Would you be able to work on my task 2 now? I have selected a art work "A Bar at the Folies - Bergere by Edouard Manet " for my 2nd task.

This painting exemplifies Manet"s commitment to REALISM in tis detailed representation of a contemporary scene.

 

 

A- Record my initial reaction to work (Suggested length of one paragraph or half a page).

1 describe initial thoughts and or feelings about this work - consider a series of questions in discussing my reaction, what drew me back to work? What do yourfindn intriguing or interesting Be prepare to describe in detail one aspect of the work that you find notable.

2. Describe in detail at least one aspect of the work that most interests you.

 

b. Analyze the work (Suggested length of 2 page) by doing the following,

1. Describe the historical context of the period which this work was written - This painting represent Realism - representation of a contemporary scene.
2. Discuss insights into the work that can be gained from the authors biography
3. Analyze how this work explores a particular theme and or stylists characteristic from its period
4. explain the relevance of this work for today's audience

 

c. Discuss how the deeper knowledge you gained through your analysis has informed or altered your thoughts and or feelings about the work. (Suggested one paragraph or half page)

 

d. Corresponding references,

 

Example: Writing About Art

The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz, 1907. 

© 2012 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / 

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (PD).

[The following brief responses are meant to provide a model for writing about art.]

Work: Alfred Steiglitz's The Steerage

Period: Realist/ Early Modern

Your initial reactions to a work

This photograph reminded me of the movie Titanic, where there was a clear divide between the classes of passengers on the ship. It immediately struck me as a political statement. The stairway produces a line directly across the scene, separating the first class passengers from steerage, that makes you immediately think about the differences between the rich and poor. My eye was immediately drawn to the women immigrants in shawls in the right hand corner of the photo, and I assumed that it was deliberately framed that way by Alfred Steiglitz. The composition of the photo benefits from this use of the Rule of Thirds (the center of interest should never be directly located in the center of the image), because it is more interesting. My eye traveled from the women to the man with the illuminated boater hat on the next level above.

Historical context

The United States experienced several waves of immigration in the 20th century. Artists, writers, photographers, and composers all touched upon the immigrant experience in their work. The themes they dealt with included alienation, the quest for the American Dream, conflict between parents and children, the ambivalence many felt about assimilating into their new society and abandoning old country traditions, and the promise of starting over.

The Steerage documented the class distinctions found in the immigrant experience. Immigrants often were crowded into steerage, as they could not afford the upper decks of a ship. The man in the straw boater hat, looking down, represents the more affluent passengers.

Many critics hailed this photo as making real the difficulties encountered by immigrants on their passage to their new home. There is some irony involved in reading this meaning into The Steerage, because Stieglitz actually took the photo of a ship traveling from New York to Bremen, Germany.

Biographical context

Stieglitz led a movement called Pictorialism, which advanced the idea of the photograph as art. He argued: "The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art" (as cited in Hoffman, 2004, p. xi.).

One other aspect of Stieglitz's personal life appears to have played a part in the making of the photograph. He took the photograph while on a voyage with his wife, Emmy Obermeyer, who was decidedly upper class, and who, according to Elizabeth Anne McCauley (2012), disliked Stieglitz's fascination with photographing the lower class passengers. (Stieglitz later divorced Emmy and married the noted painter Georgia O'Keefe.)

Exploration of themes or stylistic characteristics

The Steerage has been acclaimed as one of the greatest images of the early Modernist movements. Stieglitz took it in 1907 during the wave of massive immigration from Europe to the United States. (Stieglitz himself was the son of German-Jewish immigrants, although he was born in the U.S.) Steerage was the part of a ship providing accommodations for passengers with the cheapest tickets.

The image was hailed as an advance for photography when it was published in 1911. It was seen as helping to establish photography as an art form in its own right, moving it away from attempting to imitate painting. Instead, Steiglitz pioneered making photos as a documentary record of life while also introducing an artistic sensibility. Cubist painter Pablo Picasso praised the photo for its Modernist spirit (as cited in de Zayas, 1944, p. 291).

Steiglitz (1942) later wrote about the shapes he captured in the photo: "A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railing made of circular chains—white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape." He added: "I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life" (pp. 175-178).

Some contemporary critics are less convinced that the photograph is as ground-breaking as has been suggested. Elizabeth Anne McCauley (2012) says that The Steerage on balance seems "oddly pedestrian": "Its emphatic, two-dimensional composition is harmonious and balanced, but no more striking than that of Stieglitz's earlier prints, such as On the Ferry Boat(1902), The Flatiron (1903), and Going to the Start (1904), in which silhouetted, flattened linear shapes repeat and emphasize the edges of the frame" (p. 19).

Current relevance

Stieglitz's photographs combined his artistic vision with social and political themes. This fusion approach has influenced current photographers, photojournalists, and documentarians. They recognize that they can combine an aesthetic sensibility with images that challenge the political or cultural status quo.

The themes touched upon in The Steerage remain relevant today, as a "nation of immigrants" struggles with issues of inclusion well into the 21st century.

Changing perspective

After researching the history of the photograph, I now see it as contrived, and I'm inclined to not consider it a Modernist masterpiece. Elizabeth Anne McCauley makes a good case that the photo isn't anything exceptional, and the fact that it isn't truly depicting immigrants to the United States also makes me leery of seeing it as being a particularly important documentary photo.

Reference list

de Zayas, M. (1944). History of an American: Alfred Stieglitz. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Francisco, J. & McCauley, E.A. (2012). The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz (Defining moments in American photography). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hoffman, K. (2004). Stieglitz: A beginning light. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Stieglitz, A. (1942). How The Steerage happened. Twice a Year: A Book of Literature, The Arts, and Civil Liberties, No. 8-9, Spring-Summer 1942.

