Tag: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Manet and the Male Gaze (P27)

On March 21, 2022

There is a “male gaze” in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
The viewer seems to be looking at the barmaid in a way making her the object of his gaze.
But is there also a “female gaze” hidden in the “painting not painted”,
that is, in the reading of the Bar as seen from the perspective of the gentleman in the mirror? Is he seeing the barmaid as a subject?
Manet’s painting and a mirrored version taking this perspective have been discussed already in Post 26 as shown in Figure 1.

Let’s take another look.

Figure 1: A Bar at the Folies-Bergére and the “painting not painted”

Much has been written about the “male gaze” in art, and a “New Art History” has criticised the expression of male dominance also in Manet’s paintings.
This includes the “12 Views” (Collins 1996) on A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), the main source for our discussion of the painting.

There can be no question that their criticism (not only feminist) of the “male gaze” – treating females as mere objects in art – is a valid social criticism. But already in Luncheon in the Grass (1863) and Olympia (1865), we have seen Manet as sympathetic to females who assert their independence through their gaze at the – presumably male – viewer.

To start, we should keep two things in mind.

First, the “painting not painted” is not an illusion which Manet depicts within the painting like a mirror image or a dream. Rather, the painting presents a puzzle which is designed to make the viewer use his or her imagination to re-arrange the “pieces” in ways that make sense.

Second, this kind of solution should be distinguished from re-interpreting his paintings in the light of theories (e.g. Freudism, Neo-Marxism, or Feminism) which cast a new light on Manet’s art but run the risks Champa is concerned about (see Post 25): We should not interpret Manet in ways that “make of what he doesn’t do the implied true meaning of what he does”.
A warning to be taken seriously, and, in a way, “the painting not painted” does exactly that. But the warning is not meant to blind us to the fact that Manet just loved irony, even parody, in his paintings. Playing with hidden meanings and with the expectations of the viewer is different from picturing mythological or historic “stories”, which he clearly abhorred, or applying theories which he did not know.

On male and female gazes

Approaching the painting, the viewer is captured by a seemingly realistic scene at a bar.
The mirrored couple, then, makes the viewer aware that much of the painting is, in fact, a reflection.
And this reflection is again questioned by the many details which contradict any realistic interpretation of the entire scene.

At some point (as described in previous Posts 25 and 26), the viewer will realize that he is somehow in the position of the mirrored gentleman. The “real” customer should stand in front of the barmaid just in the position of the viewer.

The “male gaze” may enter in two ways:

The male viewer might recognize – as theme of the painting – the way a male customer is expected to look at the barmaid, seemingly confirmed by the mirror image of a customer staring down at the barmaid. He may even identify with this expectation and be prompted into a “male gaze”; he may imagine approaching the barmaid wondering whether she is a prostitute.
The viewer, thus, falls for the illusion which Manet produced by the realism of the painting.
He, then, may proceed to a criticism either of the “male gaze” depicted and/or of Manet for holding it himself, depending on the viewer’s own ideology outside the painting.
The male viewer may realize that Manet is playing a game with the viewer’s expectations, the “male gaze”, and will search for further clues within the painting for alternative views.
The surrealism of the mirror image will encourage him in this search.

What about a female viewer?

Is she assumed by Manet to take “the role of the male” and interpret the painting – like the male viewer – in accordance with the dominant gender stereotypes at the time? Manet, the realist, just depicted purposefully a scene of potential prostitution, perhaps to express social criticism, and he assumed a male viewer – as reflected in the mirror – to support his realism?
Is she going to realize that Manet is playing with male expectations, and is she going to search for clues which encourage taking “the role of the female” and allow for a “female gaze”?

With MyManet, we obviously chose the second option.
The basic question is, of course, to what extent we – viewer and critics – are willing to credit Manet with anticipating the “male gaze” and with incorporating into the painting not only a social criticism of this gaze but also the alternative of a “female gaze”.
Is there a “female story” to the “male story”?

