Manet | A Bar at the Folies-Bergeres

About A Bar at the Folies-Bergere by Edouard Manet

Manet painted this in 1882, the last major work he completed. He was already seriously ill and could barely stand for long, so he had a section of the bar rebuilt in his studio and worked from a real Folies-Bergère barmaid named Suzon. He died the following year, aged 51.

She stands behind a marble counter loaded with bottles, a bowl of oranges and roses in a glass, facing us directly. Behind her a mirror throws back the whole crowded music hall — chandeliers, a balcony packed with faces, and in the top left corner, cropped by the frame, a pair of green-slippered legs belonging to a trapeze artist mid-performance.

And the mirror is wrong. Her reflection is shifted far to the right, where it could not possibly be. A top-hatted man appears in that reflection, apparently speaking to her — but if he were standing where the reflection implies, he would be between us and her, blocking the view. Manet knew exactly what he was doing. A century and a half of writing has gone into why, and there is still no settled answer.

Own a hand-painted Bar at the Folies-Bergere

The painting works by making two things out of very different stuff. Suzon herself is solid and frontal, painted with firm edges and almost no expression, entirely still. Everything behind her in the mirror — the crowd, the balcony, the chandeliers — is dissolved into loose smears that never resolve into faces. She is present; the world behind her is not quite. That difference between hard, plain handling and deliberately unfinished handling is the whole subject, and it depends on the two being visibly made in different ways. Reproduction renders every part of a canvas with the same mechanical evenness, so the gap narrows and she stops standing out from the blur. Painted by hand in oils, the crowd goes back to being smears and Suzon goes back to being unnervingly solid in front of them.

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