Prostitutes and Female Sexuality in European Art

Prostitutes and brothel scenes were frequent subjects in European art of the 1850s-1950s. No matter the style (Impressionism, Realism, Cubism, Renaissance, etc), male artists often depicted prostitutes as inhuman, with unnatural faces and challenging expressions. They often looked undesirable. This unflattering portrayal could be due to a fear of uncontrollable female sexuality, because when a man sees a prostitute, he is the one paying, but the woman is the one in control and is not bound to one man. Prostitution is an example of women using their sexuality not as something special or available unconditionally to men, but as a weapon and a means to an end. Another danger of uncontrollable female sexuality was disease: Picasso, for one, was afraid of sexually transmitted diseases. This was possibly true of Lautrec (who died in his thirties of syphilis) as well. Artists often portrayed this fear of female sexuality by depicting prostitutes with the white face paint/makeup women of their profession were known to wear. This makeup often served as a way to make their faces unnatural and less human, even predatory. The women were often portrayed staring out at the viewer, visible, challenging, and unapologetic. This unsettling depiction could also be a moral callout, used to make the viewer feel implicated as though they are the next client.

Woman Pulling up Her Stockings
Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec

1894

Oil on canvas

Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, France

Lautrec, who spent many hours in the brothels and the Moulin Rouge, here paints a brothel scene of a nude woman pulling her clothes back on while another woman watches. Her face is averted and her body looks soft, but the woman in the background is in profile and Lautrec uses harsh lines and white, unnatural color to give her a fiendish, sharp-looking face. She doesn’t look very human, and her body is sharp as well. She doesn’t look like she belongs, and her presence in the room is unexplained - why is she there while the other girl is getting dressed? Are they lesbians? Was she the client?

Young Man and Prostitute

Edvard Munch

1893

Charcoal and gouache on paper

The Munch Museum, Oslo

Here is an example by Munch of a prostitute with a poorly-defined face, staring down the viewer. The sharp lines of her features and lack of any other definition make her unsettling to look at, and she seems very unaffected by the man touching her. She is being touched but she seems very distant from the entire situation. Her sexuality is being taken by him, but she looks completely in control and he even looks infantilized by the fact that he’s in the position of a breastfeeding baby. Here again we see female sexuality made to look undesirable and unsettling, even devilish, like the man might not have a choice in what he’s doing here.

Les Demoiselles d-Avignon

Pablo Picasso

1907

Oil on canvas

333.1939

Here Picasso paints five nude women, most of them made very inhuman by the sharp shape and
abstraction of their bodies and faces, staring out at and challenging the viewer. These are not the
nude women of Classical art, splayed out nicely for men to come and take. They are intimidating
and scary, probably a representation of Picasso’s fear of sexually transmitted diseases. They are
even painful to look at with their distorted positions, especially the woman in the bottom right corner
who is twisted around to face the viewer. They are the ones in control of the situation and they are
unapologetic. Picasso portrays them as beasts, with animalistic faces and bodies, and the viewer is
morally implicated just by looking at them.

The Englishman (William Tom Warrener, 1861-1934) at the Moulin Rouge

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

1892

Oil on cardboard

67.187.108

Lautrec paints another scene at the Moulin Rouge: his friend, speaking with two women. The face of
one of the women is obscured, but the woman in the back has only a few harsh features, the unnatural
white paint, and nothing else defined. She is staring out of the painting looking unsettling, aided by
the way Lautrec has painted her eyes with only one or a few brushstrokes. She looks like a spirit
or apparition. The man (Warrener) is leaning in towards the women, giving them attention and
creating a claustrophobic feeling in the painting, but the woman again looks disinterested in and
unavailable to him. There is debate among scholars about whether the women are prostitutes or
lesbians, but the white paint on the one woman’s face and her unnatural, ill-defined features are
consistent with the portrayals of prostitutes in other art of the time.

Olympia

Edouard Manet

1863

Oil on canvas

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Manet paints a woman in the Classical position of the reclining female nude, but Olympia does not have the creamy, supple body of Venus. Instead, her skin is a yellow-green color that almost makes her body look like a corpse. Here she is depicted receiving a gift from another client, and all the while she is staring at the viewer, looking very bored and unimpressed. This implicates the viewer as the next client, and illustrates that she is the one in control, not the client. Her sexuality is not for men to take, it’s for her to deign to give if they pay. The past client’s gift in the background shows clearly that she does not belong to you, and this makes her undesirable.

Chérubin’s Song 

Félicien Rops

1878-81

Watercolor, gouache, pastel

Sammlung Ronny Van de Velde Collection, Antwerp

Here Rops offers another example of an unnerving brothel scene. The red lights are reminiscent of
Van Gogh’s Night Cafe, blaring and attacking. The man looks very interested in a nude woman,
but she is not returning that interest or even looking at him. The arm of the couch separates them,
showing that she is not making her body submissively available to him. To distance her even more
from the man, Rops paints her with dark circles under her eyes like a skull and white paint sketched
around her body like the outline of a garment, but in its incompletion it looks like she is hung in
cobwebs. She is wearing only stockings and shoes, and there are dark shapes on her stockings that
give the impression of spiders crawling up her leg. She looks corpse-like and dead, reinforcing the
idea that she’s not for him and therefore undesirable.