If we follow the “male story”,
the male viewer will be irritated by the fact that the “real” barmaid is somewhat avoiding his gaze.
Looking into the mirror, he will see himself impersonated by the gentleman in the mirror. This man is luckier, it seems, since the mirrored barmaid is more sympathetic, leaning toward him, but she is looking less like a potential prostitute (see Post 26).
This puts the viewer in an ambivalent position: does he really want to exercise a “male gaze” treating the barmaid as an object of his desire, or does he want her to look back at him as a female subject – as shown in the “painting not painted”? After all, the avoiding gaze of the “real” barmaid may very well be “caused” by the viewer’s “male gaze”.
Looking again at the couple in the mirror, he may realize that there is something quite uncanny about those two: He is too close to her and too large hovering over her in an unrealistic, imposing position; she is not meeting his gaze in a sympathetic way of “seeing being seen” – like in the “painting not painted” and shown in Luncheon on the Grass.
The ”male gaze” of the viewer is thoroughly disclosed and compromised!

If we follow a “female story”,
the female viewer may, at first, understand the wary gaze of the barmaid being subjected to and avoiding a “male gaze”. The mirrored couple with the imposing male will confirm her view.
But then the puzzle will take over: Why is the woman so different? Why is the gentleman too close and too large? Is there a different female identity implied by the clearly different woman in the mirror?
Imagining this other woman, the female viewer will “see” someone like in the “painting not painted” – a subject looking back at her.

Realizing that she is now looking from the position of the gentleman in the mirror, she might imagine mirroring of the painting like in the “male story” and – without identifying with the male viewer in front of the painting – turning him into the mirror on the left.
Now, the female viewer is meeting the gaze of a barmaid “seeing being seen” by a sympathetic viewer which need not have (but may have) sexual connotations (the assumption of potential prostitution being distinctly male).

The “painting not painted” clearly underlines the subjectivity of the barmaid who rejects being made a mere object by the “male gaze”. Showing a self-assured female subjectivity and identity is something Manet has done before, in fact, in all of his major paintings of women discussed previously.

Further supporting this view is an important change we witness from the study to the Bar (Figure 2):

The study shows a rather dominating barmaid looking down on a meagre customer.
The reflection in the mirror seems to correspond to the “reality”.
Manet’s intention to take a critical stand toward the “male gaze” is confirmed by this parody.
The final version shows the evasive look of a barmaid now more front and centre.
The effect of the “male gaze” appears to be his theme.
The self-confident barmaid has moved into the mirror.

Why this change? If not to initially capture the attention of the (male or female) viewer with a facial expression and posture requiring further explanation and involving the viewer in an intriguing puzzle.

Figure 2: Comparing the study with the final version of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

The study unambiguously employs the “male gaze” and is easy to interpret by both male and female viewers, the final version is not. Divergent interpretations of generations of art historians attest to that. Rejecting the “male gaze”, the painting – not only the barmaid – asks for alternative readings which do not amount to a mere elaboration and confirmation of the “male story” based on the contemporary setting of the Folies-Bergère.

Especially the “female story” may raise doubts that female viewers will, indeed, imagine a complicated narrative along those lines (watch out for hidden sexism).
However, the “male story” is not really less complicated following pretty much accepted interpretations by (mostly male) art historians.
The descriptions are also more involved, while the reader may agree that looking at the images the female narrative is as accessible as the male version.

Evaluating the “female story”, it is enlightening to review the essays of the two feminist art historians among the “12 Views” : Carol Armstrong and Griselda Pollock.
Again, I will only extract some relevant aspects for our discussion:

Armstrong – optical ambiguities masking misogynistic gender ideology

Armstrong offers her own analysis of the “layers of illusionistic depth” (41) identifying the ambiguities and inconsistencies. The painting combines elements like a “collage” and the “optical ambiguities are really sexual ambiguities” masking a “misogynistic gender ideology” (42) resulting in the equation

spectator=male / object of vision=female.

For our purposes, the equation describes the “male gaze”, but, according to Armstrong, “this equation is nearly defeated”:

What we are offered to see in the painting is not “what we were waiting to see” (42).
Armstrong suggests three expectations not painted:

a picture showing the consumption of the sexual promises presumably made by the mirrored barmaid to the customer but not realized in the painting
a narrative showing the eventual meeting of human gazes, with the viewer and within the mirror, which is not happening
seeing some version of ourselves;
instead, “we feel, rather uncannily, that we are not there … as subjects we are absent”,
and this applies to both female and male spectators, since, “the spectacle’s male and female cases, are sewn together to form a Janus figure” (42).

