Oiled on canvas: the art of intoxication
Jonathan JONES
Drinking it in ... Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) View
larger picture
Detail from Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882.
Courtesy The Courtauld Gallery Collection
For New Year’s Eve, here are my top five images of drinking in art.
The Dutch master created one of art’s happiest images of alcohol when he
portrayed himself as the Prodigal Son, glass in hand in a tavern. His
wife Saskia poses beside him as a prostitute. Rembrandt cheerfully holds
up a tall beer glass bubbling with golden ale. You can almost taste the
beer; it looks like a good Dutch or German brew, and it glows.
Rembrandt, like other 17th-century Dutch artists, depicts drinking as
an intimate pleasure that anticipates sex. Men and women drink together
in paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, and it looks as if their
conviviality will lead to something more than a hangover. Pieter de
Hooch’s painting A Woman Drinking with Two Men shows a flirtatious
gathering where a woman holds up a wine glass that glistens in the light
from a window – a pearl of pleasure or the false dazzle of corruption
and sin?
The party gets even wilder in another 17th-century painting, this
time by the French artist Poussin. The Triumph of Pan is an eerie image
of mass intoxication. A beautifully painted wine vessel lies empty on
its side while the face of a sculpted Pan is reddened by booze.
Partygoers dance with disturbing abandon – the power of the irrational
has been released.
Revellers abound too in Manet’s 19th-century masterpiece A Bar at the
Folies-Bergère, glimpsed this time as blurred reflections in a mirror
behind the bar. The sombre barmaid, alone in her disengagement from the
top-hatted spectacle of indulgence, is surrounded by bottles of Bass
beer, champagne and cocktail lubricants. Manet pictures modern drinking
in a sophisticated urban context: he neither judges nor celebrates.
Degas is more desolate in his painting of a woman in a cafe
contemplating a glass of absinthe.
- The Guardian |
