Picture for Women (1979), Jeff Wall

Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Manet.

Picture for Women is a “remake” of Manet’s picture. The Bar had really impressed me; I’d seen it repeatedly in the Courtauld Gallery in London when I was a student. I wanted to comment on it, to analyze it in a new picture, to try to draw out of it its inner structure, that famous positioning of figures, male and female, in an everyday working situation which was also a situation of specularity, that regime of distraction and entertainment which Manet dealt with. I made my picture as a theoretical diagram in an empty classroom. Maybe for Manet this spectacular regime was something immediate, but at the time I made Picture for Women these things had become openly theoretical, political issues, mainly through the influence of the women’s movement in the art world. There were lessons being learned throughout the period, so maybe the classroom setting has something to do with this. I think that, at that time, it was not so unusual to be bringing together a king of theoretical activity—study, if you like—with the enjoyment of pictures.


sim, daqui.