Selling, seduction, and soliciting the eye: Manet's 'Bar at the Folies-Bergere.'

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Selling, seduction, and soliciting the eye: Manet's 'Bar at the Folies-Bergere.'

When I go out, . . . I fill my pockets with them and give them to the local children who come begging. They'd probably prefer money, but I prefer to give them a share in something I enjoy. The pleasures of this world! Well, they're made of things that mean little to some people but a lot to others" (ibid., 187, citing A. Proust [1879]).

67. F. B. de Mercey, "L'Exposition Universelle des Beaux-Arts en 1855," Revue contemporaine, XXXI, 1857, 486; cited in Mainardi, 46.

68. Figures cited in T. Zeldin, France, 1848-1945, Oxford, 1977, II, 445.

69. Zola (as in n. 63), 357. The spectator ... the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself. - Charles Baudelaire, 1863(1)

Denise began to feel as if she were watching a machine working at full pressure, ... they were no longer cold windows she had seen in the early morning; they seemed to be warm and vibrating from activity within. There was a crowd before them, groups of women pushing and squeezing, devouring the finery with longing, covetous eyes. - Emile Zola, 1883(2)

Most interpreters of Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] have assumed that the man whose face we see in the mirror is propositioning the young woman at the counter. If he is not soliciting her "sexual favors" outright, it is generally assumed that her body is for sale.(3) Seduction and selling are indeed at the center of this painting, though their object is not just the fashionable woman at the counter. That the barmaid is a salesgirl and the situation at hand primarily a sales transaction of the goods on the counter has not played more than a marginal role in previous discussions of the painting.

While the woman, the man, and even the mirror itself have been given center stage in interpretations of A Bar at the Folies-Bergere for good reason,(4) the prominent display of goods in front and the packed crowd of spectators in the back have barely been addressed. No doubt, they were considered peripheral to the main scenario. But if this were the case, why is the display on the counter so provocatively positioned to beckon us as if from the threshold of the painting? And why is the radically miniaturized dense crowd in the far back taking up such a large portion of the canvas? The goods on the counter and the crowd are the primary clues for my interpretation. This essay aims to revisit modernity by reviewing A Bar at the Folies-Bergere in light of historically specific discourses of mass consumption, the changing roles of women, and the development of the modern crowd/public.

To understand Manet's painting and modernity we must extend the circumference of our interests from the immediate history of the cafe-concert, and the rhetoric of pleasure, leisure, and entertainment, to broader discourses of mass consumption.(5) As Andreas Huyssen has noted, "From its beginnings the autonomy of art has been related dialectically to the commodity form."(6) The cultural history of modernity and the avant-garde painting of Manet and the Impressionists were interrelated with discourses of mass consumption. Not only was art for sale in exhibits, a fact which in the eyes of many reduced it to the level of bazaar goods, but art shows in world exhibitions also existed in the context of displays of industrial goods and the advertising of department stores and other prominent commercial enterprises. Most important, both department stores and modern artists positioned themselves in a culture of display and commodities, soliciting the eyes of consuming spectators who were part of a mass public.(7)

Though scholars may differ on when exactly the age of mass consum...

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