In view of our “female story”, three aspects are interesting:

the first expectation, in a sense, assumes the painting under a “male gaze”
the second expectation hints at the alternative, our “painting not painted”
the painting is not analysed under a specifically female gaze – male and female views are “sewn together” – but rather under a general feministic perspective of the art historian criticising the “male gaze”.

Thus, Armstrong also suggests alternative “paintings not painted”. We learn something about a feministic view, but little about a specifically female experience of the painting different from a male one.

Griselda Pollock – The “View from Elsewhere”

Pollock claims an approach “to acknowledge and invite the sexual differentiation of spectatorship” (284) – to take the feminist “view from elsewhere”.
Writing her essay in form of an exchange of personal letters with a fictive “Feminist Scholar” and (obviously fictive) with Mary Cassatt, the friend and painter colleague of Manet, she wants us to join her in front of the painting and sharing her personal view:

“But like others before me, when I stand in front of the Bar I am now drawn into that play …” (290).

In view of MyManet and the “female story”, three aspects are relevant:

First,
Pollock subscribes totally to the characterization of Manet and his art as presented by the “big Others” (Pollock), namely, John Rewald, T.J. Clark and “to a lesser extent” Robert Herbert. Referencing the feminist art historian Novelene Ross, Manet’s painting is the art of a flaneur and dandy, a member of “the emergent bourgeoisie (that) produced a particularly vicious and confining concept of femininity” (284), with a “personal delight at being a man of his own time”, who especially in his last years “obsessively” rehearsed the “myth of La Parisienne” (305).

She backs this description up with Manet’s fascination with fashion, although his artist’s eye for modern beauty enhanced by fashion is not unequivocally linked to treating women as objects.
Pollock presents an informative example herself:
Manet’s arguably most fashionable picture of a beautiful woman is Spring: Jeanne (1881) shown in the Salon next to the Bar and eliciting exalted reactions by male critics. The “male gaze” clearly had a field day.
But then, Pollock’s friend Laura Mulvey pointed out to her that the face displays some curious similarity to the barmaid and that the descriptions of the critics did not correspond to the features of the portrait expressing “almost melancholy”, so that “the face stalemates the image of La Parisienne that the critic wants to see” (298).
If we agree with that observation, then we should be careful not to simply attribute the “vicious and confining concept of femininity” of the bourgeoisie to Manet.
If Manet aimed to “stalemate the image of La Parisienne”, should we interpret this only as the artist’s attempt to find “some telling, aesthetic form” (304)?
Or should we look for a different underlying concept of femininity in both of Manet’s paintings?

Second,
Pollock does detect clues for another view, the feminist “View from Elsewhere”.
Looking at the “reflections” of the painting, her gaze is drawn to the periphery to the “signifying female figures” on the balcony to the left. Two of the three women have been identified as prominent representatives of La Parisienne, but the third is generally recognized as citing Mary Cassatt’s painting At the Opera (1879) (see Figure 3). What is overlooked, according to Pollock addressing Cassatt, is “the radical ‘translation’ involved in taking your young bourgeois woman from the respectable opera and placing her among the demi-mondaines of the Folies-Bergère” (293).
The significance of this fact is not entirely clear. Are we to assume that Manet obscures with this move, and by placing her in the background, the feministic and critical potential of the figure? Or is the displacement meant by Manet to trigger exactly critical interpretations like Pollock’s? The former would explain why she later sees Manet only “obliquely and indirectly” (307) signifying the feminist dimension of the painting. The latter would be another sign for Manet’s inclusion of a “female gaze”.

Pollock does not tell, but what follows is a vibrant characterization of Cassatt’s woman At the Opera signifying a third – feminist – view from elsewhere. Pollock’s description of this view into “space off” fully agrees with the characterization of the Third in MyManet! The “authority” has only shifted to the “Elsewhere” of a feministic position. The woman is “seeing without seeing being seen” – as is Cassatt’s woman by the gentleman on the balcony in the background .
Then, Pollock is trying to link Cassatt’s gaze out of the picture space with the “guarded non-look” of the barmaid who “appears but does not see”(Pollock). The barmaid is interpreted as a “subtle” solution of “a modern woman looking at the viewer”, not as challenging as Degas’ woman at the race course (Figure 3), but with a “reminder of that other woman, of Mary Cassatt and her representation of looking as active feminine desire” (303).

