Analysis: A Bar At The Folies-Bergere By Manet

The Following paper will look at the article for response reading three, I will analyze all three layers of the Manet’s piece and use them to discuss the authors view of the piece through my own eyes and interpretation. I will do this by first looking at the authors uses of Duchamps infra-thin approach to examining all three parts of the image. I will also discuss the impact of meaning of the still life parts of the image. Finally I will discuss the mirror’s significance in the image and the barmaid and what she means to the image. In the article Counter Mirror Maid: Some Infra-thin Notes on A Bar at the Folies- Bergere, Carol Armstrong discusses Edouard Manet’s last great work, A Bar at the Folies- Bergere. She uses Duchamp’s infra-thin methodology, which can be described as a type of measurement system that is used differently throughout. With it she describes thin-ness, flatness, and between-ness. The author also uses this measurement system to analyze the piece she also goes on to call the piece a “pictorial construction of space (25.)” This is a direct use of the infra-thin which brings two identical items together and measures how they interact.
To do this she first starts talking about the bottles on the bar and how they are reminiscent of

Creating a painted flatness that almost displays them as unimportant commodities. By this I mean that these items do not have lables and are instead just there to perhaps fill the frame. Coming from a media production perspective that’s what I think about. The mirror may also be a narrative of the times, which gives the consumers of the art an example of Paris nightlife. There are a lot of interpretations that could be true or false, but when I look at the image I think of the mirror as a window that lapses the separation of real life vs. painted