The show closed on 17 January. Early in the 19th century, a regulatory system was created to make prostitution, which was deemed a necessary evil, tolerable. Prostitutes had to register with the police, submit to medical examinations and lim it their trade to brothels or designated residences. From the s onward, however, registrations decreased, prompting policemen and health administrators to warn that insoumises unregistered prostitutes were growing in number and infiltrating "honest" establishments.
Ambiguity was one tenet of Modernism; another was frank, naturalistic depiction that favoured both beauty and the ugliness. But idealised or classical representation had not entirely faded. As Richard Thomson reports in one of several contributions to the catalogue, prostitutes were depicted differently from courtesans, who were exalted in sculpture and painting as mythical goddesses or beauties despite the venal undertones of their kept existence. Allegory, he explains, also persisted in works that show prostitutes as emblems of vice or harbingers of corruption, echoing the sentiments of Third Republic abolitionists who decried prostitution as immoral.
Photographic models were frequently conflated with and punished as insoumises and viewing suggestive or pornographic images was perceived as psychically endangering. Indeed, much of the mania over the insoumise related to male anxieties of diminished control over women and the working classes in a radically changing Paris, where the actual pervasiveness of prostitution is hard to glean from historical record. Contemporaries speculated that anywhere from 14, to upwards of , insoumises were active at the time.
In her essay, Gabrielle Houbre reminds us that those accused of prostitution, justly or falsely, were not just colourful characters, but real women vulnerable to police punishment and client violence. Were women truly as illegible as many of the works of art included in the book imply, or did men simply read provocation and lust into passersby? Hannah Stamler is a writer based in New York. Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution in France, Art market.
Adventures with Van Gogh. Venice Biennale. A national obsession with prostitution: Hannah Stamler on 19th-century French depictions of prostitution.
