Photorealism In Manet's A Bar At The Folies-Bergere

This piece has a woman looking at her reflection in a shattered mirror, the bold text reads, ‘You Are Not Yourself.’ I chose to discuss this piece first because of its relevance to our most recent reading, The Last Time I Wore A Dress, by Daphne Scholinski. It encapsulates the stereotype that society has created for what is considered appropriate and inappropriate for someone to identify as a female. Throughout the book, Daphne struggles with her gender identity, she writes, “It was the doctors who came up with the idea that I was “an inappropriate female” – that my mouthy ways were a sign of deep unease in my female nature and that if I learned tips about eyeliner and foundation, I’d be a lot better off” (Scholinski 6). In our lecture about

Winogrand took photos of everything he saw; he always carried a camera or two, loaded and prepared to go. He sought after to make his photographs more interesting than no matter what he photographed. Contrasting many well-known photographers, he never knew what his photographs would be like he photographed in order to see what the things that interested him looked like as photographs. His photographs resemble snapshots; street scenes, parties, the zoo. A critical artistic difference between Winogrand's work and snapshots has been described this way, the snapshooter thought he knew what the subject was in advance, and for Winogrand, photography was the process of discovering it. If we recall tourist photographic practice, the difference becomes clear: tourists know in advance what photographs of the Kodak Hula Show will look like. In comparison, Winogrand fashioned photographs of subjects that no one had thought of photographing. Again and again his subjects were unconscious of his camera or indifferent to it. Winogrand was a foremost figure in post-war photography, yet his pictures often appear as if they are captured by chance. To him and other photographers in the 1950s, the previous pictures seemed planned, designed, visualized, understood in advance; they were little more than pictures, in actual fact less, because they claimed to be somewhat else the examination of real life. In this sense, the work of Garry Winogrand makes a motivating comparison to Ziller's

Photography was an ideal medium with which to explore the payers of the unconscious mind. Modernist photographers experimented with double exposure and unusual new effects similar to those of visionary Surrealist painters and sculptors. A champion of the technique, Raoul Hausmann, called photomontage “the ‘alienation’ of photography”. By this, he implied that photomontage destroyed the role of photography as a medium of recreating physical reality. But the statement also suggests that by its dependence on fragmentation and dislocation, photomontage offered a visually and conceptually new image of the chaos of an age of war and revolution.

The post-modernist Julie Rrap is a contemporary artist whose focal point rests on the basis of femineity and the way the female identity is represented historically within art. She is a feminist who accuses the ‘male gaze’ of instigating a predatory activity that is accustomed with the norm of society. She relates this norm to existing social structures that are attributed with a patriarchal society, where women were nothing more than sexual objects. All in all this term, the ‘male gaze’ evaluates the predatory voyeurism of society, where the male is the active subject and the female is a passive object of representation.

Marcel Duchamp stated that "It was his achievement to treat the camera as he treated the paintbrush, as a mere instrument at the service of the mind” (Biography.com, 2017). In addition, the photogram might seem expressive and abstract, yet on the contrary, it is the precise medium to document the everyday objects in an unrepeatable and somehow uncontrollable way. The artist cannot predict how the selected objects will be recorded under the light sources that were tampered with. From the first glance, the image completely dissociated from its original subject, allowing one’s memory to fill the gap. Yet below its surface, the image is an accurate documentation that captured a moment of psychical intensity. It revealed a new visual experience, using objects in the simplest way. One can say that the use of this medium disclosed reality more preciously due to its invisibility and mysterious representation (The Museum of Modern Art, 2017).

The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.

The painting “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere” a first modern painting that portrays young woman resting on the marble counter, the girl looks below the blond bangs with distant eyes and serene. Has the neckline adorned with a bouquet of flowers in front of it are bottles of champagne, beer and peppermint schnapps. She is the symbol of his time and the reality of his time reflected on his face. The tones of the picture, cold and creamy, remember rain and inspire melancholy. Through a game of perspective and optics, Manet gets the strange impression that we are also confronted the waitress the picture, as if we were at the Folies-Bergère and we saw that dandy reflecting itself. the result of the distorted logic of the work - is perceived tension.

