Art History in the Mirror Stage: Interpreting un Bar aux Folies Bergeres

Abstract

Much can be learnt about the procedures of art historians by a close analysis of one example. My chosen example is T. J. Clark's account of Manet's Un Bar aux Folies Bergeres. Focusing on his analysis, I compare it to interpretations of that picture by Robert Herbert and Richard Wollheim, and to a new account of my own, suggested by Clark's. I am interested in comparing these interpretations of the same artwork because I am concerned with the role played in interpretation by the rhetoric in the texts of art historians, and how those texts may be read both literally and ironically. There are a number of reasons why this example is well worth considering at such length. It raises in a focused way these important general questions about the texts of art historians. Among art historians, Clark has played a significant role in promoting concern with the social history of art. Much traditional art history treated paintings in formalist ways, isolating them from the context in which they were produced, purchased, and displayed. Clark's highly controversial work has recently been one important model for post-formalist art historians. Already his pupils and followers constitute an identifiable group of productive scholars. An older Marxist tradition urged that analysis of the class structure of the society in which paintings were produced could help explain the content and composition of artworks. Clark's different approach involves placing the artwork in the context of critical commentary by contemporaries of the artist. Such commentary displays the values of a culture; reading it to learn what critics see, and fail to see, in a painting is immensely instructive. Learning how the contemporaries of Courbet and Manet responded to their paintings teaches us much about both their individual paintings and the nineteenth-century French culture