Michel Foucault’s Picture Object: Lighting, Perception, and the Modern Viewer

Michel Foucault is a French historian and philosopher who interestingly uses art, specifically, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet 1882, to demonstrate a foundational shift in the history of representation in the modern image. He asserts that during the 19th century, “Manet reinvents (or perhaps he invents) the picture-object, the picture as a materiality, the picture as something coloured which clarifies an external light and in front of which, or about which, the viewer revolves” (Foucault 31). Foucault’s interest is in the experience of reality and the viewer’s relationship with the physical object of the image. Through the picture-object as Nicolas Bourriaud states “Manet invents the figure of the modern viewer, questioned by a pictorial object which renders him conscious of his presence and of his position within a much larger system” (Bourriaud in Foucault 17). Foucault’s modern representation of the image as picture-object locates the art in space where the conditions of the exhibition, specifically lighting, fundamentally shift our experience of the work. This paper examines Foucault’s theory of the picture-object, with particular attention to how external, contextual lighting produces both the modern image and the modern viewer.