Figure 3:

Mary Cassatt At the Opera (1879)

Edgar Degas Woman with Field Glasses (1865)

Again, in view of MyManet, there is an interesting parallel. The woman on the balcony is seen as a Third and linked to the main figure, a subtle clue to interpret the barmaid also in terms of a Third – like in Manet’s scheme. However, it is somewhat puzzling that not the main figures in the painting – Pollock hardly mentions the figures to right – but the little sideshow on the balcony should provide the initial key to her interpretation. (In MyManet, the little scene of three women is a reminder of Manet’s scheme (Post 25)).
It is even more puzzling that “a modern woman looking at the viewer” – as Manet shows in Olympia or The Waitress and dramatized in Degas’ drawing – should be signified by a woman not looking at the viewer, even by a woman avoiding direct eye contact.

But Pollock is not really interested in a systematic analysis of all gazes, already the gazes of the other two women are neglected. Unfortunately, they are representatives of demi-mondaines who belong to the other “male world” of the painting.

Third,
Pollock admits another way in which the barmaid – the painting’s “oddity at the center”- is “attracting her gaze but then directs it to those ardent feminine writers of the time” (304). There is “another history, one that enables me to make a feminist identification with its central female figure” (306).

In view of MyManet, this confirms the potential within the painting for a distinctly “female story”. Pollock does not use the mirror image of the couple to the right to explicate a feminist view, but choses the citation of Cassatt’s woman on the balcony to the left.
But she is “drawn into the play” as a female identifying with a female.

The problem is, she does not credit Manet with aiming at this effect. On her account, her female sensitivity detects the “oblique” and “implicit” signs of a “female story”. In her postmodern theory of the painting as a text, the author “Manet” is not the subject writing his story. He is seen as an individual reworking “heavily loaded ideological materials” which import into the painting both the “male gaze” of the ruling ideology and signs of the “female gaze” of an emerging feminist movement. The scene where it happens is the studio where Manet’s labour and the model Suzon’s labour meet “in a concrete social space” (307).

In view of MyManet, Pollock demonstrates that the painting enables female identification through a distinct “female story”, at least, if we attribute to him more authorship of the signs revealed by both her and Armstrong than Pollock is willing to do.
A basis for acknowledgment is provided by Pollock herself when she is referring to the concrete social space of the studio and the interaction of Manet and his model Suzon in the production of art – Manet’s “very signature as an artist” (307). So far, MyManet would agree.
Then, she imagines those “ardent feminine writers” (who evidently are not totally confined by the bourgeois concept of femininity) as campaigning with Suzon in the streets of Paris. But she does not consider that his working class models, Suzon as well as Victorine Meurent, or Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, his close friends, art colleagues, and modern women, had influence on Manet in that “concrete social space”. We should assume that their interacting creativity – of both sides, female and male – allowed for a (relative) independence resembling that of those pioneers of the feminist movement, not in the field of politics but in the field of art.

From all we know, Manet had a great social sensitivity, he respected women, and he was a contrarian not readily accepting social norms whether inside or outside the studio.

After all, his Olympia dared a very direct gaze at the viewer; she did not stare from a safe distance through field glasses at Edgar Degas betraying his ambivalent relation to women including his friendship with Mary Cassatt.

The surrealistic couple on the upper right side, the free-floating mirror image of the bar, and the strange depiction of the feet on a trapeze in the upper left corner are just three of the more obvious elements which breach a straightforward realistic interpretation.
They suggested another layer beneath the realistic illusions, the “painting not painted”, and motivated our search for a “female gaze”.

So, let us take another look at Manet’s realism!

See you in about two weeks!

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère – Manet’s Scheme in the Mirror (26)

By Richard Pieper

On February 28, 2022

In Edouard Manet

The “12 Views” of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Collins 1996) discussed in the previous Post 25 had two topics in common:
the role of the barmaid as picturing Manet’s view of women in Parisian society and the spatial inconsistencies or violations of perspectives caused by the mirror.

