Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère: Modern Life's Alienation

[Music] thanks to wigs for supporting PBS Digital Studios this is a painting of a

woman tending bar in Paris during the latter half of the 19th century we know it was painted by French impressionist

Edouard Manet in 1882 during the storied Belle Epoque a time of relative stability in France after over a century

of revolution and conflict after Paris had been transformed from a crowded labyrinth of winding streets to a modern

city with new train terminals and straight wide boulevards we know that it's set at the fully bearshare

a Paris cafe concert where you could get a drink and be entertained and we know mayonnaise models suzong actually worked

at the fully bearshare but posed for the artist at his studio but there's a heck of a lot we don't

know we don't know why we can see a man in the mirror behind her but not where he should be in the space in front of

her we don't know what their relationship is whether he's trying to buy a drink or her and we don't know

what's going on inside of her head behind the blank stare is she just a person as unreadable from the outside as

any other or is she a potent symbol of the estrangement of modern life a kind of life where we witness and are part of

the grand spectacle of capitalism and entertainment so central to our existence today let's better know a bar

at the fully bearshare many unveiled his painting at the Paris salon of 1882 among works like Alfred Philippe rolls

depiction of the first official celebration of Bastille Day it was at the salon that knew mostly safe academic

art was tested out in front of audiences but while most of mayonnaise impressionist peers like Claude Monet

had abandoned the salon and formed their own exhibitions many held firm to the institution declaring the salon is the

real field of battle it's there that one must take one's measure and there he took his measure on a number of

occasions with varying degrees of success the jury rejected his absinthe drinker in 1859

accepted and awarded the Spanish singer in 1861 he was again denied in 1863 and instead exhibited his luncheon in the

grass at the Salon de Hafeez a causing quite the stir for its bras and depiction of a naked woman cavorting

with clothed men despite its clear reference to a much-loved Renaissance masterpiece he drew upon another 16th

century masterwork for a painting that was accepted by the salon in 1865 but Manet's Olympia was reacted to with

hostility and criticism this was no sensual Venus they objected but a common courtesan depicted flatly and much too

plainly whom one writer described like a corpse on the counters at the morgue of course now it's much less provocative

but at the time many prided himself not on making tired hazy and idealized versions of past events but on being a

painter of modern life in the words of his friend the poet Baudelaire many observed what was around him in bustling

Paris and rendered fragments of it in a distinct style his sharp contrast and elimination of half-tones we can credit

to Spanish masters Goya and Velazquez whom he greatly admired as well as his interest along with many of his time in

Japanese woodblock prints MANET painted a street singer eating cherries and fancy people gathered to hear music and

gardens he traveled to Spain and painted bullfights he depicted scenes of the franco-prussian war an execution of

maximilian in mexico he painted his friends including artist Berta morisot writer Emile Zola and Monet at work on

his studio boat MANET certainly wasn't the only one looking at modern life with fresh eyes in ways that many considered

slapdash and unfinished but he was fixated less on the scenery and more on the people that populated it poet

stéphane mallarmé understood this focus as paralleling the post-revolutionary shift in their

country accounting for the quote participation of a hitherto ignored people in the political life of France

this participation of the non elite was also very much social and the fully bearshare was just one of a plethora of

venues where the social of Paris would mix and enjoy its copious new forms of entertainment

Mellor may put it this way today the multitude demands to see with its own eyes and if our latter-day art is less

glorious intense and rich it's not without the compensation of truth simplicity and childlike charm and so by

the time we arrive at a bar at the Folie Bergere money's last major painting before passing away at age 51 from

complications due to syphilis we have a better sense of the barmaid before us as a player among many in the circus of

modern Parisian life the fully bears air and other places like it were lit with the harsh and bright white light of

newly electrified Paris for to Franck you could enter and enjoy a popular singer dancer or trapeze act so

hilariously indicated by these dangling legs you could also buy beer in champagne and meet prostitutes as many

have assumed are subject to be she is presented to us frontally arranged just so along with an assortment of

refreshments available for sale her waistline expertly mimicking the fluted bowl of oranges the bar is decorated

with flowers and so is her decolletage she is firmly part of the scene rooted to her spot at this intransigent marble

counter dividing her from us and us from her and who is us perhaps we're the gentleman in the mirror whose reflection

MANET has conveniently shifted at an angle so we can see it a cartoonist at the time jokingly suggested two men a

what his picture should look like but from behind she seems to be in an active exchange with the man which is not at

all reflected in the detached gaze we see perhaps the exchange had happened in the past or was about to happen perhaps

she's imagining it to happen people couldn't reconcile the image at the time and they haven't been able to sense

despite mountains of literature reenactments and explorations in virtual reality the fact remains that she looks

out at us but is ultimately inaccessible she doesn't quite meet her eyes and her thoughts we can't pretend to know more

than many artists of the time men a said his focus on women on rare occasions they interact intently with others but

the most part they look out we've caught them in moments of reverie without strong or decodable emotion it was the

birth of the blasé attitude what Georg Simmel described in 1903 as an indifference toward the distinctions

between things a psychic mood that is the correct subjective reflection of a complete

money economy the Kafe concern embodied for many upper-class Parisians the vulgarity and immorality of modern life

and the loss inherent in the shift from the home as the center of social life to the cafe as alfred Delvaux described it

in a Paris guide to live at home to think at home to eat and drink at home we find this boring an inconvenient we

need publicity daylight the street the Cabaret the cafe the restaurant we like to pose to make a spectacle of ourselves

to have a public a gallery witnesses to our life this was written in 1867 long before the words could ring painfully

true in our social media saturated years but perhaps the weight of this painting and why men a has been called the father

of modernity is because here we are shown the beginnings of cultural life as we now know it in this contradictory

picture we cannot distinguish real life from reflection the work is all surfaces and what could be more relevant in this

time as we navigate the oft mediated and mediating surfaces of our lives and participate in the cycle of consumer and

consumed or perform our lives for a faceless crowd in late 19th century Paris and today there's an excitement to

the spectacle and to our participation in it but also a sadness an alienation as we recognize ourselves as commodities

we recognize this look we see it everywhere in others and most of all in ourselves

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