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

When I pass out, . . . I fill my pouchs with them and give them to the local children who tend hitherward begging. They'd probably prefer standard of value but I prefer to give them a share in something I be delighted with The pleasures of this world! Well, they're made of things that mean little to a certain number of people but a lot to others" (ibid., 187 citing A. Proust [1879])

67 F B de Mercey "L'Exposition Universelle de 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 pierces into the crowd as notwithstanding that it were an immense reservoir of electrical strength Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the horde itself. - Charles Baudelaire, 1863(1)

Denise began to have feeling as if she were watching a machine working at replete pressure, ... they were no longer devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat windows she had seen in the early morning; they strike one as beinged to be warm and vibrating from activity within. There was a herd before them, groups of women pushing and squeezing, devouring the finery with longing, covetous organ of visions - 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 diocese in the mirror is propositioning the young woman at the calculator If he is not soliciting her "sexual favors" outright, it is generally assumed that her material part is for sale.(3) Seduction and selling are indeed at the center of this painting, allowing their object is not just the fashionable woman at the calculator That the barmaid is a salesgirl and the situation at hand primarily a sales transaction of the beneficials on the counter has not played more than a marginal character in previous discussions of the painting.

While the woman, the man, and smooth the mirror itself have been given center stage in interpretations of A Bar at the Folies-Bergere for profitable reason,(4) the prominent display of usefuls in front and the packed throng of spectators in the back have barely been addressed. No doubt, they were considered peripheral to the main scenario. on the contrary if this were the case, for what cause [i]or[/i] reason is the display on the calculator so provocatively positioned to beckon us as if from the doorsill of the painting? And on what account is the radically miniaturized condensed crowd in the far back taking up of that kind a large portion of the canvas? The advantageouss on the counter and the concourse are the primary clues for my interpretation. This essay aims to revisit modernity through reviewing A Bar at the Folies-Bergere in light of historically specific discourses of mass consumption, the changing characters of women, and the disclosure of the modern crowd/public.

To understand Manet's painting and modernity we must reach forth 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 alone was art for sale in exhibits, a fact which in the organ of sights of many reduced it to the horizontal of bazaar goods, but art present to views in world exhibitions also existed in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of displays of industrial beneficials and the advertising of department stores and other prominent commercial enterprises. greatest in quantity important, both department stores and fresh artists positioned themselves in a tillage of display and commodities, soliciting the organ of sights of consuming spectators who were part of a mass public.(7)

Though scholars may differ upon when exactly the age of mass consumption began in Paris, hardly any would dispute that it was well below way by 1882.(8) This date marked an important jiffy in the evolution of literary and artistic discourses about fresh consumer society for Parisian audiences. It was the year in which Emile Zola's novel Au Bonheur de dames first appeared, in serial form,(9) and in which Edouard Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere was exhibited in the Salon. Zola's realist inquiry of the Parisian department store features Denise Baudu, a young woman from the provinces who finds occupation in Au Bonheur des Dames, where she gradually rises from low shop girl to top-level manager and eventually becomes co-proprietor as the wife of the holder Octave Mouret.(10) Though the usefuls sold by Manet's woman at the bar differ from the clothing sold by the agency of Zola's Denise Baudu, both works portray present salesgirls. Denise serves customers at reckoners overflowing with clothes in ne of being enclosureed at the end of hosted promotional sales, while in Manet's painting, the fashionably make straighted marchande stands behind a reckoner with a glittery display of bottle containing alcoholic beverages.

Counter filled with fruitss with salesmen or saleswomen standing behind them and single or more consumers in brow were often depicted in magazines quite through the second half of the nineteenth century; examples are Nadar's 1853 illustration [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] with a caption reading, "From sum of two units to five she visits the stores for drapery and fancy profitables fashions, and lace," and Emile Bayard's view of the glove reckoner at the bon marche [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. As Novelene Ros has demonstrated, an iconography of the dame de comptoir receiving orders or payment in cafes, bars, or restaurants was well established by means of the time Manet painted A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.(11) It is important to recognize, however, that the dame de comptoir in cafes and restaurants was part of a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of broader discourse of mass consumption in which the reckoner transaction was central.