 

 

Philip Pullman on Manet - What makes a masterpiece? The barmaid's face is the most unreadable ever painted - and just one mystery of this exquisite enigma.

What are you looking at?: Edouard Manet's 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère'  

By Philip Pullman

 

11:12AM BST 29 Sep 2010

Philip Pullman on 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère' by Edouard Manet, 1882. 

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This painting is full of mystery, ambiguity, doubt. At first sight it seems to do exactly what the title implies, and show a vivid lifelike view of a bar at the popular music hall. There is the marble counter with bottles and a dish of oranges; there is a barmaid behind it waiting to serve us; there is a mirror behind her... but here the mysteries begin. 

Because what's in the mirror cannot be a reflection of what we see in front of it. Things are displaced; the barmaid's reflection is too far off to the right, when we can see that the mirror is parallel with the plane of the picture itself; there is a man in front of her reflection in the mirror, and there isn't one in the "reality" in front of it; there is a whole balcony front missing - and so on. 

Furthermore, there are perplexing passages in the paint itself - patches of light that might be the leg of the counter, or a drift of tobacco smoke, or simply an effect of light on the surface of the mirror. It's full of ambiguity. 

Now at about the same time that Manet was painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, in the early 1880s, an English artist called Frederick Yeames was painting a picture called And When Did You Last See Your Father? It shows a scene from the English Civil War: a young boy from a Royalist family is being interrogated by a Roundhead officer, while his anxious mother and sisters wait behind him, hoping the honest little chap won't betray his father. Yeames was a competent draughtsman, and the scene is effectively composed; the handling of the paint is immaculate; the characterisation of the individuals in the scene is vivid and convincing. 

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But here's a thought-experiment. Let's imagine a full description of that Civil War scene in words. It would be perfectly possible. There are no puzzles about mirrors and reflections and things in the wrong place: everything is easily and immediately readable. 

Then let's imagine we give that description to another artist, of equivalent skill in draughtsmanship and composition and the handling of paint, one whose ability to convey character through facial expression was the equal of Yeames's, and let him or her paint a picture on a canvas of the same size and shape. It would be a different painting, but would it differ substantially in ways that are important to the way the painting works? 

I don't think so. Effectively, functionally, it would be the same picture. What the Yeames did, this would do. What excited admiration for the skill of the artist or arouses compassion or empathy for the people in one picture, would do just the same in the other. 

Now imagine the same process carried out with the Manet. 

But would that be possible at all? Long before we get to the difficulty of painting an equivalent picture by reading a description of this one, we can't even say exactly what's being represented. Then there's the appearance of the painted surface, which is so important a part of our experience of the picture: the way the paint is scumbled in the handling of the flowers in the barmaid's corsage, and in the great chandelier, and in the massing of the spectators on the balcony. 

It's Manet's particular touch, his hand, his brushstrokes, that matter in passages like these. The things that matter about the Yeames can be put into words quite easily: the things that matter about the Manet cannot. 

But I still haven't mentioned the greatest mystery of all, an enigma so profound that even if we managed to describe the rest of the painting in words, we'd still have to throw up our hands in despair at the impossibility of resolving it, and it's this: what does the barmaid's expression mean? 

How on earth would we describe that? It is the most unreadable face I know in any painting. She is far more mysterious than that smirking Florentine we know as the Mona Lisa. 

At the heart of this scene of glittering light and the sensuous richness of a dozen different textures, at the very centre of this world of brilliant surfaces, there is this pretty young face expressing a profound, inexplicable... what is it, sadness? Regret? Unease? Alienation? 

Her face is flushed; it might be simply that she's warm under all those lights; it might be the flush that suffuses the cheeks of a young child kept too long from her bed. She's by no means a child, but for all the corseted fullness of her figure, she does look young; she looks innocent; at the same time, we wouldn't be surprised to learn that the conversation in the mirror between her reflection and the man in the top hat concerns her availability for quite another purpose than pouring glasses of wine and selling oranges. 

But perhaps there's a clue in that. Which is the real girl, this one, or the one in the mirror? Is she two people, one whose character is as shallow as that of the man in the hat, as shallow as everything else in the mirror, only as deep as the glass itself, no more truly there than anything else in that glittering surface, because it's all surface - and the other who is as complex and profound as the expression on her face, a look that defies all description? 

The one in the mirror is not really there, and the one who is really there is not there either. She's somewhere else, thinking of her lover, or her debts, or her parents in the village she comes from, who haven't heard from her for months; or her little sister who has consumption... or thinking of nothing. And of course she can't think really, she's not real at all - she's a painted surface, just like the reflection that isn't a reflection. 

But these reflections on reality (we can't get away from reflections) are right at the heart of Modernism, that astonishing movement in all the arts that was fertilised by Baudelaire, germinated with the Impressionists, and grew throughout the latter part of the 19th century to burst into brilliant and fertile flowering with Picasso and Braque, with Stravinsky, with Joyce. 

That's the real difference between A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and And When Did You Last See Your Father? Yeames and all the other Victorian narrative painters were only interested in half of what there was to be interested about. Manet was interested in all of it. That's why they belonged to the past, and Manet belonged to the future. 

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is about a bar at the Folies-Bergère, it's about the mystery of that ordinary young woman's unfathomable expression, it's about champagne and oranges and tobacco smoke and chandeliers and fashionable dress; but it's also about seeing, and about recording the way the light glistens on those surfaces, and the way things in a mirror are different from things in front of our eyes; it's about the sensation of sight and the mysteries of representation; it's about painting itself. 

This is an extract from What Makes A Masterpiece: Encounters with Great Works of Art, published next month by Thames and Hudson 

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