One critic has accused Musėe d’Orsay of soliciting visitors
and many of their lesserknown contemporaries. There is also the most extensive show of works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in Paris for more than 40 years.
French art critics, while acknowledging the many treasures on display, are unhappy. One has accused the Musée d’Orsay and other Paris galleries of “soliciting” visitors by organising a series of exhibitions with sexual themes.
Last year the Musée d’Orsay presented a much criticised – and much visited – exhibition on the artistic influences of the Marquis de Sade. In 2013, the museum had an exhibition of male nudes. There has been a similar run of erotic subjects at the Musée du Luxembourg.
In Le Monde this week, the art writer Harry Bellet suggested that the Musée d’Orsay was becoming like a failing provincial art-house cinema of the 1970s. “They used to show difficult films one week
Parisien.
In the second half of the 19th century, when the population of Paris doubled in 20 years, the city became known as the naughtiest in the world. Prostitution boomed. The authorities tolerated soliciting on the streets after nightfall and the cosseted near-slavery of women in licensed brothels or maisons closes.
Almost every l eading painter of the time turned to prostitution as a subject – partly as a way of expressing their rejection of older forms of art including the often hypocritical representation of nude women in classical poses.
One of the curators of the Musée d’Orsay exhibition is Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon professor of fine art at the University of Edinburgh. In an article in the catalogue, he says that prostitution was to the Impressionists a symbol of “modernity”. Professor Thomson concedes that some of the paintings, though “fantastic” as art, did romanticise the lives of prostitutes. The lives of the great majority of the women – both on the streets and in “closed” houses which they were forbidden to leave – were “wretched” and “horrible”, he said.
The exhibition does, however, stray into strange territory. There are three “private” rooms protected by red velvet “brothel” curtains. Visitors below the age of 18 are banned from entering. Inside, the visitor finds raunchy, grainy images, which go far beyond what was offered by the old “What the Butler Saw” machines on fairgrounds.
The exhibition is, needless to say, a great success. In the official visitors’ book, someone has written: “This is an orgasmic exhibition which will go down in the anals [sic] of art history.” This is an exception. Almost all the other comments are ecstatic. Splendeurs et misères runs until 17 January. It will then move to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam