Georges Rouault's first watercolor studies of prostitutes date to 1903. The 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 Coquiot described them, are vitrolic and cruel representations of the body as commodity.

The images are painted in a summary style that is characterized by large, block-like forms bounded by heavy contours (an echo of Rouault's early apprenticeship in stained-glass), a nervous gestural line, and a loose application of the wash. Contrasts between light and dark are minimized and there is little modeling to soften the artist's harsh vision. Following Cézanne's lead--a large posthumous exhibition of the artist's watercolors was mounted in 1907 at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, though they had been shown in smaller numbers before--shadows are defined by fields of blue wash, and color is modulated in broad planes. When Rouault first exhibited his prostitutes at the Salon d'Automne in 1904, his technique and style seem to have attracted as much attention as his subject matter. Reviewing the exhibition for Gil Blas (Oct. 14, 1904) Louis Vauxcelles was disturbed by the artist's dark palette, pasty surfaces and indistinct forms.

Rouault continued to treat the theme of the prostitute in the following years, portraying the anonymous figure in different postures and attitudes. There is an almost identical version of Femme aux cheveux roux in which the figure is positioned in reverse from the other side of the bed. In another view the figure occupies a greater area of the frontal plane and is cut off just below the knees (fig. 2). A related scene shows the prostitute seated before a mirror (fig. 1). Together, these are unusually direct representations of the working woman preparing to receive clients or grooming herself following a transaction; the closeness of a sexual encounter is immediately felt.

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 prostituition 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. At a time of secular politics under the bourgeois Third Republic, the official separation of Church and State in 1905, and the growing conservative reaction among the Catholic Right, Rouault 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 Léon Bloy, whose novel La Femme Pauvre had a profound impact on Rouault. Although his friendship with Bloy was difficult, 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). Like his German Expressionist contemporary Emil Nolde, Rouault denied that his work demonstrated a prurient sensibility or morbid fascination with decadence.

Nevertheless, one cannot help but feel that Rouault's interest in the theme of the prostitute goes beyond his moralizing intentions and desire to redeem a fallen humanity. One senses the artist's own ambivalence about these "fallen women," at once predatory and repulsive. The sensitivity and delight with which he paints the flesh of the sitter in Femme aux cheveux roux, applying suggestive pink washes to the breasts, thighs, and lower abdomen, conveys an unmistakable erotic charge, while elsewhere, the model's flesh appears lifeless and dirty. Rouault's friend and fellow Fauve painter, Maurice de Vlaminck, recognized the contradiction in his work:

Rouault puts his whole self into his painting. He is
the monk with cold hands watching Esmeralda dance. He
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. The
nude concierge. The heavy-thighed lady wrestler in the
fair booth...

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.

A somber, violent, satanic color...

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: Verlain as a
café waiter with stiff white collar and small black
tie. (M. de Vlaminck, Corréa, "Désobeir," 1936; "Remembrances: Homage to Georges Rouault, " XXe
Siècle, special issue, 1971).

(fig. 1) Georges Rouault, Le miroir, 1906, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

(fig. 2) Georges Rouault, Fille, 1906, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris