How Manet A Bar at the Folies-Bergère Is Constructed, Historia sztuki, Historia Sztuki UW
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How Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" Is Constructed
Author(s): Thierry de Duve and Brian Holmes
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 136-168
Published by:
Stable URL:
.
Accessed: 30/10/2011 19:48
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Critical
Inquiry.
How Manet's A Bar at the
Folies-Bergere
Is
Constructed
Thierry
de Duve
Translated
by
Brian Holmes and
Thierry
de Duve
(fig.
1),
his last
great
and ambitious
painting,
in
1881-82
when he was
already gravely
ill-he
would die a
year
later-and
showed it
at
the
Salon that
same
year,
with
as little
hope
as ever that he would at last reach his true
public. Through-
out all his
career,
he had often been
rejected by
the Salon
jury,
even more
often demolished
by
the
critics,
and
occasionally lampooned by
the
press.
He knew that the medal of the
Legion
of
Honor,
recently
awarded to
him
through
the efforts of his friend Antonin
Proust,
was
hardly likely
to ren-
der his
painting any
more
comprehensible
for his
contemporaries.
The
Bar is Manet's most
enigmatic masterpiece,
and there is no doubt that he
meant it to be his
pictorial
testament. He addressed it to the future and
destined it for the
museum,
where it now
hangs
for our
greatest pleasure,
enticing
the insatiable
curiosity
of art historians. The literature on the
Bar is abundant. It has
recently
been
augmented by
TwelveViews
of
Manet's
"Bar,"
a collection of
essays compiled by
Bradford Collins in an effort to
sum
up
the diverse
approaches
("Marxist,
psychoanalytic,
structuralist,
post-structuralist,
and
feminist,
most
notably") grouped
under the label
of "'the New Art
History."" My
aim here is neither to discuss the tenor of
Edouard Manet
painted
A Bar at the
Folies-Bergetre
All schemas and
diagrams
are
by Thierry
de Duve. Thanks to
Eugene
Lew and Chris-
tine Demblon for
help
with the
schemas,
and to Les Travaux
d'Hercule, Brussels,
for
help
with the
diagrams.
1. Bradford R.
Collins,
preface
to TwelveViews
of Manet's
"Bar,"
ed. Collins
(Princeton,
N.J.,
1996),
p.
xix. The contributors to the volume are listed in
alphabetical
order,
which
is
also the order of their
appearance
in the book: Carol
Armstrong,
Albert Boime,
David Car-
Critical
Inquiry
25
(Autumn 1998)
?
1998
by
The
University
of
Chicago.
0093-1896/98/2501-0002$02.00.
All
rights
reserved.
136
Critical
Inquiry
Autumn1998
137
these twelve
contributions--which
are indeed
quite
diverse and fascinat-
ing
on
many
accounts-nor to evaluate their
respective
merits. If Collins
sought
to
provide
the
perfect
inkblot test for his
colleagues
in the New
Art
History,
he could have made no better choice of
subject
than
A
Bar
at the
Folies-Bergere,
and
certainly
I shall
disparage
neither the
variety
of
readings
(the
more the
better)
nor the
broadening
and renewal of art
historical
methodologies
(the
freer the more
fruitful,
at least for the time
being).
But since Collins's
anthology represents
the state of the art in the
exegesis
of the
Bar,
I find it unavoidable to
engage
with the one
assump-
tion shared
by
all its authors that I think is
simply
false.
The
anthology
unfolds beneath the
aegis
of two absent
figures:
No-
velene
Ross,
the author of a
sociological
and
iconographical study
of the
Bar, and,
above
all,
T.
J.
Clark,
whose
analysis
in the fourth
chapter
of his
book The
Painting of
Modern
Life
(1985)
set the tone for
virtually every
subsequent interpretation
of the famous
painting.2
All the authors of
TwelveViews
of Manet's
"Bar"refer to
it,
without
exception.
