Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era

Abstract

BOOKPainted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist EraHollis Clayson https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00319 Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22813Copy Prostitution was widespread in nineteenth-century Paris, and as French streets filled with prostitutes, French art and literature of the period paralleled this development. In this engrossing 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 Cézanne, 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 connotations 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.AuthorHollis ClaysonPublisherYale University PressPrint publication date December 1991 (out of print)Print ISBN 9780300047301EISBN 9780300270822Copyright© 1991 by Yale UniversityIllustrations 91Print Status out of print Publisher (out of print) WorldCat Google Books

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