Paris exists in the modern
popular imagination globally as a city of romance—the picture perfect
background to innumerable engagements, honeymooners and weekend breakers. Yet
the City of Love also has a darker past, a reputation for which, in the
nineteenth century, it was even more famous, as a spiritual home for Europe’s
sex trade.
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| Rolla, Henri Gervex (1878) |
Forget the stylised costumes of
Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001);
the d’Orsay’s current exhibition, Splendour and Misery: Pictures of Prostitution, 1850-1910, is the first major art
show dedicated to vice and contains 15 rooms of artworks (drawings, paintings,
photographs and film), spanning the major art movements of the second half of
the nineteenth century and beyond, and shedding new light on the practices of
the trade.
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| Au salon, scène de maison close, Constantin Guys |
The show transports you from the
streets of Paris, where both illegal and registered prostitutes rubbed
shoulders with ‘respectable’ women, advertising their services with subtle
visual cues, to the environs of the ballet, where many chorus girls led a
double life, to the brothels (maisons de
tolérance) where men could indulge in a variety of sexual pleasures at
leisure, and, finally, to the pornographer’s studio where staged sexual acts,
captured on early film, start to take on a decidedly modern appearance.
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| Les belles de nuit au jardin de Paris, Jean Béraud (1905) |
The experience of visiting the
show is designed to feel illicit. Deep red walls serve as a backdrop to the works,
while velvet curtains veil those parts of the exhibition off-limits to under
18s, where crowds push to view daguerreotypes
through peepholes and stand in awkward silence watching a reel of a
nineteenth-century couple taking off layer upon layer of clothing before
getting down to the deed.
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| Le Client, Jean-Louis Forain (1878) |
Yet the major takeaway from the
show isn’t to romanticise the work women at many social levels were often
forced into due to lack of opportunities, education and equal pay.
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| Femme à La Voilette, Anquetin Louis (1891) |
Venereal disease is a major
subject and subtext for the works on show (there’s even a wax model taken from
the marked face of a syphilitic woman), several of the paintings focus on the
interiority and unhappiness of their subjects (for instance Edgar Degas’s L’Absinthe) and the realities of
prostitution prove as fertile a ground for artists as the fantasies that
surround it, with many works focusing on aspects of life at the brothel we
might find mundane (like contemporary hygiene practices) or surprising (e.g.
the homoerotic relationships between women living in close proximity to each
other within these establishments).
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| L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas (1875-1876) |
The exhibition’s title comes from
Honoré de Balzac’s Splendeurs and Misères
des Courtisanes (1838-1847) and there’s certainly a lot of splendour on show
here too. There are the fine clothes of Jean Béraud’s belles de nuit, Edouard Manet’s infamous Olympia lounges naked and triumphant, and there are many paintings
dedicated to recording the lives of the demi-mondaines—those
women at the pinnacle of prostitution in the period, who enjoyed luxury and
celebrity.
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| Olympia, Edouard Manet (1863) |
When walking around the
exhibition, it’s hard not to be struck by the sheer variety—of stories, social
classes, sexual positions, body types. The curators choose to touch only
briefly on the story of male prostitution (there are some early photographs of
male/male penetrative sex on display), but the female sex worker is examined
from every angle, always an object, frequently of lust, occasionally of horror,
often of pity.
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| Rousse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1889) |
If you’re in Paris before 17th
January, the exhibition is worth every minute in line at the d’Orsay. It’s a
window into Paris’s past and into the bedrooms of generations of its men and
women.
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| Sur le Boulevard (La Parisienne), Louis Valtat (1893) |
Do you know of any art exhibitions
in New York you think the Secret Victorianist should visit? Let me know—here,
on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
