July 13, 2012
Paris seen through Manet's eyes
In The Foreigner, published by Notting Hill Editions, Richard Sennett examines the painter's view of the city's inhabitants and his clever eye for displacement.
Edouard Manet was a painter of the city but no realist, as we commonly understand that term.
He did not seek to achieve in painting the effect of surprising life in the raw, as did photographers of his time. Nor did Manet’s record of Paris share much in spirit with Zola’s declarative, indignant literary portraits of the city’s whores, abandoned children, or families dining on roasted rats.
Manet’s art is capable of stunning direct political statement, as witness the painting he made in 1868, The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, but the artist’s vision of the city relies upon other means for its effects.
In recording the life he saw in Paris, Manet made use of visual gestures which trouble the eye, which wrench it from object to object within the frame of the painting, and which often suggest that the real story of the painting is happening elsewhere, off the canvas. In painting the city, Manet is an artist of displacements. It is in his understanding of displacement that the artist speaks to us socially, today as in his own time; his art challenges certain assumptions we may make in describing people who are displaced economically or politically: the immigrant, the exile, the expatriate.
These words name the differing reasons a person may live abroad, but the result of such displacements seems, today, a fate in common. To be a foreigner is to live ill at ease abroad – the immigrant who is culture-shocked and clings to his or her own, the exile who hibernates indifferently in a city barely touched, the expatriate who soon dreams of returning . . .
Such images sentimentalize the need for roots and the virtues of the hearth. More, they deny to those who become foreigners the will and capacity to make something humane from the very experience of displacement, even if forced initially to migrate.
A painter completely at ease in his city, interested in the smells and shadows of its everyday life, Manet yet imagines what is positive about the very experience of displacement. The duality of ‘home’ and ‘foreign’ comes apart under his brush, since the imagery of familiar places becomes itself increasingly strange and foreign.
Manet’s eye for displacement is given full rein in his last major work, The Bar at the Folies-Bergère, painted over the winter of 1881–2. The painting has an interesting history. In 1879 Manet proposed himself to the Municipal Council of Paris as the painter of murals for the new Hotel de Ville; these murals of modern Paris would show the effect on the life of the city of new constructions – the steel bridges, the poured-cement sewers, the wrought-iron buildings.
Manet’s proposal was rebuffed, and it is significant that this, the great work he turned to after his denial, does not present one of the scenes envisioned for his murals of Paris, but rather turns to something seemingly more sentimental, more kitsch even, a picture of the Folies-Bergère. What Manet would seek to do is infuse this banal scene with the force of all the changes he felt at work in Paris, changes which had spurred the development of a modern sensibility.
It is important for us to understand, in retrospect, what the Folies-Bergère of Manet’s time was, and was not. It was a place of sensual licence: both female and male prostitutes drifted among its crowds, and there were performances of the cancan, which in its nineteenth-century version was nothing like its more modern, sanitized descendant (the cancan, introduced into Paris in the 1830s, was usually danced by women with no underclothing beneath their loose, short skirts, so that every time they kicked their legs, their mounts of Venus were disclosed to view).
The Folies-Bergère was not itself, however, a whorehouse, though conveniently located to several, a fact which meant that it was possible for women to frequent it for amusement – which respectable women in surprisingly respectable numbers did. This, then, is a risqué place but a public one, filled with noisy crowds drinking and flirting, the air perfumed by cigars, coffee and cheap Beaujolais. Parisians went to the Folies when they wanted to relax. It was comfortable and homey, a home away from, very far away from, the rigours of the family home.
Such is the scene Manet will take apart. We are shown a woman standing behind a bar: pensive, sad, unsmiling, an isolated figure in the midst of noise (the painted figure is based on Suzon, a barmaid at the Folies-Bergère whom Manet knew). The viewer is drawn into this scene though the use Manet makes of mirrors, mirrors which create a special experience of displacement.
