Once I had cleared some space, both mentally and domestically, in which to embark on this new adventure, my first challenge was to name it. The purely descriptive titles - Art Talks, Art Matters, Art Stories - had been gobbled up and I was left in the unfamiliar world of branding. I wanted a name that invoked a sense of unwrapping and uncovering the stories behind the pictures I wanted to talk about. Always drawn to the colour orange - I have red hair - for its highly visible but cheering nature, I began to explore further.
And then I saw them. Sitting pretty and gorgeous on a marble counter in a gleaming glass bowl. Ready to be picked up and unwrapped - like everything else on the counter and possibly behind it. A tangerine. What a beautiful thing! Supremely brought into being by the master of moving paint across a canvas, Eduoard Manet, in his artistic curtain call, and love letter to his past,
A Bar at the Folies Bergere is one of my favourite paintings. Now in the Courtauld Gallery in London, it was completed in 1882, when Manet was in excruciating and mortal pain; one leg had already been amputated as a result of the syphilitic malaise that was ravaging his body. It is a poignant and evocative portrayal of a life just out of reach and he paints it so tenderly. By now social distancing is ingrained in our collective consciousness but here it is brought to an operatic pitch as we contemplate, and seek to understand, the scene before us. It calls to my mind the glittering but corrosive portrayal of Bright Young Things later to be made by Evelyn Waugh. Like all great paintings, it asks us “What do you see?”. And then, “What do you really see?”. Manet plays tricks with time, space, perspective, perception and as a modernist, he plays tricks with the painted surface. His vibrantly painted world is alluring but it is as manufactured as the chemically formulated oil paints he uses, now readily available in an ever-dazzling array of new colours.
Nightclubs were the last of the entertainment spaces to reopen after the long Covid lockdowns and are often places of experimentation, of few inhibitions, loosening the constraints of the work-a-day life. Manet presents a tantalising portrait of the new palace of pleasure that was the Folies Bergere. Newly reopened, refurbished and renamed only a decade before this painting was exhibited, the Folies Bergere was one of the new forms of entertainment venue springing up in the city since Haussmannisation brought about wholesale urban transformation, wrenching Paris from its medieval past and into the modern age. It offered its clientele a dazzling hybrid of the circus, opera, theatres and bars and gave artists of all types a fascinating microcosm of public interaction. It is typical of Manet to include not only the consumers of this entertainment but also the staff who provided it.
The Folies Bergere positioned itself as the venue for the bourgeoisie, the moneyed, leisured middle classes with disposable income and morals. The chandeliers, the champagne and imported beer call to a more exclusive clientele than those who flocked to the cafe concerts. The Bass beer, recognisable from the red triangle on its label - one of the first trademarks in consumer goods - hints at the invasion of English tourists to the City of Lights. This in spite of warnings in contemporary guidebooks that Paris was a den of iniquity and unhygienic vices. Champagne was not as expensive as it once was. New fermentation techniques in the champagne houses of Reims and the growing connectivity of the railway network meant that champagne could be produced and transported quicker and in greater quantities than before. The footed bowl in which the tangerines sit is a luxury item of fashionable and high quality Baccarat glassware, so exquisitely catching the light in Manet’s treatment of it.
As well as imported beer, the Folies Bergere imported acts, notably, at the time Manet frequented the venue, the trapeze artist Leona Dare from the United States of America. Dare wore red boots but a pair of green boots can be seen in the top left of the painting in an audacious act of artistic cropping.
Visitors to the Folies Bergere could enjoy being seen and checking out who was with who. They would move from one banquette to another, from bar to bar. There were many bars which is why Manet’s painting is just A Bar - one of a number at the back of the circle and stalls. Manet made many sketches in situ but he was too ill to complete this large painting there. It was painted slowly in his studio where a young barmaid from the Folies Bergere called Suzon came to sit (or stand), for him.
It is Suzon that makes such compelling eye contact with us in such an inscrutable way. Her fashionable uniform - barmaids at the Folies Bergere were required to wear low cut dresses with flowers embellishing their décolleté - is all arrows and triangles, directing us where to look. Barmaids here had already been categorised by the author Maupassant as “vendors of drink and of love” and barmaids across Paris often supplemented their wages with prostitution. The identity of the blurred male top-hatted figure reinforces this impression of a sale being made. But Manet doesn’t make it that simple or obvious. For the girl is now looking at us. What do we want to buy? For a painting that so precisely captures a moment in time, it is also completely timeless. It tells its story with such elegance and sophistication - a challenge I hope to rise to.
Comments