Lot Essay
Rouault's first watercolor studies of prostitutes date to 1903. These hapless figures, alone and in groups, are exposed to the viewer's erotic gaze, clad only in stockings and garters. In surroundings that are as minimal as their (un)dress--the requisite bed, mirror, and stove to warm their bare flesh--these "gutter Venuses" twisted "in poses assumed by epileptic toads," as Gustave Caillebotte desribed them, are vitrolic and cruel representations of the body as reduced to a commodity.
While on the surface Rouault's scenes of prostitutes locate him squarely within the Realist tradition of French caricature and social criticism that extends from Daumier and Guys to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, his caustic vision is more in line with the image of prostitution proffered by mass circulation satirical journals such as L'Assiette au beurre. The artist, however, insisted that his work was the spiritual reflection of a suffering humanity. He identified with the spiritual mission of the Nabis and aspired to be "the monk of painting in our time." Among his friends were the Symbolist writer J. K. Huysmans, who had earlier experienced a religious conversion, and Lon Bloy, whose novel La Femme pauvre had a profound impact on Rouault. Although his friendship with Bloy was ambivalent, it encouraged him in the belief that art had a redemptory mission to expose and atone for the sins of society.
Speaking of the spiritual epiphany he experienced in 1903, Rouault later explained, "I underwent...a moral crisis of the most violent sort. I experienced things which cannot be expressed by words. And I began to paint with an outrageous lyricism which disconcerted everybody....It was not the influence of Lautrec, Degas or the moderns which inspired me, but an inner necessity and the perhaps unconscious desire not to fall full-length into conventional religious subject matter" (J. T. Soby, Georges Rouault, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1945, pp. 12-13). While Rouault denied that his work demonstrated a prurient sensibility or morbid fascination with decadence, his interest in the theme of the prostitute goes beyond his moralizing intentions and desire to redeem a fallen humanity. The sensitivity and delight with which he paints the flesh of the sitter in the present work conveys an unmistakable erotic charge. Rouault's friend and fellow Fauve painter Maurice de Vlaminck, recognized the contradiction in his work:
"[Rouault] is the thin-fingered Saint Anthony beating his shiny bald head against the stone floor of the Cloister to drive away his bestial, carnal and obscene visions... Rouault's painting expresses desire, temptation and the horrors of lust all at once, the same complex of feelings found in the figures medieval artists carved on cathedrals in the twelfth century. The association of religion and anarchy which, embracing and clashing, join forces in his canvases... If there is something of the monk and the saint in Rouault, there is also something of the libertarian martyr, dressed in a black cheviot suit... (M. de Vlaminck, Corra, "Dsobeir," 1936; "Remembrances: Homage to Georges Rouault," XXe Sicle, special issue, 1971).
While on the surface Rouault's scenes of prostitutes locate him squarely within the Realist tradition of French caricature and social criticism that extends from Daumier and Guys to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, his caustic vision is more in line with the image of prostitution proffered by mass circulation satirical journals such as L'Assiette au beurre. The artist, however, insisted that his work was the spiritual reflection of a suffering humanity. He identified with the spiritual mission of the Nabis and aspired to be "the monk of painting in our time." Among his friends were the Symbolist writer J. K. Huysmans, who had earlier experienced a religious conversion, and Lon Bloy, whose novel La Femme pauvre had a profound impact on Rouault. Although his friendship with Bloy was ambivalent, it encouraged him in the belief that art had a redemptory mission to expose and atone for the sins of society.
Speaking of the spiritual epiphany he experienced in 1903, Rouault later explained, "I underwent...a moral crisis of the most violent sort. I experienced things which cannot be expressed by words. And I began to paint with an outrageous lyricism which disconcerted everybody....It was not the influence of Lautrec, Degas or the moderns which inspired me, but an inner necessity and the perhaps unconscious desire not to fall full-length into conventional religious subject matter" (J. T. Soby, Georges Rouault, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1945, pp. 12-13). While Rouault denied that his work demonstrated a prurient sensibility or morbid fascination with decadence, his interest in the theme of the prostitute goes beyond his moralizing intentions and desire to redeem a fallen humanity. The sensitivity and delight with which he paints the flesh of the sitter in the present work conveys an unmistakable erotic charge. Rouault's friend and fellow Fauve painter Maurice de Vlaminck, recognized the contradiction in his work:
"[Rouault] is the thin-fingered Saint Anthony beating his shiny bald head against the stone floor of the Cloister to drive away his bestial, carnal and obscene visions... Rouault's painting expresses desire, temptation and the horrors of lust all at once, the same complex of feelings found in the figures medieval artists carved on cathedrals in the twelfth century. The association of religion and anarchy which, embracing and clashing, join forces in his canvases... If there is something of the monk and the saint in Rouault, there is also something of the libertarian martyr, dressed in a black cheviot suit... (M. de Vlaminck, Corra, "Dsobeir," 1936; "Remembrances: Homage to Georges Rouault," XXe Sicle, special issue, 1971).