Manet and Neoliberalism: The Case of Salman Toor

Deep into its latest comeback, more obsessed than ever by its own history, contemporary painting keeps rediscovering that history in the reworked contents of modernism’s first masterworks. Compositions recur; identities change. In Salman Toor’s The Bar on East 13th (2019), the Folies-Bergère becomes a Manhattan gay bar, Édouard Manet’s barmaid an androgynous barman. Such switching of content has become so prominent a feature of contemporary painting as almost to amount to a new genre. Figurative painters are celebrated as, simultaneously, champions of identity and conservers of tradition. I argue, by contrast, that the new paradigm is fundamentally antitraditional. If Toor and his peers can’t stop coming back to Manet, this is to reaffirm, each time, the inaccessibility of pictorial values such as difficulty, reserve, and autonomy, for which his painting once stood. This is no bad thing; rather, it bespeaks a kind of painting attuned to those forces in contemporary culture—digitization, globalization, and neoliberalism—that have rendered those values illegible.