Bar At The Folies-Bergere Poem by gershon hepner

The bar that Manet painted at Folies-Bergère
portrays a working woman who is un-
exceptionable. She seems to have no special flair,
and does not concentrate on having fun
like all her customers. They, too, are isolated
from one another, no one eye to eye
with one another, just like men who’ve been fellated
by strange whores whom they can’t identify.
The scene’s reflected in a mirror with a frame
that hems the barmaid in a narrow space;
there’s little room to breathe, but lots to feel the shame
that comes when we cannot be face to face
with people in a crowd, but see them from an angle,
as Manet did the barmaid and the man
who wore a top hat and did not entangle
himself with others he surveyed deadpan.

The Courtauld Institute has loaned the Getty Museum it’s Manet masterpiece, “Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882) , in a one-painting exhibition review in the LA Times on June 15 by David Pagel (“He holds a mirror up to a weary world”) :

If you’ve ever had a job that sucked the life right out of you, you know what it’s like to be the young woman in Édouard Manet’s 1882 painting “Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” Boredom would be a relief from the despondency her expression makes palpable. Manet’s barmaid, whose pasty face is currently on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is sufficiently numb to be blasé about the indulgences around her: succulent oranges, fresh-cut flowers, expensive drinks and crystal chandeliers. But she is not numb enough to be unaware of her wretched unhappiness…A brochure available at the Getty summarizes a study by art historian Malcolm Park, who argued that everything in the painting makes visual sense when you realize that Manet painted it from an angle far to the barmaid’s left––as if staring at her out of the corner of his eye. In the painting, it looks as though the customer and barmaid are entangled in face-to-face conversation. Park’s diagram reveals that to be an illusion: in Manet’s setup, and in the world it mimicked, no one was eye to eye with anyone else. Each was isolated, lost in his or her thoughts…The profound disconnect he painted 125 years ago is still part of modern life, despite its increasingly spectacular distractions.

6/15/07