A Bar at the Folies-Bergere by Edouard Manet

Exhibited at The Courtauld Gallery, London, 1882
credit here

Opinion: I was attracted to this painting because it puzzled me. I like when things force me to think and the more I look at this painting, the more I think. I keep musing over what exactly is going and of course, still have absolutely no idea. 

Theory: This is an Impressionist masterpiece created by Manet. It shows the basic Impressionist characteristics: a blurred painterly style depicting a moment in time. However, unlike many other Impressionist pieces, it caused quite a stir among art historians. Manet’s Impressionist style calls attention to the surface and pushes viewers to try to make sense of the scene. When the viewer does so, visual discrepancies emerge. If the background is a mirror, everything else should be shown in the mirror, but its not. “It is impossible to reconcile the spatial relationship between the barmaid, the mirror, the bar’s frontal horizontality, and the barmaid’s seemingly displaced reflection” (Gardner, Page 910). Additionally, who is the woman behind the barmaid? Is it her reflection, although it looks like an older women. The main figure is recognizable. The people who go to the bar have paid money to be entertained and she is the only who we can recognize. The man who she is waiting on could be any Frenchman of the time. She, on the other hand is giving us her inner feeling: she is not a happy woman. In conclusion, Manet produced an extremely thought- provoking painting which called on us to examine the medium’s basic premises.