The barmaid is painted so that she stares directly out at the viewer. The mirror in front of which she stands is also directly opposite the viewer; Manet reinforces this full-frontal alignment by how he places the barmaid’s arms and hands on the bar: her arms are extended and her hands are turned out, as a ballet dancer would turn out the legs in the full-frontal ‘address’ of the body. Directly to the right of this figure we see her back reflected in the mirror, the flat mass of her black dress exactly the size of the body, so that the reflected figure lacks perspectival diminishment; the reflection seems in the same dimensional plane as the body.
I say we see her reflection in a mirror, although optically this is impossible; we could not be facing her directly and seeing her reflection to the right of her at the same time. Today the viewer accepts this impossibility; it seems visually logical if optically impossible.
However, Charles de Feir, in his Guide du Salon de Paris 1882, spoke for many of Manet’s contemporaries in finding this strange mirror a sign of the painter’s faulty technique.
In many of Manet’s late paintings, the modern viewer’s sense of optical displacement is reinforced by some seemingly minor, arbitrary gesture which further detaches the scene from representational fact. In The Bar at the Folies-Bergère this occurs in the way Manet paints two gaslights reflected in the mirror; they are disks of pure white, white disks which lie flat on the picture plane; these lanterns cast no shadow, they show no penumbral refractions as mirrored lights usually do, nor indeed are they even painted in the round.
Again, Manet’s contemporaries found in these strange lights a sign of the painter’s weakness. In L’Illustration, Jules Compte remarked of them that ‘Monsieur Manet has probably chosen a moment when the lamps were not working properly, for never have we seen light less dazzling . . .’
Today we can see these white disks serve the same purpose as the displaced reflection of the barmaid’s black dress. They set up the painting so that we focus on the only significant experience of depth and recession in it. In the upper right corner of the painting, reflected in the mirror, we see the man the barmaid is looking at, staring intently into her eyes.
However, just as the barmaid’s back cannot possibly be reflected to her immediate right, this intent gentleman in his top hat, asking her a question with his eyes, who inspires in her a look of such sadness, cannot optically exist, for he would entirely block out our direct, unobstructed view of Suzon, who is in turn looking straight in front of her. The painting is set up so that the viewer, you or me, is standing in front of her. But of course you or I don’t resemble the particular person reflected in the mirror.
Due to the full-frontal positioning of the subject in relation to the viewer, there is no way to look at her without this reflexive disturbance occurring. The drama Manet creates in this painting is: I look in a mirror and see someone who is not myself.
This aspect of the painting did speak to Manet’s contemporaries. Some sought to pass off the disturbance with a joke (the Journal Amusant of 27 May 1882 made a woodcut of the painting with the gentleman reflected in the mirror drawn in, standing before the barmaid and blocking our view), but most critics reacted with anger to the disturbing questions about the viewer created by Manet’s painting: ‘Is this picture true? No. Is it beautiful? No. Is it attractive? No. But what is it, then?’
Their distress could have mostly had to do with the story being told by the painting; a man propositions a young barmaid, who responds to him with a look of infinite sadness.
Of course such a story is as apt a Victorian homily as one could imagine. The lonely young woman in a vice-tainted public realm was a homily Edgar Degas painted more directly, for instance, in L’Absinthe of 1876. In Manet’s painting the optic disturbance relieves the woman of serving such a neatly moralizing purpose. A question is raised about the story of the painting by making the viewing of the painting, by men and women in other costumes, times, and places, inseparable from the story being told.
In the same painterly way, the objects placed on the bar are given a heightened life. The bottles on the bar are painted fully in the round; they contrast with the abstract disks in that mirror which shows us another self than the one we might prefer to call our own. Although the mirror runs full length across the painting, Manet allows only two of this crowded collection of objects to show in reflection, even though optically all should show. These optical ghosts of bottles, flowers and fruit seem the most solid objects in the painting.
This is how displacement works in The Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Displacement creates value: reflexive value, that is a value given to the viewer as part of the thing seen; and value given to the physical world itself, whose character and form we are forced to assess by looking at its transmutation in a distorting mirror.
By contrast, there is but an illusory solidity to those objects which have not been subjected to this displacement. Were Manet a philosopher – which he emphatically would protest he was not – he might point to this as the real point of his painting: the solidity of undisplaced things, as of selves which have not experienced displacement, may indeed be the greatest of illusions. This painting certainly makes a modernist promise: disturbance will infuse value into experience.
