Splendor and Misery: Images of Prostitution

Art & Design NYT
‘Splendor and Misery: Images of Prostitution,’ Captures a Profession in Paris Through Artists’ Eyes

By ELAINE SCIOLINO SEPT. 21, 2015
Photo of Léopold Reutlinger’s “La Belle Otéro” from an album of photographs. Credit Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris


PARIS — A skirt lifted above her ankle. A beauty mark painted on her cheek. A direct gaze. Sitting alone over a drink in a cafe.

These were some of the clues that a woman in 19th-century Paris might not be a person of standing but just might be a streetwalker.

Ambiguity about prostitutes in the public space is a central theme of “Splendor and Misery: Images of Prostitution 1850-1910,” which opens on Tuesday and runs through Jan. 17 at the Musée d’Orsay here. Taking its title from Honoré de Balzac’s mid-19th-century Comédie Humaine novel “The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans,” it is touted by the museum as the first major exhibition on the artistic representation of prostitution in Paris.

Paris during this period was a city in transformation. Its population of one million in 1850 almost doubled by 1870 as men and women abandoned the countryside for this capital. Traditional social structures and codes of behavior shattered. The rise of a wealthy urban class through trade and industry meant plenty of money to spend.

In this frenzied era of commerce, prostitution — already legal and considered a necessary evil — exploded.

Every major artist and writer (male, of course) explored the subject. Over the years, it was romanticized, exposed, caricatured and eventually condemned. Prostitution became so central to the artistic imagination that the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in his personal journal: “What is art? Prostitution.”

“Why was prostitution such a big theme for artists?” said Richard Thomson, professor of fine art at the Edinburgh College of Art and a curator of the exhibition. “There was the sexual aspect, of course. But there was another reason. The city was slippery. Everything was speeding up, becoming more commercial, more ambiguous, more of a spectacle. How can we be sure this person filled a certain role and not another? Who was who? Was she or wasn’t she? These questions disturbed and fascinated artists.”

In this show, the museum has brought together masterpieces by artists of the day, including Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Manet, Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso.

The artists explored only the world of female prostitution; male prostitution was treated as a homosexual act subject to criminal prosecution. However, the exhibition includes a small number of police reports and photographs of men together in sexually suggestive poses.

To illustrate the interaction between the artists’ representations of the prostitutes’ world and its harsh reality, the show has drawn on the vast collection of police records, photographs, periodicals and pornographic material from France’s national library.

There are also objects of the trade, including jetons (tokens) paid by clients to prostitutes in lieu of cash, which went directly to the bordello’s madame; brothel guides for tourists; and business cards advertising ambiguous services. (One offered “hygienic massages” in a setting where English was spoken.)

One room of the show is dominated by the “Armchair of Love, or Chair of Voluptousness,” a brocade-upholstered contraption with a seat and bronze stirrups on the top and a place to recline below, to have relations with two women at once. It was built in the late-19th-century for the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, who visited Paris for pleasure.

The cornerstone of prostitution in the mid-19th-century was the “maison close” — “closed house,” or bordello, a controlled legal entity where women were registered with the police and subjected to regular medical examinations.

Several bordello paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec are here, the women depicted neither as victims nor femmes fatales, but as working women. In one, a woman lifts her dress for a medical inspection; in another, a nude woman pulls a black stocking over her knee.

As more women decided to work as independent contractors, the number of brothels declined. Women working in poor-paying jobs as florists and laundresses, for example, might supplement their incomes with part-time prostitution. In the streets, in cafes and bars, at the theater or the opera, it was often difficult to tell the “honest women” from those who sold their bodies.

In the opening room of the exhibition, for example, hangs the 1892 painting “Sur le Boulevard (La Parisienne),” by Louis Valtat, of a heavily made-up woman wearing flat black tie shoes and a long black boa. She is lifting her skirt several inches to reveal her ankle, a sign that she is a prostitute.

The exhibition also explores the world of courtesans, the top of the hierarchy. These were kept women who were often showered with jewels and elegant clothing and housed in luxuriously decorated mansions. (Cash payments were considered vulgar.)

A painting of Valtesse de la Bigne, one of Paris’s most celebrated courtesans, portrays her in a ruffled white dress, holding a white umbrella, a half-smile on her face. There is nothing to suggest she sells herself. In a nearby display case, however, is her walking stick and a whip with six thin metal strands that can be neatly hidden inside.

One of the exhibition’s centerpieces is Manet’s “Olympia,” the painting of his muse, the 17-year-old Victorine Meurent, posing as a reclining prostitute, with a gaze of independence and defiance that shocked the art world. Among the telltale signs of the profession: the orchid in her hair and the black cat at her side.

With the advent of photography came a new medium to represent prostitution. Photographers were prohibited from working inside brothels, so they recreated these scenes in their studios. The photographers and their subjects remained anonymous; the photos were sold illegally.

Behind heavy red velvet curtains are two small rooms off limits to those under 18. In them hang pornographic photographs of heterosexual and homosexual activity and women in various sexual poses.

A number of artists focused on the suffering of prostitutes. Picasso was allowed access to the Saint-Lazare prison, where prostitutes, many with syphilis, were locked up. He painted them in shades of blue, as sad Madonnas, with elongated bodies and sculpted faces.


Most jarring in the show are 1910-1912 photographs of women whose faces and bodies have been disfigured by syphilis.

The show ends with the moralistic portrayal of prostitution by early-20th-century artists. France was by then cursed with high rates of alcoholism and syphilis, and prostitutes came to be considered disease-carrying corrupters of men.

A dozen films about prostitutes are to be shown, including Luis Buñuel’s 1967 “Belle de Jour,” in which Catherine Deneuve plays a bored bourgeois housewife who becomes a high-class prostitute.

The issue of prostitution continues to perplex the French. The exhibition coincides with a protracted debate in the French Parliament about whether a prostitute’s customers should be subject to prosecution, although prostitution is, and is likely to remain, legal here. Last spring, some prostitutes protested the bill in front of the National Assembly. One sign read: “You’re sleeping with us. You’re voting against us.”

Prostitution still retains the scent of the romantic. Among the corporate sponsors of the Musée d’Orsay exhibition is the Maison Souquet, a boutique hotel in a former bordello in Pigalle, near the Moulin Rouge nightclub. It has kept the bordello décor, and each of its rooms is named after a famous Parisian courtesan.

­Elaine Sciolino is the author of the forthcoming book, “The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs.”