'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère' by Édouard Manet :The Courtauld Gallery

   A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (French: Un bar aux Folies Bergère), painted and exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1882, was the last major work by French painter Édouard Manet. It depicts a scene in the Folies Bergère nightclub in Paris.

   Suzon, according to the recollections of Manet's friends:  a young woman who worked at the Folies-Bergère, one of the great Parisian cafés-concerts , a kind of beer hall with music, circus acts and other entertainment. Suzon stands alone in a crowded room. The look on her face is detached, melancholy, distracted from her job serving at the bar in the vast crowded room reflected in the glass behind her. There is a locket around her neck that is a token of another life, a love a long way from this job. The only solid realities are the marble bar top and the bottles; crème de menthe, champagne, beer, a bowl of oranges, two flowers delicately placed in a vase. She has both hands firmly on the bar as if she needs to touch something solid, in case she should be carried away by the vortex of light and shapes reflected in the mirror.

This is NOT a realistic painting of the Folies-Bergère. Suzon did work there, but she posed for the painting in Manet's studio, behind a table laden with bottles. There is no attempt to make the image cohere: there is, as contemporary critics pointed out, an inconsistency to the relationship between the reflections in the mirror and the real things. The man in the top hat approaching Suzon in a sinister way in the top right hand corner of the mirror would in reality have to be standing with his back to us in front of the bar and Suzon herself should be reflected in an entirely different place.  Manet conveys Suzon's estrangement from her world by the fact that she is the only person in this painting who is not reflected in glass. Everyone else in the painting is seen in the big bar mirror: the quickly painted, harshly reflected faces and bodies, a woman in gloves with her lover or client, someone else looking at the scene with binoculars. They are objects she is looking at but at one remove, through a glass darkly.

( A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is a modern version of Velazquez's Las Meninas (1656-7), the most profound meditation on the portrait. In Las Meninas, ostensibly a picture of the royal Infanta and her retinue of children, pets and dwarf, Velazquez includes the king and queen reflected in a mirror at the back of this palace apartment. He himself stands painting them on a vast canvas looking at us, and we are the royal eye, looking back at the world that exists for our regal gaze. Manet worshipped Velazquez, and transferred this aesthetic of reflection to modern times, to create a world that only exists in mirrors; this turns the viewer into a spectral, disturbing presence, part of the crowd that Suzon looks at with such disillusion. The 20th-century painter whose portraits owe most to Manet was the flatly ironic Andy Warhol.)

JERWOOD SPACE GALLERY

  Even this gallery was the smallest gallery that we went ever; it was the most creative one from young artists. The work in there has been produced with the easiest and elementary materials. However, the all works are in detailed and bitter which have been taken the long time to put it together. From my opinion they are the hardest and skillful ones even if they have produced with easy materials. In some case, I needed to stare at a work that I did not understand by the first look. Because it felt nothing near art for me but for them it is beyond the art space. So they wanted to open our second mind to see the meaning the message of art and not to see or imagine only from our point of view.

     I liked the technique Arthur Robert used in his work called ‘Summer’. I love shading and he showed this technique with pencil on wood. It gave the piece great texture and a smooth surface. I also liked the geometric forms he used. A square is the shape of the final piece and a great composition of triangles. The triangle is the simpliest and known geometric form, pattern which can construct by connecting three not equal points using the minimum amount of lines to create this view. And lastly he adorns this with the shading it, gives me the breeze of summer.

TATE: TACITA DEAN : TURBINE HALL

     Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, Kent. She considered as one of ‘Young British Artists’. Tacita Dean’s film is the first work in The Unilever Series that is devoted to the moving image. And the twelfth commission in The Unilever Series at Tate Modern in London has been realized by the Berlin. The work ‘Entitled Film’ is 11minutes silent, 35mm looped film projected onto monolith standing 13 meters tall at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall. I think the presented location of the film is on the advantage that the walk from the empty entrance down the ramp, builds up the viewer’s expectation of finding something extraordinary in the darkness behind the staircase. In that case, though the art work had better be extraordinary and looks very special.  The work Entitled Film deals with the typical nature of the analogue film in contrast to the digital image. By flipping the traditional horizontal format of the cinema screen into a vertical position she moves its size and shape with the insistent vertical girders along the north and south walls. As the film begins we realize we are looking at a strip of celluloid, complete with sprockets on either side to attach it to the projector.

     The thing I liked the most about her work was the way she used the screen as her 'canvas’. She creates a swiftly moving collage of cinematic techniques and possibilities, such as; cuts, fades, superimpositions, and bursts of colour alternating with black and white still photographs and archival footage. Dean keeps emphasising the verticality of the screen by showing balloons and bubbles floating downward, an escalator moving upwards, and streams and fountains running from the top of the screen to the bottom. And I also liked the little triangle which keep changes the colour and the object when every time it moved. As you watch transfixed, details lifted from paintings by Magritte and Mondrian appear and disappear, while Eliasson’s mirrored sun flashes by, as does the famous mountain that is the logo of Paramount pictures. These kinds of techniques made my interest to keep up on film and not just mine but it’s grabbing the viewer’s attention and holding it long enough to make us want to return to see it all over again.

Drawing From Nature

The Saatchi Gallery - The Shape Of Things To Come:

  The Saatchi gallery is one of a London gallery which represents the contemporary and modern art. Charles Saatchi who is known worldwide as an art collector and owner of the Saatchi Gallery- which opened the gallery in 1985 in order  to show his collection of art to the public. The Saatchi Gallery is 70,000sq ft. Duke of York HQ building on King's Road, in Chelsea with an exhibition dedicated to new art from China.

   I want to make a point of artists shown at the gallery because I realized that many artists are unknown, not only to the general public but also to the commercial art world. However we can take this as an advantage for them such as starting a launch careers.

Artist: Björn Dahlem  - The Milky Way, 2007           

Materials: Wood, Neon lamp, Bottle of milk

  In my opinion art is an invisible line which creates a different connection of knowledge, imagination, senses, creativity and many more between people. The reason of the revolution of different art movements that keep changing is might be the difference of invisible environment we all live in.  

  The Saatchi gallery was one of the experiences which I felt the live energy and senses while I was analyzing the every design. Every sculpture had a small history, meanings for it. I also realized that you can make a design from every little thing. David Batchelor, an artist is one of the best examples for this. Now I’m so sure that the strongest and clear examples of art movements take place in this gallery.  

  The work that I found the most interesting and attractive is called ‘The Milky Way’ by Björn Dahlem. His creations are based on fragility rather than stability; defining condition of human knowledge. His room-sized sculpture is one of them, which represent abstract concept of space and matter. He only used low-tech wood and light crowded mean to universal theories, philosophy and re-imagining the ways the universe is understood, seem in startlingly simplified terms. For me it is nothing that breaks the boundaries and pushes sculpture to the next level.

  ‘Modernism is about light’ (Mcluhan) to me the light represents the futurism and modernism too. The technique of secret is in brightness of the light. It made me to trust and feel the senses of infinity, freedom, happiness, beauty and calm altogether. Leave the end of connecting the imagination open. In brief connects you with beautiful space and invisible environment. The message is clear and dashed line. .  In his most sculptures, wood is paired with light, a symbol of the immaterial and of enlightenment.

  “Wood allows me very immediate access to my ideas, because what I’m trying to do is to stay as close to the idea and the immaterial image of the imagination.”B. Dahlem …

* Björn Dahlem was born in 1974 in Munich, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin.