Twelve Views of Manet's Bar / Edition 1

by Bradford Collins

Overview

Bradford Collins has assembled here a collection of twelve essays that demonstrates, through the interpretation of a single work of art, the abundance and complexity of methodological approaches now available to art historians. Focusing on Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, each contributor applies to it a different methodology, ranging from the more traditional to the newer, including feminism, Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and semiotics. By demonstrating the ways that individual practitioners actually apply the various methodological insights that inform their research, Twelve Views of Manet's "Bar" serves as an excellent introduction to critical methodology as well as a provocative overview for those already familiar with the current discourse of art history. In the process of gaining new insight into Manet's work, and into the discourse of methodology, one discovers that it is not only the individual painting but art history itself that is under investigation. An introduction by Richard Shiff sets the background with a brief history of Manet scholarship and suggestions as to why today's accounts have taken certain distinct directions. The contributors, selected to provide a broad and balanced range of methodological approaches, include: Carol Armstrong, Albert Boime, David Carrier, Kermit Champa, Bradford R. Collins, Michael Paul Driskel, Jack Flam, Tag Gronberg, James D. Herbert, John House, Steven Z. Levine, and Griselda Pollock.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691036915
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/24/1996
Series:	Princeton Series in 19th Century Art, Culture, and Society , #1
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bradford R. Collins is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of South Carolina.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Preface

Introduction: Ascribing to Manet, Declaring the Author

Counter, Mirror, Maid: Some Infra-thin Notes on A Bar at the Folies-Bergere

Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere as an Allegory of Nostaligia

Art History in the Mirror Stage: Interpreting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere

Le Chef d'Oeuvre (bien connu)

The Dialectics of Desire, the Narcissism of Authorship: A Male Interpretation of the Psychological Origins of Manet's Bar

On Manet's Binarism: Virgin and/or Whore at the Folies-Bergere

Looking into the Abyss: The Poetics of Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere

Dumbshows: A Carefully Staged Indifference

Privilege and the Illusion of the Real

In Front of Manet's Bar: Subverting the "Natural"

Manet's Man Meets the Gleam of Her Gaze: A Psychoanalytic Novel

The "View from Elsewhere": Extracts from a Semi-public Correspondence about the Visibility of Desire

A Select Bibliography for Methodological Issues in Art History

Editorial Reviews

"[Twelve Views of Manet's Bar] is a fascinating glimpse into the almost infinite richness of one centrally situated work of visual art, and the evolving methodologies developed by art and cultural historians to account for its complexities of meaning."

Art History