Prostitution was widespread in 19th-century Paris, and as French streets filled with prostitutes, French art and literature of the period paralleled this development. In this book, Hollis Clayson explains why she provides the first description and analysis of French artistic interest in women prostitutes, examining how the subject was treated in the art of the 1870s and 1880s by such avant-garde painters as Cezanne, Degas, Manet, and Renoir as well as by academic and low-brow painters who were their contemporaries. Clayson, illuminates not only the imagery of prostitution - with its contradictory connations of disgust and fascination, but also issues and problems relevant to women and men in patriarchal society. She discusses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and mores. She describes the system that evolved of regulating prostitutes and the subsequent rise of clandestine prostitutes who escaped police regulation and who were condemned both for blurring social boundaries and for spreading sexual licentiousness in their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it embodied key notions of modernity - it exemplified the commercialization and the ambiguity of modern life.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
As prostitution escalated in 19th-century Paris, it likewise appeared more frequently as a subject in French literature and art. Clayson (art history, Northwestern) reasons that there is a "connection between, on the one hand, covert prostitution as subject matter and, on the other, evasiveness as narrational strategy among artists who operated within Impressionist circles during the 1870s and 1880s." Her unique, often complex, study analyzes the male artists' "contradictory dialectic of disgust and fascination" toward their female subjects. Clayson claims that their "ambiguous depictions served to reinforce" lowly female stereotypes. Amusing caricatures, extensive documentation, and good reproductions of Cezanne's Olympia series, Degas's monotypes of brothel scenes, and Manet's Nana support Clayson's feminist perceptions, adding new meaning to rather familiar artworks. Recommended for large art history and women's study collections.
-Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terrific Insight,
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This review is from: Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (Texts & Documents) (Paperback)
I always wondered why everyone was always so certain that "Olympia" was a prostitute. Now I know! This is a great book about an Era in France with some deep, dark secrets.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The thinking is top notch,
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This review is from: Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (Texts & Documents) (Paperback)
We do not have a very moral society at the moment, but the way an art critic can pick a theme that allows a tremendous amount of humor and social commentary to carry a reader through times that might make our future much more diverse if we can ever get our minds off the kind of economic crash that is our character as well as our fate at this late date astounds me.
2 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
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Highly Scholarly,
This review is from: Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era (Hardcover)
I might not have purchased this book if it hadn't been included in a selection of bargain books from Yale University Press. The Acknowledgments on p. xv includes a comment on "My dissertation research in Paris." My use of the term "modern" in my reviews conforms to the sense which I observe on page 79 of this book. A cartoon at the top of the page, called "M. Manet studying beautiful nature," dated April 25, 1880, is followed by an explanation which "connects the extremity of exposed breasts to vulgarity and ugliness . . . by mocking any connection between this toilette and decorous feminine beauty." The painting which is then discussed, Henri Gervex's "Rolla," was abruptly removed from the Salon of 1878 for impropriety, but was exhibited by a private dealer for three months. Consideration of that painting in this book begins with "Another instance of a painting that displays female sexuality as something of a threat, and that locates this threat specifically in the realm of modern fashion." (p. 79) The painting was based on a poem by Alfred de Musset about a son of the bourgeoisie who squandered his fortune and committed suicide at the age of nineteen. The details of the painting are discussed to such an extent that minor elements of the picture become a great danger. "Indeed the lack of restraint that Gervex showed in placing the cain in the still life points to the vulnerability of the genre of the nude, to the ways in which the nude was almost always a strained synthesis of opposing forces, perpetually in danger of slipping out of equilibrium as a consequence of even the smallest push in the direction of deviance." (p.88) The discussion of that painting concludes with "Rolla drowned in the rising tide of sexual vice. The woman was the culprit, and Rolla her victim." (p. 93) Chapter Four's topic is "Suspicious Professions" and features pictures of working women, the intrigue being tied closely to the question, what makes them so cute?
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