Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution in France, 1850-1910

Musée d'Orsay
Ends January 17th 2016

Published at Hyperallergic as
How Artists Portrayed Prostitution in 19th-Century Paris
http://hyperallergic.com/264313/how-artists-portrayed-prostitution-in-19th-century-paris/

François-Rupert Carabin “Groupe de quatre femmes nues” (entre 1895 et 1910) Épreuve sur papier
albuminé, 17,3 x 12 cm Paris, Musée d’Orsay © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Alexis Brandt

Perhaps out of permissive libertine spirit, prostitution (both chic demi-mondaine and lascivious pierreuse
street-walker style) played a central role in the nascent development of modern painting. Far from being
confined to private wanton boudoirs or lewd dedicated red-light areas, prostitutes inhabited the public space
of Paris throughout the nineteenth century, and were widely accepted as a sordid but nesseccery vice. This
is not to suggest that I am not sharply aware of the uncritical acceptance of sexual stereotypes and
scopophilia power relations at work deep at the heart of prostitution, where mere nominalist positions are
most often taken for granted. Yet it is true that glamorous, if syphilitic, brothels - and the dandy male
gamesters who went there - fascinated many generations of painters and photographers.

The Splendours and Miseries red-plush aesthetic is sociological and historical in emphasis. With more than
400 works of art and ephemera in various mediums placed hither and thither, it is the first vast public
exhibition devoted to exploring uncouth prostitution as a theme. Its dynamic cluster, containing early hard-
core porno photos (including a set of non-heteronormative images of male sex partners) and movies shown
in sealed-off age-restricted rooms, Fauteuil d'amour which was the Prince de Galle's 1890 Neo-Rococo
threesome-facilitating sex chair, police reports, and brothel calling cards, along with paintings by Edvard
Munch, Frantisek Kupka, Georges Rouault, Auguste Chabaud, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Kees Van
Dongen, copiously demonstrates how voyeuristic artists in Paris between the Second Empire and the Belle
Époque sympathetically took to this non-sentimental sexual subject matter with a-moralistic ease.

Though erratic and elusive, prostitution was fairly rampant in Parisian society and in the wake of Charles
Baudelaire (who famously proclaimed: “What is art? Prostitution.”) many artists saw it as the modern
subject par excellence. It might even have appeared luxurious and opulent to them, because it often was.

Édouard Manet “Olympia” (1863) oil on canvas, 130 x 190 cm Paris, Musée d’Orsay © Musée d'Orsay,
Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
 Installation view © Musée d’Orsay, photo by Sophie Boegly

I would have opened the show with only a famous intimidating stare: that of Édouard Manet’s
magnificently scandalous “Olympia” (1863). Rather, she is placed near the end of the exhibition mixed in
with other pieces of various quality. But she still held my rapt attention. If placed alone, smack dab at the
entrance, her examining, scrutinizing gaze could have driven the show to an immediate aesthetic high, one
that would have contradicted the dominant and obvious clichés at work here: clichés that continually place
prostitution within the fairly regimented grooves of masturbatory male heterosexual power over women. A
good example of this exercise in supremacy is Jean-Louis Forain’s soft-porn “Le Client” (1878) where a
frumpish and frogish man in top hat and tails ogles and selects from five mostly naked women in a red-
walled brothel.
Jean-Louis Forain, “Le Client” (1878) pencil, watercolor and gouache, 9 3/4 x 12 3/4 in. (image from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Forain)
 Giovanni Boldini’s “Scène de fête au Moulin Rouge” (vers 1889) oil on canvas, 96,5 x 104,4 cm Paris,
musée d’Orsay © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Giovanni Boldini’s “Scène de fête au Moulin Rouge” (vers 1889) situates multiple male clients in a
Montmartre mad carnival setting of frenzied intensity; full of delirious exploration (for the clients), full of
juicy mind-game mingling for the females. Painted in a loose yet precise style, form and content come
together in this rectangle so as to create a sizzling mood at once celebratory, farcical, satirical and almost
aching.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s interpretation of exciting érotique promise, pleasure and transgression also
tumbled out of the clubs and brothels into the cafés and brasseries where Manet (with his stunning black-
and-white, “Masked Ball at the Opéra” (1875)), multiple Edgar Degas works, and some previously unseen
minor Vincent Van Gogh paintings picked up on it, bluring the boundaries of prostitution by using cocottes
(courtesans, actresses, singers, or dancers financially supported by rich protectors). Jean Béraud’s haunting
lady-in-waiting “L’Attente” (1880) is a very good painting - and a very good example of this suspended
ambiguity of identity.

A scandalous shell bed of the famous courtisane la Marquise de la Païva (Esther Lachmann) offers a
curious cultural decorative object to meditate on. Coming from the extreme poverty of the Moscow Jewish
ghetto, Lachmann, who devastated many a man's fortune during the Second Empire, was one of the sources
of inspiration for Émile Zola's novel Nana, the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart
series. La Païva's mansion at 25, Avenue des Champs-Élysées, famed for its ostentatious decoration, was
the model for entire Les Rougon-Macquart. La Païva's mansion was scandalously known for the silver
bathtub that had three taps, with one for champagne.

Having grown up in Chicago, it was a delight to find an old instructive friend from The Art Institute in this
erotic carnival setting; Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Au Moulin Rouge” (1895) holding its own in this osé situation.
In the sketchy but masterful Toulouse-Lautrec paintings “L’Inspection médicale: femme de maison blonde”
(1894) and “Femme tirant son bas” (1894), a weird, isolated sadness prevails. This poignant theme was first
picked up by Degas in his dour “L’Absinthe” (1876) and in Manet’s “La Prune” (1878). Pablo Picasso, in
his blue melancholy painting “Femme Assise au Fichu” (1903), perfectly refines the heartbreaking theme
with his moody color choice. Donald Lowe really hit this dehumanizing male nail on the head in his book
History of Bourgeois Perception where he identified the male bourgeois perceptual gaze as a visual mode
fundamentally nonreflexive and objectifying. What is suggested in the champagne-free sadness of the blue
Picasso is a loss of psychological contentment of the sex worker to the extent of which descriptions of the
scientist and the doctor cannot do suitable justice.
Jean Béraud’s “L’Attente” (1880) oil on canvas, 56 x 39,5 cm, musée d’Orsay © RMN-Grand Palais
(Musée d’Orsay) / Franck Raux (1889)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec “Femme tirant son bas” (1894) oil on canvas, 58 x 46 cm Paris, musée d’Orsay
© RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec “L’Inspection médicale: femme de maison blonde” (1894) oil on cardboard,
68,5 x 47,5 cm Paris, musée d’Orsay © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
 Pablo Picasso “Femme Assise au Fichu” (1903) oil on canvas, 100 x 69.2 cm (image from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasso%27s_Blue_Period)

Indeed, a happy hooker is a rare sight here, but there is at least one crazed one; Gustav Adolf Mossa’s
rather grotesque symbolist/decadent “Elle” (1905). The painting depicts a young curvaceous naked woman
perched on a huge pile of suffering tiny naked men. A kitty cat defines her pubic area. Such dark allegorical
imagination, matched only with that of Félicien Rops, is just the caushionary note to end this splendid but
miserable show.
 Gustav-Adolf Mossa “Elle” (1905) Musée des Beaux Arts

Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution in France, 1850-1910 is next on view at Amsterdam’s
Van Gogh Museum, which co-organized the show, February 19–June 19, 2016

Joseph Nechvatal