In The Serious Customer (fig. 15), four prostitutes face a timid client. The composition is 35 structured to suggest that only a random slice of the activity has been committed to the plate, In the because the parts are incomplete at all four edges. The body of the naked woman (who stands Brothel with her back to us) is made up entirely of Degas's fingerprints. She reaches out her hand to the reticent man, whose form is all streaky brush or rag marks, encouraging him or mocking his timidity, or both. It is a group effort next to which the man appears especially small. His un- modeled, suited body appears flat and insubstantial next to the sculptural roundness of the women's ample bodies. He is also psychologically small: they appear at ease operating in their communal seminakedness while he appears shy even though protected by his street clothes from head to foot. On balance (look again at figs. 14 and 15 and see fig. 18, for example) the monotypes pro- pose that their Parisian brothel was a brutalized and brutalizing ghetto of women, an enclave of urban coldness for men par excellence. In asserting this outlook, Degas was in fact out of step with the majority of Frenchmen at the time. He was viewing the subject of the brothel anach- ronistically, against the grain of the most up-to-date and widespread opinion. Because he in- sisted that the prostitute was a material commodity, he (like certain abolitionist critics of regu- 19 lated prostitution) was ignoring the discursive forms of the most modern prostitutions of the day: the simulated and increasingly popular warmth of clandestine prostitution (the subject of chapters 3 and 4) and the suave eroticism of the deluxe brothel. For the most part, then, the series constitutes a backward-looking construction of the essential prostitute, which allowed Degas to carry out his visualization of a dehumanized ghetto of prostitution but in a radical pictorial form that provided his gloss on the subject with the appearance of the forthright and the new nevertheless. The function of Degas's fantasy of brutalized, infantilized women and slightly humiliated men has both personal and social dimensions, even though the images were never meant for 20 male strangers, let alone women. One dimension of the motivation for the series that bridges the gap between the public and the private was, undoubtedly, aesthetic: to use the modernist language of incompleteness and half-legibility (which, Greenberg reminds us, was in part gen- erated by the effort to accurately transcribe the seen). But in spite of and because of the well- known commitment to particular conceptions of modernity and its telltale forms (venal sex, for one) on the part of Degas and his circle, in order for Degas to maintain a view of prostitution that insisted upon one plausibly modern, material definition of it — its brutishness and corn- modification, its being another enclave of modern urban coldness — he had to ignore the ideo- 15- logical forms of the fashionable and new prostitutions of his time. Edgar Throughout the monotypes the rooms are decorated with stuffed sofas and chairs, chan- Degas, deliers and sconces with round glass globes, and mirrors in carved frames. The women wear The Serious little or transparent or no clothing at all. In view of the consistent "facts" of the settings of Customer, Degas's prints, his real-world point of reference may have been one of the fashionable forms: ca. 1879 — 80 the deluxe brothel. After all, only at the pinnacle of the sex business could naked prostitutes be or 1876—77, counted on to appear in carefully ornamented rooms and to assume enticing, rehearsed poses. monotype, The rituals of overture acted out by the nude women in the living rooms of the house were very National carefully orchestrated. A later nineteenth-century witness emphasized the coexistence of si- Gallery of lence and stylized erotic blandishments during a typical meeting between a client and the Canada, women in a salon: "The serious client makes his entrance. None of the women would address a Ottawa.