
Jeff Wall, Picture For Women, 1979
The artist’s comments on this piece via MoMA:
Pictures for Women is a “remake” of Manet’s picture. The Bar at the Folies-Bergere 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 spectacularity, that regime of distraction and entertainment which Manet dealt with.