This course, a case study of sorts, is about a single painting, Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), and the multiple, often contradictory ways in which art historians have sought to describe and interpret it. It is course, then, about two complementary practices; which is to say, it is about the complexity of painting as way of reaching out to the world and giving it form – of giving it meaning through form – and the complexity of scholarly research and debate. The goal of the course, in the end, is to acclimate students to the rigors of critical writing, reading, and looking.