Paris seen through Manet's eyes
Edouard Manet was a painter of the city but no realist, as we commonly understand that term.
He did not seek to achieve in painting the effect of surprising life in the raw, as did photographers of his time. Nor did Manet’s record of Paris share much in spirit with Zola’s declarative, indignant literary portraits of the city’s whores, abandoned children, or families dining on roasted rats.
Manet’s art is capable of stunning direct political statement, as witness the painting he made in 1868, The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, but the artist’s vision of the city relies upon other means for its effects.
In recording the life he saw in Paris, Manet made use of visual gestures which trouble the eye, which wrench it from object to object within the frame of the painting, and which often suggest that the real story of the painting is happening elsewhere, off the canvas. In painting the city, Manet is an artist of displacements. It is in his understanding of displacement that the artist speaks to us socially, today as in his own time; his art challenges certain assumptions we may make in describing people who are displaced economically or politically: the immigrant, the exile, the expatriate.
These words name the differing reasons a person may live abroad, but the result of such displacements seems, today, a fate in common. To be a foreigner is to live ill at ease abroad – the immigrant who is culture-shocked and clings to his or her own, the exile who hibernates indifferently in a city barely touched, the expatriate who soon dreams of returning . . .
Such images sentimentalize the need for roots and the virtues of the hearth. More, they deny to those who become foreigners the will and capacity to make something humane from the very experience of displacement, even if forced initially to migrate.
A painter completely at ease in his city, interested in the smells and shadows of its everyday life, Manet yet imagines what is positive about the very experience of displacement. The duality of ‘home’ and ‘foreign’ comes apart under his brush, since the imagery of familiar places becomes itself increasingly strange and foreign.
Manet’s eye for displacement is given full rein in his last major work, The Bar at the Folies-Bergère, painted over the winter of 1881–2. The painting has an interesting history. In 1879 Manet proposed himself to the Municipal Council of Paris as the painter of murals for the new Hotel de Ville; these murals of modern Paris would show the effect on the life of the city of new constructions – the steel bridges, the poured-cement sewers, the wrought-iron buildings.
Manet’s proposal was rebuffed, and it is significant that this, the great work he turned to after his denial, does not present one of the scenes envisioned for his murals of Paris, but rather turns to something seemingly more sentimental, more kitsch even, a picture of the Folies-Bergère. What Manet would seek to do is infuse this banal scene with the force of all the changes he felt at work in Paris, changes which had spurred the development of a modern sensibility.
It is important for us to understand, in retrospect, what the Folies-Bergère of Manet’s time was, and was not. It was a place of sensual licence: both female and male prostitutes drifted among its crowds, and there were performances of the cancan, which in its nineteenth-century version was nothing like its more modern, sanitized descendant (the cancan, introduced into Paris in the 1830s, was usually danced by women with no underclothing beneath their loose, short skirts, so that every time they kicked their legs, their mounts of Venus were disclosed to view).
The Folies-Bergère was not itself, however, a whorehouse, though conveniently located to several, a fact which meant that it was possible for women to frequent it for amusement – which respectable women in surprisingly respectable numbers did. This, then, is a risqué place but a public one, filled with noisy crowds drinking and flirting, the air perfumed by cigars, coffee and cheap Beaujolais. Parisians went to the Folies when they wanted to relax. It was comfortable and homey, a home away from, very far away from, the rigours of the family home.
Such is the scene Manet will take apart. We are shown a woman standing behind a bar: pensive, sad, unsmiling, an isolated figure in the midst of noise (the painted figure is based on Suzon, a barmaid at the Folies-Bergère whom Manet knew). The viewer is drawn into this scene though the use Manet makes of mirrors, mirrors which create a special experience of displacement.
The barmaid is painted so that she stares directly out at the viewer. The mirror in front of which she stands is also directly opposite the viewer; Manet reinforces this full-frontal alignment by how he places the barmaid’s arms and hands on the bar: her arms are extended and her hands are turned out, as a ballet dancer would turn out the legs in the full-frontal ‘address’ of the body. Directly to the right of this figure we see her back reflected in the mirror, the flat mass of her black dress exactly the size of the body, so that the reflected figure lacks perspectival diminishment; the reflection seems in the same dimensional plane as the body.
