Customer Reviews

Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era

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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.

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.

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?