyond. Manet did not celebrate modern life -- he rooted himself in the past, both spiritually and aesthetically, to offer a gentle, tasteful critique - when he wasn't just painting flowers, still lifes, or beautiful women. (all three of which appear in the Bar)
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Pablo Picasso, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", 1907 (96" by 92")
Here's a painting that's even more important to the canonical narrative of Modernism - and I can't resist making a comparison. Unlike the Bar - I've actually seen this piece in person - the last time being in 2014 when I
posted some photos and comments to another blog.
We're told that Picasso's original title was "Les Bordels (brothels) d'Avignon" - so like the Folies Bergere it was named after a place where sex was sold - though much more directly. No need to dress the women up, provide other kinds of entertainment, and appeal to fashionable women as well as sex hungry men. And there's no mirrors to provoke sophisticated puzzlement. Though, like the Bar, there is a small still life of fruit in the foreground, available for refreshment.
We might also note that both artists contracted STD's from the women who worked in these places - though apparently better treatments were available to Picasso than to Manet.
And in their preparatory sketches, both artists originally included the male customer. Only his face remains in the Bar, where it is a mirror image off to the far side; in Les Demoiselles he is removed entirely. The result, in both paintings, is that the women directly confront the viewer instead.
Cezanne , Bathers (Large), 1906 (82" x 98")
One of the origin stories told about Les Demoiselles is that it was inspired by this large Cezanne, first exhibited in 1906. It had to be a shocker for those who enjoy the spaciousness as well as the volume, gesture, weight, and fleshiness of the female nudes as painted in the post Renaissance tradition. And unlike the Cezanne landscapes, it's also awkward, ugly, and pointless- except as a demonstration of his pictorial language. Cezanne had a hard time making stuff up -- he was much better at interpreting what he could see actually in front of him.
Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1526
But it was a great inspiration to the small community of avant garde painters in early twentieth century Paris.
Matisse, Bonheur de Vivre, (70" x 95"), 1906
It may have inspired this painting which was created that same year. It also feels more like a demonstration of rule-breaking than anything else - but the original piece with the original colors might have convinced me otherwise.
El Greco, "Vision of St. John", 1608-1614
And then there's this piece which Picasso is known to have seen in the studio of his friend, Ignacio Zuloaga. It had suffered some abuse in the hands of a previous owner who lopped a few feet of canvas off at the top - and it was so held in such low esteem Zuloaga had bought it for only $200. But its eruptive, troubling presence certainly appears to have had a strong effect on Picasso while he was
painting Les Demoiselles.
In this and several other paintings, El Greco had a way of making figures seem to burst out from behind the canvas. They feel like ecstatic visions from another, more spiritual world.
That Picasso painted prostitutes in this manner is rather provocative. And they're not courtesans like Manet's Olympia or part-time escorts like Manet's Barmaid. They're cheap whores who offer their bodies to the general public. They're wild animals - presented here as large predators are displayed behind glass at a museum of natural history.
And unlike the fugitive viewer of the single Barmaid, the viewer of the Bordel is overwhelmed by five women - or maybe it's only one woman moving, left to right, through five phases from upright, dignified, statuesque caryatid to squatting, cross-eyed, harpy. To the left of the bowl of fruit she is appealing - to the right she is predatory. You don't have to be a misogynist to feel that this is closer to reality than the arcadian sexual fantasies of Matisse, Cezanne, Titian, and many others. That notion can also be found in canonial Chinese literature (Journey to the West) as well as Buddhist art in India (the murals in the Ajanta caves)
MOMA chief curator, William
Rubin, wrote that Les Demoiselles reflected "Picasso's deep-seated fear and loathing of the female body, which existed side by side with his craving for and ecstatic idealization of it." I would say, however, that it's just a dramatization of an ambivalence that is common among cis-gender males who may, like myself, understand that it is not only women who may become monsters.
Whether misogynist or not, both Le Demoiselles and The Bar do strongly reaffirm patriarchal attitudes towards the genders as they kick off that confrontational mode that has dominated the artworld ever since. It was a post-Christian mode, beyond Good and Evil - though Picasso more so than Manet. And it does seem to be aimed at building a merchandise-able brand for Picasso - while it was more about a hip, personal reputation for Manet. (he never needed money)
And they both were dedicated to the formal energy they had experienced from the old masters. Manet was enthralled by Velasquez - while in this painting, Picasso was channeling El Greco. Where would Modern Art be without the Spanish!. In recent decades, social responsibility has been rediscovered ---- while formal energy has apparently been considered a distraction from the intended joke or lesson.