Groseclose focuses on studying the artwork’s use of lighting and the identity of the subjects, their postures, and facial expressions. Also, she interprets the painting

Two very prominent painters are photographed cut off from the work of art, seemingly stuck in a gray walled room with no artistic fervor anywhere to be seen. The photographs are bleak, but offer a sense of distance from the audience, enough to show these famous individuals as humans. Penn creates beauty through humanity, with or without the help of fashion his portraits convey truly an unhinged reality of fashion and art, unseen by the general public.

Secondly, the medium that Hoch and Rosenquist use witnesses how mass media, industrialization, and mass consumption marched. The photomontage is like a poster or a magazine page while the oil painting is like most large-scale billboard paintings. The Beautiful Girl and The Light That Won’t Fail I are given the feel of an advertisement. In Hoch’s photomontage and Rosenquist ‘soil painting, we see Hoch and Rosenquist were engaging with the new forms of mass media of their time periods. Hoch, as Dadaist, made a great contribution to developing photomontage as medium of representation. Dada artists replaced paint all together, making use exclusively of ready-made

Painting portraits, portraits of women, youth and loved ones became more popular than scenery. Here, women are no longer mythological creatures and have stepped out into everyday life, although there is still an air of idealism around them. (Fig. 2)is a work of this period with an emphasis on the female element.

The fact that the barmaids facial expressions don’t seem to match up with the body language portrayed in the reflection has to make you wonder what the true meaning, or if there is even a true meaning to this piece, or if Manet’s main purpose was to get the viewer to think and ponder about life, society, morals and take it all in on a personal level. Art is meant to inspire and to showcase your personality and individuality, but it’s also meant to provoke thought and change.

Anne Hollander discusses how some painters render a woman wearing an elegant dress as if the dress is part of the woman. In contrast to images from previous chapters in which women are depicted as posing in their gowns as they look directly at the viewer, Hollander presents several images showing a woman whose gaze is directed elsewhere. She explains that if the depicted woman meets the viewers gaze that she calls attention to herself and her clothing, thus the clothing is modeled and posed in which implies seduction towards the male. In contrast, the common traits of the discussed paintings includes facial imagery that is obscured or shadowed, a sense of the woman being alone with her own thoughts, and an unawareness of the gown that the figure

Photorealism is a genre of art that creates photographic images which blend the real and the unreal. Édouard Manet’s painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, utilizes photorealism to depict the scene of a young barmaid standing behind a bar table in a lively cabaret music hall, facing the viewer with an exhausted, serious expression and awaiting her patron's order. The painting plays with our sense of reality by including a mirror that shows a strange man and the oblique-angled reflections of the barmaid and liquor bottles. Likewise, in Picture for Women, Jeff Wall emulates the arrangement of Manet’s painting and also positions the light bulbs and ceiling pipes to create linear perspective. This photograph is composed entirely of the mirror reflection of a studio and is split into three sections; on the left is a woman who stares at the viewer fiercely,

Van Gogh stares at guests with such solemn eyes that seem to be all colors at once. Claude Monet takes you to the French country side that are covered in swaying pastures of yellow wildflowers and haystacks. The relaxed posed of Renoir’s nude female models shows the realistic ideas the impressionism artists had for the future of art. They painted the true colors of the world around them and present them to us as we pass through the hallways. There is a muffled quietness in the exhibit as everyone observes the sound the paintings reflect as though trying to here the gentle breeze in Monet’s painting of water lilies. Everyone gathers to gaze at George Seurat’s meticulous work that covers an expansive wall which barely contains the impressive effort. Cameras flash trying to capture the unique and awe-inspiring talent and dedication that made Seurat famous but none are able. No one can truly capture the detail and dedication that all artists put into their work through photos, you have to stand right in front of it to come