Bar at the Folies Bergeres
Eduard Manet
1882
Arguably (and if put to it, I can produce a pretty good argument) a painting cannot be a work of art unless it is seen. The spectator is a dynamic and vital component in the painting's status as art. Without a viewer, a painting never moves from its basic existence as an arrangement of pigments on canvas.
Artists have always known this, I suspect, and they often conspicuously involve the viewer in their work. Any number of paintings include a character who gazes directly out of the picture at the spectator, drawing them into the scene. Here though is a painting which does this is in a radically different way.
What we see is a young woman selling beer, wine and champagne at a bar in the Paris nightclub Les Folies Bergeres. Our attention might well be drawn to the exquisite way in which Manet depicts reflected light. We might be delighted by the vivid orange of the tangerines, or intrigued by the first depiction in art of branded beer (Bass Beer from Burton on Trent, with its familiar logo).
But look again. Manet has placed the bar in front of a large mirror, at a slight angle to the bar. We realise now that we can see the back of the waitress, the back of the bottles, the crowds in their boxes. And someone else - a man in a stovepipe hat. He is standing where we are standing. He is 'us'.
A piece of historical information you can't know simply by looking at the painting: 19th century 'gentlemen's guide books' to Paris advised their readers that the women who worked in the night clubs were 'of easy virtue'. So what is on sale here?
Knowing this, we begin to revise the way we read the expression on this young woman's face. Manet has created a painting to challenge us (most especially if we are male viewers): how do you see this young woman? what do you see her as?
Art historians refer to this style of painting as realism. Not realistic - that is a word which raises all sorts of problems in art - but realism. This is how things really are. The artist takes the world which we think we know and re-presents it to us.