Avant-Garde Painters and the Subject of Prostitution. Anonymity, Identity and the Parisian Prostitute. The Travails and Tragedies of the Ordinary Prostitute. Covert Prostitution: Shopgirls and Serveuses. The painters of modernity were driven to find their subjects in the everyday world that surrounded them, exploring sites ranging from bourgeois leisure spaces to the brothels and bars of the city.
Central to their artistic endeavor was the commitment to observe and depict their world without conventional filters. Given this approach, it is not surprising that female prostitutes, who were becoming increasingly visible in the social landscape of Paris during that period, featured prominently as subjects in their works.
The avant-garde artists of the time sought to capture the raw and unfiltered aspects of contemporary urban life, and the presence of prostitutes became a poignant and often controversial element in their portrayals.
Larger enterprises privileged skilled male workers with families, providing them with certain advantages. In contrast, young single women often faced lower wages than their male counterparts in the workforce. Female workers who had recently arrived in Paris were frequently compelled to take on multiple jobs to make ends meet and many resorted to prostitution as a means of supplementing their income.
The economic and social dynamics of the time underscored the challenges faced by different segments of the workforce, particularly women. In the rebuilt Paris, spaces of bourgeois entertainment and social exchange created new opportunities for prostitutes, who quickly became a visible part of the everyday fabric of the city. Avant-garde representations of women in nineteenth-century French art and literature rapidly reflected this new social reality, and artists who were ambitious to express their era elevated courtesans to bonafide subjects in their works.
