Comparing and Contrasting

The two artworks that I have selected to study are Gerhard Richter’s Lesende (Reader) (1994), and Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882). These are clearly starkly different pieces, painted over a hundred years apart from each other, but they do also contain a number of strong similarities.

The most obvious similarity is probably the medium: they are both oil on canvas paintings, a medium that is certainly much less common in contemporary art than it was in the late 19^th century when Manet’s painting was executed. Secondly, there is the subject matter: both are centrally portraits of women. It should also be noted that in Lesende the subject is in profile, rather than in the Bar, where the subject is both face on, and with her back to us in the reflection. The figures represented in each image are also very still in nature, totally unmoving. These aspects create a strong initial visual similarity, but other than this the two differ dramatically.

First I will consider the Manet work. The painting style here is very typical of the impressionist movement of artists. The brush strokes, while less obvious than in some more extreme impressionist works, are still on display. Perspective is also not treated as important; the reflection in the mirror is almost entirely nonsensical. The bottles in the lower left hand corner of the painting and the ones in the reflection seem to be completely different ones, and the reflection of the woman, who is facing us straight on, does not match up. In the reflection she is off to the side of herself, where as her reflection should be directly behind her, based on the composition of the painting. These are not bad points, just to say that physical realism was not the goal of this painting, as was the thinking behind the rebellious impressionists. Indeed, the photograph had been invented nearly half a century earlier; perhaps this is a response to and rejection of the cameras way of seeing things. The painting was executed in a studio, rather than from a photograph, on location, or from memory. The woman was an employee at the bar, and Manet asked her to come to his studio dressed as she would for work, and he painted this scene from this.

Lesende, on the other hand, is an example of a very photorealistic approach to painting, as was Richter’s goal in this and many of his other paintings. The background here is sparse and irrelevant; the sole focus here is the woman in the centre. Richter executes these paintings by taking a photograph and projecting it onto a canvas, from where he paints over it to achieve an exact likeness. Finally, he adds his signature blur, which enhances its photographic qualities. By painting in such a way, he is perhaps as rebellious as the impressionists were for rejecting realism, as now realism is so far from the norm, that it itself has become against the common order of things. Richter was heavily criticized for the paintings of his third wife, Sabine Moritz, but not for this one, and another that both ‘conceal the subject’s identity…with generic titles…and visibly allude to art-historical iconography’.[1]

As to the Manet work, there is a lot of disagreement regarding the descriptions of the painting, and even more on the interpretation.

This barmaid is not necessarily what she may appear to be. The dislocation of her frontal image with her reflected image conveys the tension between what she represents to the ordinary patron of the establishment and how the painter sees her, or how she regards herself.[2]

The mirror creates a lot of issues regarding meaning, with many theories proposed. One is that of duality, an obvious concept when involving mirrors.

Surface         Depth

            Frontality      Obliqueness

            Symmetry     Asymmetry

            Timelessness Time

            Being             Becoming

            Symbol          Narrative

            Authority      Individualism

            Sacred          Profane

            Purity             Concupiscence

            Virgin             Whore[3]

The pairs I am going to focus on are these last two pairs, and symbol and narrative. The glass directly in front of her, containing two roses, is a strong example of symbolism. The white rose represents purity, as does the glass filled with water, and there is a corsage of white roses on the woman’s chest as well. These are all symbols of her virginity and purity. But in the mirror, we cannot see any of these things; instead we can see her talking to a man, and in such a situation, in this particular bar, this can be seen as alluding to a sexual proposition, referring to her possible identity as a prostitute.

In the Richter painting, there is almost a sense of two meanings behind it. The subject is his wife, and he has painted his different wives many times before, but in this painting, her identity as his wife is of no importance. She is simply a woman, reading a newspaper. The fact that she is his wife is of no consequence to the painting, the purpose here was to create a photographic looking painting; the importance is in the technique and visual appearance, rather than any sort of underlying meaning.

While these two paintings have some quite strong similarities at a basic level, both being oil paintings (even at a time when such is very uncommon), both being portraits of women, the differences are far stronger. The more recent work focuses on painting for realism, in a time where this is seen as dated and unimportant, and the older work rejects such notions, as part of a movement that were very against the grain of the time, appreciating a more realistic style to art works. With the Richter the focus is more on the technical aspects of
creation of the painting, rather than any hidden meaning, or the
identity of the subject.  In contrast, Manet’s painting has many subtle
complexities both in relation to the form of representation and the
subject of the painting. These are two very different art works, the product of the many years between them, but both fantastic and beautifully executed pieces, for entirely different reasons.

Bibliography

Stefan Gronert, Gerhard Richter Portraits, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany, 2006

Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002

Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, Thames & Hudson, 2005

Beth Archer Brombert, Rebel in a Frock Coat, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996

Bradcord R. Collins, 12 Views of Manet’s Bar, Princeton University Press, 1996

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[1] Stefan Gronert, Gerhard Richter Portraits, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany, 2006, p. 99

[2] Beth Archer Brombert, Rebel in a Frock Coat, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, p. 441

[3] Michael Paul Driskel, Bradford R. Collins, 12 Views of Manet’s Bar, Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 145

Final Mark:  64%, 2-1