More
surpris-
ing
is the almost total lack of reference to the
work
of Michael Fried.3 It
is true that the accidents of
publishing brought
his monumental
Manet's
Modernismto the bookstores
just
a few months after the volume
compiled
by Collins.4
It
is
also true that in his earlier work on
Manet,
Fried did not
mention the
Bar.5
Yet
given
the
importance
that all the authors in
Collins's
rier,
Kermit S.
Champa,
Collins,
Michael Paul
Driskel,
Jack
Flam,
Tag Gronberg, James
D.
Herbert,
John
House,
Steven Z.
Levine,
and Griselda
Pollock,
with an introduction
by
Richard Shiff.
2. See Novelene
Ross,
Manet's"Barat the
Folies-Bergere"
and the
Mythsof Popular
Illustra-
tion
(Ann
Arbor, Mich.,
1982),
and
T.J.
Clark,
"ABar at the
Folies-Bergere," chap.
4 of The
Painting of
Modern
Life:
Paris in theArt
of
Manet and His Followers
(New
York,
1985), pp.
205-
58. See also the first version of Clark's
text,
"The Bar at the
Folies-Bergere,"
in The
Wolf
and
the Lamb:
Popular
Culturein France
from
the Old
Regime
to the Twentieth
Century,
ed.
Jacques
Beauroy,
Marc
Bertrand,
and Edward
T. Gargan (Saratoga,
Calif., 1977),
pp.
233-52.
3.
Except by
Levine, who was Fried's student and who admits his
Oedipal
debt in a
disconcerting
and
slightly embarrassing way;
see Steven
Z.
Levine,
"Manet'sMan Meets the
Gleam of Her Gaze:
A
Psychoanalytic
Novel,"
in
TwelveViews
of
Manet's
"Bar,"
pp.
250, 251,
and 269.
4.
See Michael Fried,
Manet'sModernism,or,
TheFace
of Painting
in
the 1860s
(Chicago,
1996).
5.
Among
the studies Fried has
partially
or
entirely
devoted to Manet before
Manet's
Modernismare "Manet's Sources:
Aspects
of His
Art, 1859-1865,"
Artforum
7
(Mar. 1969):
28-82,
republished
in toto as "Manet's
Sources, 1859-1869,"
chap.
1 of
Manet'sModernism,
pp.
23-135;
"Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in
Nineteenth-Century
Thierry
de Duve has written
extensively
on modern
and
contempo-
rary
art. He is the author of Pictorial Nominalism
(1991),
Kant
after
Du-
champ
(1996),
and Clement
Greenberg
betweentheLines
(1996)
and editor of
The
DefinitivelyUnfinished
Marcel
Duchamp
(1991).
416?
ANKC1.
NO-1,
r'log*
lit?,?
FIG.
1.-Edouard
Manet,
A Bar at the
Folies-Bergere,
1882. Oil on canvas. 96
x
Art,
London.
Critical
Inquiry
Autumn1998
139
anthology grant
to the central
question posed by
the Bar-that of the
relations between the
figures
inside the
painting
and
the viewer
before
the
painting-I
am astonished
by
the scant attention
paid
to the
interpretive
paths
that Fried has been
systematically exploring
at least since "Manet's
Sources"
(and
in
reality
since "Artand
Objecthood").6
No doubt
Fried,
still
perceived
as a
formalist,
was not
granted
the honors of the New Art
History.
As Richard Shiff remarks in his
introduction,
each author
ap-
proaches
A Bar at the
Folies-Bergere
with a
particular
interest,
one of the
so-called discoveries of the New Art
History
being
that there is no disin-
terested
history
of art. So I
may
as well admit
my long-term
interest here:
to cross Fried with
Clark;
to
play
the
question
of the viewer's
place
when
he or she faces a
painting
that
faces
him or her
against
the
question
of the
uncertainty
of
representation
when it is
representative
of an
uncertainty
that constitutes the social
identity
of the
public-all
at the
precise
mo-
ment in
the
history
of
painting
when an
emergent
modernism could still
lay
claims
on "the
painting
of modern life." I am less concerned than
Fried to isolate the Manet of the 1860s and to establish his
place
within
what Fried calls the
generation
of
1863.
