A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Judged on the configuration. The barmaid cannot go: she is the one thing not seen in glass, the only face that meets ours. The counter cannot go: it is the line of trade between her and the viewer, and the still life on it is the goods she stands among, at her height and in her colours. The mirror cannot go, and neither can its displacement: without the reflected back and the man in the hat the picture is a portrait of a girl at a bar. The trapeze artist’s feet carry the show no one is watching. What yields is at the margin: the balcony crowd could be thinner, the chandeliers fewer, and the bottles at the right edge are a second count of those at the left. The scale is compelled: near life size across a counter, at the distance of a customer.

Score: 8.8 / 10

What is disclosed can be stated, and it holds. A person whose work is to be looked at, in a place of pleasure built for buying, is offered with the goods: she is placed among the bottles, her bodice and the flowers at her breast in the same register as the champagne foil, and the counter between her and the customer is the counter between her and the viewer. Second, the public face and the transaction are two pictures that do not agree, and both are true: in front she is withdrawn and unaddressed, in the glass she leans toward a man. Third, modern pleasure is a crowd watching nothing, the spectacle reduced to two feet in a corner. Held below the top because the withdrawn face gives a state as much as a meaning, and the reading of the man as a client is invited by the picture rather than compelled.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Elevation is present in one register, cool and glittering, and it is not the picture’s business. Its places: the chandeliers and the white globes of light dissolving in the mirror; the crowd in the balcony, a haze of rapid touches from which gloves and opera glasses surface; and the still life at the left, where foil, glass and the orange of the fruit stand at the height of the medium as beauty. The girl’s face, still and unreadable against all that light, is the one place where something like gravity rises. There is no grandeur of scale, no terror and no transport. The height is beauty held deliberately at arm’s length, the temper is melancholy, and the picture keeps one temperature in one instant. Beauty is high; elevation in the axis’s full sense is moderate.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Evoked more than built. The patterns are there: the double, the self and its reflection that do not coincide; the woman offered as merchandise, Venus at the counter, with flowers at her breast and fruit before her; the vanitas of glass and bottled pleasure before a figure who will not smile. The structure of the double is load-bearing, since the composition is built on the split between the girl and her image. But its weight is carried by the mirror as an apparatus of modern life, not by a myth the picture constructs, and the readings of Venus and vanitas are brought to it as much as found in it. The particular stays particular to the last label. What holds the axis here is that the deep is summoned by structure and atmosphere and is not made the picture’s spine, as the sovereign’s absence is the spine of Las Meninas.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is two. One is the mirror picture of the old masters, Van Eyck and Velázquez, where the glass shows truly what stands before it. The other is the café and café-concert scene of Manet’s own circle, Degas, Renoir and his own earlier café pictures, a genre of small size and anecdote. The departure: a café-concert subject at near life size, sent to the Salon; a mirror that tells a different story from the room, so that optics are given up for a second truth; the main figure facing out with no anecdote, the scene happening only in reflection. The stake was a Salon public and a painter who was ill, newly decorated, with standing to lose and little time. Held below the top because Manet had made the frontal, withholding figure his wager twenty years before, and the risk here was smaller than the risk then.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The knowledge is that she is in two places at once, as a person and as a service, and that we stand where the client stands. That knowledge is the mirror’s discrepancy: correct the optics and the man must stand where the viewer stands, and the viewer becomes the client; leave them incorrect and the viewer is both in his place and not. A photograph, a narrative, a correct perspective or a cabinet size would each lose it. The near life size and the counter at the bottom edge are what place the viewer at the bar, and the still life is form too, since she is painted with the same touch as the bottles. Held below the top for the right side of the reflection, where the man and her back are drawn more summarily than the front and read in places as a diagram of the idea rather than its painting.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Evidence over promise: 144 years, and the questions have stayed open. Whether the mirror is an error, a convention or the picture’s argument, and whether any viewpoint exists from which it is consistent. Who the man is, and whether he is the viewer. Whether the barmaid is for sale, and what her face says: boredom, fatigue, refusal, dignity. Whether this is a picture of modernity’s spectacle, the reading made central by T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life in 1984, or of class and labour, of a dying painter’s leave-taking of Paris, or of painting itself. These are questions of meaning, and none of them has been closed. Held below the top because the debate returns again and again to one apparatus, the mirror, and the still life gives little on return.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Published and shown, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas reorganised what a mirror in a picture can do, from a device of completion to a device of contradiction, and it set modern commercial leisure and the person who serves it at the scale of history painting. The reach is real and narrower than the force. The move to the modern subject and frontal address belongs to Manet’s work of the 1860s, and the redirection of painting in the 1880s and after runs through Cézanne, Seurat and those who followed them more than through this canvas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the double space of the mirror runs on into later picture-making about the viewer’s position; Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women of 1979 answers it directly; and through T. J. Clark it stands as a founding text of the social history of art.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole, the girl, the counter, the still life and the mirror all legible. Presence: in public view in London for most of the last century, and among the most reproduced paintings of its century, which earns a little and proves nothing by itself. The span is 144 years. The surface is fixed to its moment in every particular, the Bass label, the bustle, the globes of light, the café-concert, and none of it stands between the picture and a viewer who knows nothing of 1882: a person at work being looked at across a counter is not dated. It has outlived the Salon it was sent to, the hall it shows in its first form, and its painter. What holds it below the top is the span, the shorter test in its band, and that no catastrophe has been survived.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged as command of oil on a canvas about a metre high. The making is load-bearing where it counts. The still life at the left is among the summits of the medium: foil, the glass of the bottles, the orange of the fruit and the flowers in their glass, each a few loaded strokes that resolve at a step’s distance. The barmaid’s bodice, black against pale flesh; the face, flat, lit from the front and still. The crowd above in rapid notation, gloves, hats, opera glasses and faces, holding as a crowd in the reflected haze. The light of the globes doubled in glass, flat and white, with no single dominant source. The costs are charged here: the reflected man and her reflected back are summary, the drawing of the right side reads as an afterthought, and the space of the counter in the glass is unstable beyond what the argument needs.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the still life on the counter at the bottom, rendered closely, and the crowd in the far balcony at the top, a haze. They obey one law: everything is seen frontally, flattened toward the plane, in one white light, by a touch that slows as things come near and quickens as they recede. The girl is painted in the law of the bottles. The mirror is the one place where the law appears to break, and it is the law: the glass obeys the picture’s logic, not optics. What resists is that the reflected right side is painted in another and thinner key, and that the trapeze feet are a joke in a grave picture, which the law nearly but not quite absorbs. The range is moderate: a counter, a girl, a crowd and a show, wider than a still life and narrower than a court.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The orders held: labour, in a woman at work; commerce, in the goods and the counter; class, in the man in the hat and the girl who serves him; sexuality and its sale, implied; the crowd and the city’s leisure; spectacle, in the trapeze; and consciousness, in a face that withholds what it thinks. The counter and the glass integrate them, binding each to the transaction across the bar. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, nature (the oranges and the flowers are goods), the family, the state and history are not in it. It holds more than a pond or a night sky, since a society is present, and less than a court, since that society is a bar. The figure describes the form.

Score: 7.6 / 10