Courtauld Institute 2 Manet Bar at Folies-Bergère

Throughout the painting, the viewer can see that Manet has a fluid facility for handling 'wet on wet' painting techniques. He has a range of different brushes and knows how to use strokes to suggest the appearance of a lot of complex details in a fleeting fashion. Manet never allows too much detail to get in the way of the overall unity of the picture.

Consider these bottles as a good example. Each one is recognisably a bottle. And, we can see the corks, stoppers, labels, gilt wrappers and other elements clearly. In fact, the bottle at the front right is famously the first painting of a brand of beer – the red triangle represents Bass British beer.

Despite having all this detail, this element of the picture does not take the focus away from the main parts which express complex ideas about modern art and its move from the perceptual approach of Impressionism to the conceptual approach that would become ever more important.

The painting is also a vehicle for looking at difficult non visual ideas like individuals and society, gender and class.

Throughout this painting, Manet uses a series of flattening effects to remind us that the entire background of the picture is actually the surface of a mirror. 

Here, Manet is suggesting that we don't see a real society but the image of one, its structure and its divisions. Everything is held within a regulated system a bit like a machine. In this way, he suggests that the social relations of society, men and women, rich and poor, low and high in the class systems are like the parts of a larger machine that all work in relation to one another.

Manet make sure that his considerable painting skills re-emphasise this meaning at all times. We can see the reflection of the bottles as much as the bottle is in front and the foreground of the picture. 

This reminds us that the background is an illusion. We see some distortions and effects on the surface of the mirror. 

The same wet on wet style is used to represent both the foreground 'real' objects and the background's illusionistic scene and its contents. 

In the background though, the style has become looser and more brushed in to suggest some difference in the logic of the picture.

All of the items in the foreground become frozen figures. They move along a strip of marble which represents the bar of the Folies-Bergère. 

And this way the real objects of the bottles, the fruit, the glass dishes and the flowers become a pattern or texture which helps to frame essential element of the interaction of the figures.

When we look at the whole painting as one complete image, it is easy to see that Manet has managed to unify the picture so that the focal point is the head of the barmaid. That is clearly the subject of the painting. 

All of the other details: the bottles at the front, the intricate reflections of people in the background, even the strange ghostly interaction between the woman and the man on the far right, are subservient to the main image which is the young woman at the centre of the picture.

Technically, Manet makes this apparent by making her head the brightest tonal point of the picture. She appears lighter than the other elements and draws our mind to her image. 

Manet also echoes her form by placing geometric shapes around her to act as secondary elements. These secondary elements underline or decorate her appearance. These elements are the chandeliers, the colons and around lights in the background as well as the still life collections in the foreground. 

Manet puts the young woman at the centre of the picture and expressly uses a series of geometric lines to create horizontal bands within the picture. These are separate elements which are stacked up like layers seen in a landscape or more accurately, like lines in a woven pattern on a blanket or a flag. These horizontal bars are repeated again in the softer line of the crowd in the mirror. 

You can see here that they have been colour-coded with a red overlay to make it apparent where they lie.  This series of horizontal geometric lines run through the picture and flatten it. They emphasise the flat rectangle shape of the picture frame. They remind us that this is only an illusion on a flat surface and not, a window into another wold that is real and continuous.

Manet goes further than this by adding two strong vertical bars which are shown by the pillars in the background which makes the painting divide even further into a grid like structure. 

Again, this is flat, frontal and holds the picture as a singular flat design.  

Manet then adds several more repeating elements that exist in the background, the mid ground and the foreground. 

These are geometric shapes which again, emphasise the obstruction and the flatness of the picture and in this case are largely made of white circle shapes. 

The two lamps on the pillars are white flat discs, the reflections in the mirror become distorted white circles. There are white round shapes on the blouse of the barmaid and there are geometric white shapes in the foreground.

Manet used devices like this throughout his career. For example, look at the later sketch reworking of his famous Déjeuner sur l'herbe painting also in the Courtauld collection. The figures sit in front of a flattened, theatrical backdrop that looks like a painted scene in a play on a stage. 

As well as being one of the early modernist painters who revealed the manufacturing of painting as an illusion made with brushes on a flat surface, Manet was also interested in the social interaction of people in society and the potential for art to convey those meanings.

In A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Manet shows us the male gaze. This is possibly the first representation of this so explicitly in Western Art. 

Bars like the Folies-Bergère  were popular hang outs for young rich men who spent their time idling in society and enjoying themselves. These young men were called flâneurs and they could/would often try to "procure" the barmaid as much as the drinks at these establishments.

As we have seen earlier, the Bar at the Folies-Bergère was a place where young men would proposition the serving women. Clearly this was an equal relationship. The women were poor working class. They were in fear for their jobs and they were exploited by rich, layabout young men drawn from the middle and upper classes. The men who treat their women are better than objects and would boast of their triumphs with one another. 

It is a mark of the sophistication of money that he is able to bring this element of class drive into the painting and also turn it into an interesting pectoral device. There is no slavish attempt at real-world illusionism. Clearly, the reflection is inadequate to maintain this sense of the real. 

Manet not only uses this as a device but exploits it to promote the idea that the act of looking at the barmaid makes us prostitute her

(and so we become the flâneur). 

If we are, as viewers, ourselves, become the man in the picture then, in a naturalistic world our refection would be obscured by the barmaid. That Manet places it to one side allows us to see it as a secondary meaning, a secondary process. 

In this way, Manet says, this reflection of the private conversation and terms being elicited from the barmaid is the negotiation and the contract of looking in society today. Looking like acting in an unequal world is not neutral but is complicit in the inequality of our society.

This is a remarkable first step for an artist working in 1882, but it should be noted that Manet was a man. The barmaid does not have a voice. 

Here then, is a painting in which the men speak and the women remain objects.

Manet does highlight that, but he does so to present the woman's social identity rather than her identity as an individual. He doesn't show us and can't really present her with a voice in the dialogue of the painting and the narrative of art. THat needs to be done by a woman artist.

Manet has a clear ambition for this painting. It is a complex and large work. It is his final statement as an artist. Although he would paint other things after it, he would not paint anything quite so large and ambitious as this ever again.

The painting represents what Manet understands as an artist, as a man living in that period towards the end of his life and it is his statement on his understanding of modernity. Manet lived in and worked in a society regulated by capitalism and the interaction between social classes and between men and women.

This painting seeks to address those questions and is the final statement who had been characterised as 'the painter of modern life' in an important essay by the poet Charles Baudelaire at the start of Manet's career. 

As we have discussed above, the woman, the subject of the painting has no voice as a woman, she is unequal to the customers who come to buy drinks at her bar and to impose upon her for favours.

She is right at the heart of the Parisian art world but she is not invited to join in. She is in the middle in clear view but she is simultaneously invisible. She is not invited to participate. She is to be consumed as a pleasure like the drinks on offer on the bar.

Manet paints her view in the centre as a robot. The forms of her body, her arms, torso and the neck, face and hair are regimented and simplified to remind the viewer of the geometric abstractions - the shapes around her. As such she is dehumanised and becomes the mask of her profession rather than a portrait of a real individual and thinking breathing person.

We see the worker, we don't see the person. We see the robot who serves not the woman who thinks and feels.