I say we see her reflection in a mirror, although optically this is impossible; we could not be facing her directly and seeing her reflection to the right of her at the same time. Today the viewer accepts this impossibility; it seems visually logical if optically impossible.
However, Charles de Feir, in his Guide du Salon de Paris 1882, spoke for many of Manet’s contemporaries in finding this strange mirror a sign of the painter’s faulty technique.
In many of Manet’s late paintings, the modern viewer’s sense of optical displacement is reinforced by some seemingly minor, arbitrary gesture which further detaches the scene from representational fact. In The Bar at the Folies-Bergère this occurs in the way Manet paints two gaslights reflected in the mirror; they are disks of pure white, white disks which lie flat on the picture plane; these lanterns cast no shadow, they show no penumbral refractions as mirrored lights usually do, nor indeed are they even painted in the round.
Again, Manet’s contemporaries found in these strange lights a sign of the painter’s weakness. In L’Illustration, Jules Compte remarked of them that ‘Monsieur Manet has probably chosen a moment when the lamps were not working properly, for never have we seen light less dazzling . . .’
Today we can see these white disks serve the same purpose as the displaced reflection of the barmaid’s black dress. They set up the painting so that we focus on the only significant experience of depth and recession in it. In the upper right corner of the painting, reflected in the mirror, we see the man the barmaid is looking at, staring intently into her eyes.
However, just as the barmaid’s back cannot possibly be reflected to her immediate right, this intent gentleman in his top hat, asking her a question with his eyes, who inspires in her a look of such sadness, cannot optically exist, for he would entirely block out our direct, unobstructed view of Suzon, who is in turn looking straight in front of her. The painting is set up so that the viewer, you or me, is standing in front of her. But of course you or I don’t resemble the particular person reflected in the mirror.
Due to the full-frontal positioning of the subject in relation to the viewer, there is no way to look at her without this reflexive disturbance occurring. The drama Manet creates in this painting is: I look in a mirror and see someone who is not myself.
This aspect of the painting did speak to Manet’s contemporaries. Some sought to pass off the disturbance with a joke (the Journal Amusant of 27 May 1882 made a woodcut of the painting with the gentleman reflected in the mirror drawn in, standing before the barmaid and blocking our view), but most critics reacted with anger to the disturbing questions about the viewer created by Manet’s painting: ‘Is this picture true? No. Is it beautiful? No. Is it attractive? No. But what is it, then?’
Their distress could have mostly had to do with the story being told by the painting; a man propositions a young barmaid, who responds to him with a look of infinite sadness.
Of course such a story is as apt a Victorian homily as one could imagine. The lonely young woman in a vice-tainted public realm was a homily Edgar Degas painted more directly, for instance, in L’Absinthe of 1876. In Manet’s painting the optic disturbance relieves the woman of serving such a neatly moralizing purpose. A question is raised about the story of the painting by making the viewing of the painting, by men and women in other costumes, times, and places, inseparable from the story being told.
In the same painterly way, the objects placed on the bar are given a heightened life. The bottles on the bar are painted fully in the round; they contrast with the abstract disks in that mirror which shows us another self than the one we might prefer to call our own. Although the mirror runs full length across the painting, Manet allows only two of this crowded collection of objects to show in reflection, even though optically all should show. These optical ghosts of bottles, flowers and fruit seem the most solid objects in the painting.
This is how displacement works in The Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Displacement creates value: reflexive value, that is a value given to the viewer as part of the thing seen; and value given to the physical world itself, whose character and form we are forced to assess by looking at its transmutation in a distorting mirror.
By contrast, there is but an illusory solidity to those objects which have not been subjected to this displacement. Were Manet a philosopher – which he emphatically would protest he was not – he might point to this as the real point of his painting: the solidity of undisplaced things, as of selves which have not experienced displacement, may indeed be the greatest of illusions. This painting certainly makes a modernist promise: disturbance will infuse value into experience.
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