And I am
less
"political"
than
Clark.
But,
like
the
latter,
I
am convinced that
the
very peculiar
resistance
to
interpretation
of A Bar at the
Folies-Bergereposes
one of the most
perti-
nent
challenges
to art
history today.
Let us
turn, then,
to the
object
of the
present essay,
which I take as
a
preliminary
to the
interpretation
of the
painting. Everyone-Fried
and
Clark;
the twelve authors
brought together by
Collins;
and all the authors
of
monographs
or
catalogues
on
Manet,
not
excluding Raymond
Morti-
mer,
who wrote the first
study
devoted
entirely
to the
Bar,
or
Adolphe
Tabarant,
Manet's
biographer,
or most of the critics and Salon reviewers
of the
time-everyone
agrees
that the
painting's
construction is aberrant
French
Painting,"Artforum
8
(June
1970): 36-46;
"Painting
Memories: On the Containment
of the Past in Baudelaire and
Manet,"
Critical
Inquiry
10
(Mar.
1984):
510-42;
and "Manet
in His Generation: The Face of
Painting
in the
1860s,"
Critical
Inquiry
19
(Autumn
1992):
22-69. These
studies,
devoted to the Manet of the
1860s,
do not mention the
Bar,
but a
note in
Courbet's
Realism
(Chicago, 1990)
does:
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 be-
tween 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.
[P
201 n.
28]
6. See
Fried,
Absorption
and
Theatricality:Painting
and Beholderin the
Age of
Diderot
(1980;
Chicago,
1988)
and
"Art
and
Objecthood,"
Artforum
5
(June 1967):
12-23;
rpt.
in
Fried,
Art
and
Objecthood
(Chicago, 1998), pp.
148-72.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl chiara76.opx.pl
How Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" Is Constructed
Author(s): Thierry de Duve and Brian Holmes
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 136-168
Published by:
Stable URL:
.
Accessed: 30/10/2011 19:48
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Critical
Inquiry.
How Manet's A Bar at the
Folies-Bergere
Is
Constructed
Thierry
de Duve
Translated
by
Brian Holmes and
Thierry
de Duve
(fig.
1),
his last
great
and ambitious
painting,
in
1881-82
when he was
already gravely
ill-he
would die a
year
later-and
showed it
at
the
Salon that
same
year,
with
as little
hope
as ever that he would at last reach his true
public. Through-
out all his
career,
he had often been
rejected by
the Salon
jury,
even more
often demolished
by
the
critics,
and
occasionally lampooned by
the
press.
He knew that the medal of the
Legion
of
Honor,
recently
awarded to
him
through
the efforts of his friend Antonin
Proust,
was
hardly likely
to ren-
der his
painting any
more
comprehensible
for his
contemporaries.
The
Bar is Manet's most
enigmatic masterpiece,
and there is no doubt that he
meant it to be his
pictorial
testament. He addressed it to the future and
destined it for the
museum,
where it now
hangs
for our
greatest pleasure,
enticing
the insatiable
curiosity
of art historians. The literature on the
Bar is abundant. It has
recently
been
augmented by
TwelveViews
of
Manet's
"Bar,"
a collection of
essays compiled by
Bradford Collins in an effort to
sum
up
the diverse
approaches
("Marxist,
psychoanalytic,
structuralist,
post-structuralist,
and
feminist,
most
notably") grouped
under the label
of "'the New Art
History."" My
aim here is neither to discuss the tenor of
Edouard Manet
painted
A Bar at the
Folies-Bergetre
All schemas and
diagrams
are
by Thierry
de Duve. Thanks to
Eugene
Lew and Chris-
tine Demblon for
help
with the
schemas,
and to Les Travaux
d'Hercule, Brussels,
for
help
with the
diagrams.
