Painted love : prostitution in French art of the impressionist era

Bibliographic Information

Painted love : prostitution in French art of the impressionist era

Hollis Clayson

(Texts & documents)

Getty Research Institute, c2003

Available at  / 4 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Originally published: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991

Includes bibliographical references (p. 189-196) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Hollis Clayson provides a 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 the academic and low-brow painters who were their contemporaries. Clayson not only illuminates the imagery of prostitution - with its contradictory connotations of disgust and fascination - but also tackles the issues and problems relevant to women and men in a patriarchal society. She discusses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and civilized mores. She describes the system that evolved out 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 among their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it exemplified the commercialisation and the ambiguity of modern life.

by "Nielsen BookData"

Related Books: 1-1 of 1

  • Texts & documents

    Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities , Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities , Distributed by the University of Chicago Press

Details

Page Top