But there are other aspects which are neglected or featuring less prominent in the discussion.

Let us consider some of these aspects taking a fresh look at the painting
and a sketch in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Edouard Manet

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) and Sketch for A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881)

First question:

Disregard for correct perspective is not a new feature in Manet’s paintings.
But why using a mirror to close up the background rather than a curtain, a wall or a dark space or some other partitioning as in previous paintings?

Staging the figures in a limited “flattened” space – in a “puppet theatre” – and leaving the viewer in a shifting position in front of the scene – that is a feature which is characteristic of Manet’s scheme as proposed in MyManet.
But, using a mirror – which is typically used to open up a space – to close off the scene in the back is counterintuitive. We should think that it simply does not work. It does in this painting.

The viewer is fully aware that the barmaid is standing in a very narrow space between the bar and the mirror. Manet is moving the balcony on the left side forward like in a magnifying mirror, as Flam (166) observes, and he uses a loser, impressionistic brushwork painting the background.
The black back of the reflected barmaid effectively closes off the view on the right side (an effect not achieved in the sketch!).

Using the mirror in ways obviously violating optical laws creates problems for his realistic style.
Why is Manet inviting doubts about his realism?

Second question:

The barmaid reflected in the mirror seems to be a different woman.

The mirror image has rather loose hair while the barmaid has her hair tightly pulled back. Flam (166) even suggests that she might have a ponytail. The cheeks of the mirror image seem to be rounder, her waist somewhat fuller, and her posture leaning forward and more attentive and friendly to the customer – if not inviting and “eager to please” (Flam 167).

But, does she look more like a casual prostitute than the barmaid confronting the viewer with her tight waist and low neckline, as many interpretations suggest?
Or is this a view following from an assumption that the gentleman in the mirror surely must be a potential customer?
As Lüthy (2003, 164) observes: In interpretations that follow T.J. Clark’s focus on prostitution in Paris at the time, it seems that “the interpreter approaches Manet’s painting like the customer the counter” trying to find out whether she is a prostitute or not (own translation).
Is Manet – perhaps critically – presenting the “male gaze” or is he playing with the expectations of the viewer?

Third question:

The viewer seems to be standing at a comfortable distance from the barmaid
(about 2m following Flam).
However, the gentleman in the mirror is uncomfortably close leaning over the counter and looking down into the eyes of the woman. He is scaled a little too large and looming in the upper corner at a position which does not correspond to any possible place in front of the barmaid.
It is not even clear whether she is returning his gaze or looking somewhere through and beyond him. (Both facts are somewhat at odds with the interesting interpretation of Duve – see Post 25.)

In the sketch for the Bar in Figure 1, a smaller customer is positioned lower and looking up to the barmaid looking down on him. Their gazes in the mirror seem to meet. The barmaid herself is looking to a place to the right of the viewer where the gentleman actually may stand.
Why the changes?
Why is the barmaid in the final version looking toward the viewer but avoiding eye contact?
Why is the mirror image of the assumed customer now moved into an implausible position in the upper right corner?

Fourth question:

In the final version, the left side is on closer inspection a confusing collage of detached elements:
– The balcony is too close compared to the right side (compare also the width of the columns);
– the legs of the artist on the trapeze are too small and certainly not above the stage;
– the counter with bottles in the mirror is floating in the air;
– the balcony appears to be zoomed in to avail a better look at the people on the other side.
Art historians have identified the three women sitting around an empty chair, two looking toward the stage to the left, one seems to look at the viewer.
A fourth person, a gentleman with a black moustache, looks similar to the gentleman in the upper right corner and he seems to direct his gaze at the barmaid (or the viewer’s back).

Manet is clearly citing people he knows. We see a “little cabinet of perspectives” (Lüthy p.178) in the focus of the left side.
How should we explain this grouping and the direction of their gazes?

So, what to make of these questions in view of MyManet and applying Manet’s scheme?

As a starting point, the painting has been described as a “testament” by several authors.
If it is true that Manet is looking back and citing many of his important paintings, and
if MyManet is capturing with Manet’s scheme some relevant feature of his work,
then we should find aspects of his scheme in the composition of the Bar.

On first sight, this is not really promising:

There is only one figure in the painting – and two or more reflections.
Manet’s scheme as developed in discussing the Luncheon on the Grass (1863) provides for four positions and gazes within the painting (see Post 9 and 24):

The First – looking at the viewer:
“seeing being seen” by the viewer

The Second – looking at someone within the picture space supporting the internal “stage”:
“being seen seeing” by the viewer

The Third – looking out and beyond the picture space:
“seeing without seeing being seen” by some other

The “Other” – looking from the back:
seeing from a position other than the viewer.

The barmaid is clearly puzzling since she is not really looking at the viewer.
If anything, she is gazing at some unidentified spot beyond the viewer – seeing without seeing being seen.
This would qualify her for the position of the Third.
An example of this variation of the scheme we found in Breakfast in the Atelier with the young man standing very up front and looking past the viewer (Post 18 and 19).
The couple reflected in the mirror would have to take the role of the First and the Second.
But that seems quite a stretch for the scheme.
The woman in the mirror as the First (seeing being seen) would use the mirror and look backward at the gentleman who takes the role of the viewer in front of the painting.
Conceivable; however, this leaves us without the Second.

The gentleman in the mirror seems to meet the gaze of the barmaid in the role of the First, establishing a relation between her and the viewer represented by him.
For the role of the “Other”, looking at the scene from the back, he is clearly much to close to her.
The ”Other” could be identified readily in the mirror on the balcony to the left.
Especially the gentleman with the moustache, as Flam (166) describes him, is literally looking from the back onto the scene.

Thus, to satisfy Manet’s scheme we need an interpretation for the missing Second.
(Somewhat like Sherlock Holmes and the dog that did not bark.)

For a solution, we consider the role of the couple in the mirror again.

What if their role is just to provide the viewer with a clue on how to “read” the painting and to see

the painting that Manet did not paint ?

What is the clue?

Manet clearly invites the viewer to take the position of the gentleman in the mirror and to see what he is seeing.

Basically, that means that the entire scene is turned around and the reflected viewer is now in the position of the “real” viewer looking into the eyes of the barmaid who is gazing at him. The “real” barmaid will turn into the mirror on the left side looking toward the back. The “real” viewer will take a position in the mirror to the left, only that – keeping his distance from the barmaid – her reflection will appear more behind the barmaid in the centre.

The new “painting not painted” would look somewhat like in Figure 2 !

Figure 2: “The painting not painted”:
The original painting and the Bar seen with the eyes of the man in the mirror

The “new” painting is actually based on mirroring the original painting vertically,
thus, it combines a mirror image – like in a lithograph, an operation quite familiar to Manet – with the turning around of positions.

Some “photoshopping” is also needed. The waist of the barmaid is adapted and a ponytail introduced (following Flam). Most importantly, the face of the friendly barmaid has to be inserted. I took the liberty of utilizing the face of Manet’s favourite model of his earlier period – an undated portrait of Victorine Meurent.

But why using a reflection of the painting?

Unlike the small angle assumed in Duve’s interpretation (see Post 25) turning of the mirror – we now assume an almost 180 degrees turning of the painting and moving the position of the viewer. Duve wants to explain the positions of the two figures within the painting (barmaid and customer) keeping the place of the viewer fixed. This is still a meaningful layer of interpretation.

Given the positions, however, MyManet tries to explain:
Why are the mirrored figures painted as they are?
– clearly not as realistic reflections of the figures assumed in front of the mirror, as Duve implies.

Now, if we apply Manet’s scheme to the “painting not painted” – it works!

In Figure 2, we see the missing Second now impersonated by the (imagined) former viewer.
The barmaid is perfect in the role of the First leaning slightly forward and engaging the viewer.
The “Other”, the gentleman on the balcony, has switched sides, but is still onlooking.
The Third, the mirrored barmaid, in this variation is looking somewhere off to the back. She is “seeing without seeing being seen by some other”.
This is a variation in the direction of the gaze compatible with the scheme. And we still have the original barmaid with her evasive gaze in front of us (reminding us of the Third) when we – as viewer – imagine looking with the eyes of our reflection in the mirror.