1. Bradford R.
Collins,
preface
to TwelveViews
of Manet's
"Bar,"
ed. Collins
(Princeton,
N.J.,
1996),
p.
xix. The contributors to the volume are listed in
alphabetical
order,
which
is
also the order of their
appearance
in the book: Carol
Armstrong,
Albert Boime,
David Car-
Critical
Inquiry
25
(Autumn 1998)
?
1998
by
The
University
of
Chicago.
0093-1896/98/2501-0002$02.00.
All
rights
reserved.
136
Critical
Inquiry
Autumn1998
137
these twelve
contributions--which
are indeed
quite
diverse and fascinat-
ing
on
many
accounts-nor to evaluate their
respective
merits. If Collins
sought
to
provide
the
perfect
inkblot test for his
colleagues
in the New
Art
History,
he could have made no better choice of
subject
than
A
Bar
at the
Folies-Bergere,
and
certainly
I shall
disparage
neither the
variety
of
readings
(the
more the
better)
nor the
broadening
and renewal of art
historical
methodologies
(the
freer the more
fruitful,
at least for the time
being).
But since Collins's
anthology represents
the state of the art in the
exegesis
of the
Bar,
I find it unavoidable to
engage
with the one
assump-
tion shared
by
all its authors that I think is
simply
false.
The
anthology
unfolds beneath the
aegis
of two absent
figures:
No-
velene
Ross,
the author of a
sociological
and
iconographical study
of the
Bar, and,
above
all,
T.
J.
Clark,
whose
analysis
in the fourth
chapter
of his
book The
Painting of
Modern
Life
(1985)
set the tone for
virtually every
subsequent interpretation
of the famous
painting.2
All the authors of
TwelveViews
of Manet's
"Bar"refer to
it,
without
exception.
More
surpris-
ing
is the almost total lack of reference to the
work
of Michael Fried.3 It
is true that the accidents of
publishing brought
his monumental
Manet's
Modernismto the bookstores
just
a few months after the volume
compiled
by Collins.4
It
is
also true that in his earlier work on
Manet,
Fried did not
mention the
Bar.5
Yet
given
the
importance
that all the authors in
Collins's
rier,
Kermit S.
Champa,
Collins,
Michael Paul
Driskel,
Jack
Flam,
Tag Gronberg, James
D.
Herbert,
John
House,
Steven Z.
Levine,
and Griselda
Pollock,
with an introduction
by
Richard Shiff.
2. See Novelene
Ross,
Manet's"Barat the
Folies-Bergere"
and the
Mythsof Popular
Illustra-
tion
(Ann
Arbor, Mich.,
1982),
and
T.J.
Clark,
"ABar at the
Folies-Bergere," chap.
4 of The
Painting of
Modern
Life:
Paris in theArt
of
Manet and His Followers
(New
York,
1985), pp.
205-
58. See also the first version of Clark's
text,
"The Bar at the
Folies-Bergere,"
in The
Wolf
and
the Lamb:
Popular
Culturein France
from
the Old
Regime
to the Twentieth
Century,
ed.
Jacques
Beauroy,
Marc
Bertrand,
and Edward
T. Gargan (Saratoga,
Calif., 1977),
pp.
233-52.
3.
Except by
Levine, who was Fried's student and who admits his
Oedipal
debt in a
disconcerting
and
slightly embarrassing way;
see Steven
Z.
Levine,
"Manet'sMan Meets the
Gleam of Her Gaze:
A
Psychoanalytic
Novel,"
in
TwelveViews
of
Manet's
"Bar,"
pp.
250, 251,
and 269.
4.
See Michael Fried,
Manet'sModernism,or,
TheFace
of Painting
in
the 1860s
(Chicago,
1996).
5.
