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NARRATOR: Thanks to Wix for supporting PBS Digital Studios.
This is a painting of a woman tending bar in Paris
during the latter half of the 19th century.
We know it was painted by French impressionist Edouard
Manet in 1882 during the storied Belle Epoque,
a time of relative stability in France
after over a century of revolution and conflict,
after Paris had been transformed from a crowded labyrinth
of winding streets to a modern city with new train terminals
and straight, wide boulevards.
We know that it's set at the Folies Bergere, a Paris cafe
concert, where you could get a drink and be entertained.
And we know Manet's model, Suzon, actually worked
at the Folies Bergere, but posed for the artist at his studio.
But there's a heck of a lot we don't know.
We don't know why we can see a man in the mirror behind her,
but not where he should be in the space in front of her.
We don't know what their relationship is, whether he's
trying to buy a drink or her, and we
don't know what's going on inside of her head
behind the blank stare.
Is she just a person as unreadable from the outside
as any other, or is she a potent symbol
of the estrangement of modern life, a kind of life where
we witness and are part of the grand spectacle of capitalism
and entertainment so central to our existence today?
Let's better know A Bar at the Folies Bergere.
Manet unveiled his painting at the Paris Salon of 1882
among works like Alfred Philippe Roll's depiction
of the first official celebration of Bastille Day.
It was at the salon that new mostly safe academic art was
tested out in front of audiences.
But while most of Manet's impressionist peers,
like Claude Monet, had abandoned the salon
and formed their own exhibitions,
Manet held firm to the institution, declaring,
the Salon is the real field of battle.
It's there that one must take one's measure.
And there he took his measure on a number of occasions
with varying degrees of success.
The jury rejected his Absinthe Drinker in 1859,
but it accepted and awarded The Spanish Singer in 1861.
He was again denied in 1863, and instead exhibited
his Luncheon in the Grass at the Salon des Refuses,
causing quite the stir for its brazen depiction
of a naked woman cavorting with clothed men
despite its clear reference to a much loved Renaissance
masterpiece.
He drew upon another 16th century masterwork
for a painting that was accepted by the salon in 1865.
But Manet's Olympia was reacted to
with hostility and criticism.
This was no sensual Venus, they objected,
but a common courtesan depicted flatly and much too plainly,
whom one writer described, like a corpse on the counters
at the morgue.
Of course, now, it's much less provocative.
But at the time, Manet prided himself
not on making tired, hazy, and idealized versions
of past events, but on being a painter of modern life,
in the words of his friend the poet Baudelaire.
Manet observed what was around him in bustling Paris
and rendered fragments of it in a distinct style.
His sharp contrast and elimination of halftones,
we can credit to Spanish masters Goya and Velazquez, whom
he greatly admired, as well as his interest,
along with many of his time, in Japanese woodblock prints.
Manet painted a street singer eating cherries
and fancy people gathered to hear music in gardens.
He traveled to Spain and painted bullfights.
He depicted scenes of the Franco-Prussian War
and the execution of Maximilian in Mexico.
He painted his friends, including artist Berthe
Morisot, writer Emile Zola, and Monet
at work on his studio boat.
Manet certainly wasn't the only one
looking at modern life with fresh eyes in ways
that many considered slapdash and unfinished.
But he was fixated less on the scenery
and more on the people that populated it.
Stephane Mallarme understood this focus
as paralleling the post-revolutionary shift
in their country, accounting for the, quote,
"participation of a hitherto ignored
people in the political life of France."
This participation of the non-elite
was also very much social, and the Folies Bergere
was just one of a plethora of venues
where the social classes of Paris
would mix and enjoy its copious new forms of entertainment.
Mallarme put it this way, today, the multitude
demands to see with its own eyes.
And if our latter day art is less glorious, intense,
and rich, it's not without the compensation
of truth, simplicity, and childlike charm.
And so by the time we arrive at A Bar at the Folies
Bergere, Manet's last major painting
before passing away at age 51 from complications
due to syphilis, we have a better sense
of the barmaid before us as a player among many
in the circus of modern Parisian life.
The Folies Bergere and other places
like it were lit with the harsh and bright white light of newly
electrified Paris.
For two franc, you could enter and enjoy
a popular singer, dancer, or trapeze act,
so hilariously indicated by these dangling legs.
You could also buy beer and champagne
and meet prostitutes as many have assumed our subject to be.
She is presented to us frontally arranged
just so along with an assortment of refreshments
available for sale.
Her waistline expertly mimicking the fluted bowl of oranges.
The bar is decorated with flowers,
and so is her decolletage.
She is firmly part of the scene, rooted to her spot
at this intransigent marble counter, dividing her from us
and us from her.
And who is us?
Perhaps we're the gentleman in the mirror, whose reflection
Manet has conveniently shifted at an angle so we can see it.
A cartoonist at the time jokingly
suggested to Manet what his picture should look like.
But from behind, she seems to be in an active exchange
with the man, which is not at all reflected
in the detached gaze we see.
Perhaps the exchange had happened in the past
or was about to happen.
Perhaps she's imagining it to happen.
People couldn't reconcile the image at the time,
and they haven't been able to since, despite mountains
of literature, reenactments, and explorations
in virtual reality.
The fact remains that she looks out at us,
but is ultimately inaccessible.
She doesn't quite meet our eyes.
And her thoughts, we can't pretend to know.
More than many artists of the time, Manet
set his focus on women.
On rare occasions, they interact intently with others.
But for the most part, they look out.
We've caught them in moments of reverie
without strong or decodeable emotion.
It was the birth of the blase attitude, what
Georg Simmel described in 1903 as an indifference
toward the distinctions between things, a psychic mood that
is the correct subjective reflection of a complete money
economy.
The cafe concert embodied, for many upper class Parisians,
the vulgarity and immorality of modern life
and the loss inherent in the shift
from the home as the center of social life to the cafe.
As Alfred Delvau described it in a Paris guide, to live at home,
to think at home, to eat and drink at home,
we find this boring and inconvenient.
We need publicity, daylight, the street, the cabaret, the cafe,
the restaurant.
We like to pose, to make a spectacle of ourselves,
to have a public, a gallery, witnesses to our life.
This was written in 1867 long before the words
could ring painfully true in our social media saturated ears.
But perhaps the weight of this painting
and why Manet has been called the father of modernity
is because, here, we are shown the beginnings of cultural life
as we now know it.
In this contradictory picture, we cannot distinguish real life
from reflection.
The work is all surfaces.
And what could be more relevant in this time
as we navigate the oft mediated and mediating
surfaces of our lives and participate
in the cycle of consumer and consumed
or perform our lives for a faceless crowd.
In late 19th century Paris, and today,
there is an excitement to the spectacle
and to our participation in it, but also
a sadness, an alienation, as we recognize ourselves
as commodities.
We recognize this look.
We see it everywhere, in others, and most of all, in ourselves.
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