Revealing the role of Manet’s scheme in the composition supports interpretations of the painting as a “testament”. It is not only citing previous own paintings but also revitalizing and creatively developing a basic compositional scheme.
Already since Olympia (1865) – as demonstrated in Post 17 – Manet has applied variations of the scheme with fewer figures. In the 70ies, after The Balcony (1868), he has used the scheme only partially in paintings with two figures (for instance, Nana). We will have a look at the major paintings in the 1870ies in following posts to see the continuing influence of the scheme.

Here, in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Manet goes one step further and ingeniously – so the view of MyManet – applies the scheme with only one central figure and with a counterintuitive use of a mirror to set the “stage”.

The view that Manet is searching in the Bar for a new and innovative variation of his scheme can explain some of the changes from the study to the final version (Figure 2).

Moving the barmaid in the centre and giving her this famous avoiding gaze is designed to radicalize the attempt from Breakfast in the Atelier placing the Third front and centre – this time as the only “real” figure.
Already in the Atelier, we interpreted the gaze of the young man as looking into his open future. The role of the Third, more generally, signifies in the scheme the orientation to some “authority” outside the picture space.
Both aspects gain obvious significance in a painterly “testament” by a painter expecting his death.
With the gaze of the barmaid directed somewhere passed the viewer, the right side of the study (Figure 4) does not work anymore. Manet had to find a new solution which preserves credibility as a realistic painting, at least on first sight, and which allows for the application of the scheme to the other figures.
The result is the juxtaposition of a painting with a “painting not painted”.

The study and the first impression of the final version do not conform to the scheme,
but a viewer accepting the invitation to imagine looking through the eyes of his (or her) “impersonator” in the mirror will have the benefit of seeing the scheme – an important element of his “testament”.

But there is another clue on the left side. One is tempted to say, for those of us (including me) who do (or did) not readily recognize the clue on the right side pointing to the presence of Manet’s scheme.
Interpreters typically focus on the figures on the balcony only as representing friends and colleagues.
The “little cabinet of perspectives” (Lüthy p.178), however, can also be seen as a citation of Manet’s scheme!

The empty chair creates a space distinguishing the three adjoining figures.
The figure to the left reminds of Berthe Morisot in The Balcony posing for the Second (although she has been identified as another friend of Manet’s);
the figure to the right is citing a painting by Mary Cassat, and she is using her opera glass to stare beyond the picture space – a candidate for the role of the Third;
the woman in the next row (clearly accentuated by the empty chair) is looking straight at the viewer – taking the role of the First.
The gentleman to the far left plays already the role of the “Other” but – given his reflection – he can also be seen as doubling as an “Other” in the “little cabinet”. (The lady and the gentleman could change roles as First and “Other”, but I think that the empty chair is meant to join the lady to the triad.)

The complex composition is summarized in the diagram in Figure 3:

Figure 3: Diagram of the scheme in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

On the left and centre, now we see Manet’s scheme with the roles of the First, Second and Third. Additionally, the shifting position of the viewer is indicated. In the original, the viewer is induced to move slightly from the centre to the right trying to align with the mirror image within the painting. In the “painting not painted”, the viewer is motivated to shift to the left as indicated in the diagram.
This shifting from outside to inside and from right to left will motivate the viewer (if he or she is trying to solve the puzzle) to look “from the side” on the level of the mirror plane – a position supporting identification with the Second and establishing the picture space.
On the right side, we see the “little cabinet” reminding of the scheme and the “Other” doubling inside and outside the painting.
Besides the painterly challenges of using a mirror as a background, Manet has solved the problem of staging his 4-figure scheme within a painting featuring essentially one figure.

Two questions (1 and 2) are still open from our list above:

Manet is playing games with the “male gaze”.
In view of the “painting not painted”, is there a clue that there is also a “female gaze not painted”?

And:

Manet seems to put into question a realistic interpretation more radically than in any previous painting.
This is especially troubling in the case of the looming face of the gentleman placed in the upper right corner.
Should we reassess Manet’s self-claimed position as a realist?

Good questions, but let us address them in the next post.

See you in about two weeks!