Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution in France, 1850–1910

Presented by the Musée d’Orsay as the first major exhibition on the subject, Splendour and Misery examined how prostitution, in all its forms and settings, became a central theme for the artists of modern Paris between 1850 and 1910.

The book moves from the scandal of Manet‘s Olympia and Degas‘s Absinthe to the brothel scenes of Toulouse-Lautrec and Munch and the caustic figures of Georges Rouault, Kees van Dongen and Pablo Picasso. Painters, sculptors and photographers, at times fascinated and at times repelled, appear side by side, capturing both the realities and the fantasies of an ambiguous world.

The exhibition was curated by Nienke Bakker of the Van Gogh Museum, Isolde Pludermacher and Marie Robert of the Musée d’Orsay, and Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, with Guy Cogeval, then president of the Musée d’Orsay. Richly illustrated with more than 300 images, the catalog received a special mention at the Prix CatalPa for exhibition catalogs.

A landmark study for readers of nineteenth-century French art and its social history.