Among
the studies Fried has
partially
or
entirely
devoted to Manet before
Manet's
Modernismare "Manet's Sources:
Aspects
of His
Art, 1859-1865,"
Artforum
7
(Mar. 1969):
28-82,
republished
in toto as "Manet's
Sources, 1859-1869,"
chap.
1 of
Manet'sModernism,
pp.
23-135;
"Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in
Nineteenth-Century
Thierry
de Duve has written
extensively
on modern
and
contempo-
rary
art. He is the author of Pictorial Nominalism
(1991),
Kant
after
Du-
champ
(1996),
and Clement
Greenberg
betweentheLines
(1996)
and editor of
The
DefinitivelyUnfinished
Marcel
Duchamp
(1991).
416?
ANKC1.
NO-1,
r'log*
lit?,?
FIG.
1.-Edouard
Manet,
A Bar at the
Folies-Bergere,
1882. Oil on canvas. 96
x
Art,
London.
Critical
Inquiry
Autumn1998
139
anthology grant
to the central
question posed by
the Bar-that of the
relations between the
figures
inside the
painting
and
the viewer
before
the
painting-I
am astonished
by
the scant attention
paid
to the
interpretive
paths
that Fried has been
systematically exploring
at least since "Manet's
Sources"
(and
in
reality
since "Artand
Objecthood").6
No doubt
Fried,
still
perceived
as a
formalist,
was not
granted
the honors of the New Art
History.
As Richard Shiff remarks in his
introduction,
each author
ap-
proaches
A Bar at the
Folies-Bergere
with a
particular
interest,
one of the
so-called discoveries of the New Art
History
being
that there is no disin-
terested
history
of art. So I
may
as well admit
my long-term
interest here:
to cross Fried with
Clark;
to
play
the
question
of the viewer's
place
when
he or she faces a
painting
that
faces
him or her
against
the
question
of the
uncertainty
of
representation
when it is
representative
of an
uncertainty
that constitutes the social
identity
of the
public-all
at the
precise
mo-
ment in
the
history
of
painting
when an
emergent
modernism could still
lay
claims
on "the
painting
of modern life." I am less concerned than
Fried to isolate the Manet of the 1860s and to establish his
place
within
what Fried calls the
generation
of
1863.
And I am
less
"political"
than
Clark.
But,
like
the
latter,
I
am convinced that
the
very peculiar
resistance
to
interpretation
of A Bar at the
Folies-Bergereposes
one of the most
perti-
nent
challenges
to art
history today.
Let us
turn, then,
to the
object
of the
present essay,
which I take as
a
preliminary
to the
interpretation
of the
painting. Everyone-Fried
and
Clark;
the twelve authors
brought together by
Collins;
and all the authors
of
monographs
or
catalogues
on
Manet,
not
excluding Raymond
Morti-
mer,
who wrote the first
study
devoted
entirely
to the
Bar,
or
Adolphe
Tabarant,
Manet's
biographer,
or most of the critics and Salon reviewers
of the
time-everyone
agrees
that the
painting's
construction is aberrant
French
Painting,"Artforum
8
(June
1970): 36-46;
"Painting
Memories: On the Containment
of the Past in Baudelaire and
Manet,"
Critical
Inquiry
10
(Mar.
1984):
510-42;
and "Manet
in His Generation: The Face of
Painting
in the
1860s,"
Critical
Inquiry
19
(Autumn
1992):
22-69. These
studies,
devoted to the Manet of the
1860s,
do not mention the
Bar,
but a
note in
Courbet's
Realism
(Chicago, 1990)
does:
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 be-
tween 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.
[P
201 n.
28]
6. See
Fried,
Absorption
and
Theatricality:Painting
and Beholderin the
Age of
Diderot
(1980;
Chicago,
1988)
and
"Art
and
Objecthood,"
Artforum
5
(June 1967):
12-23;
rpt.
in
Fried,
Art
and
Objecthood
(Chicago, 1998), pp.
148-72.
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