The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences – criminals and kept women – which drift about in the underworld of a great city […] all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism […]. The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846
In the spring of 2016 Amsterdam will host two major exhibitions: Easy Virtue: Prostitution in French Art, 1850-1910 (Van Gogh Museum, previously Musée d’Orsay) and Girls in Kimono: The Breitner Variations (Rijksmuseum). Both exhibitions explore the depiction of women in the margins of urban life – the . . . → En lire plus
