nomic interests and sophistication, in his one attempt to devise an imagery of brothel workers, *5- GO would use prominent derrieres as part of the women's already corpulent bodies. But Degas used Edgar the fleshy buttocks of the prostitute in two distinctively different ways. Degas, In one of the prints entitled Waiting (fig. 25), which depicts the women passing the time in Waiting, a downstairs salon, the second girl from the right is shown acting the part of the quintessentially ca. 1879—80 bete prostitute by upending her derriere without giving a second thought to etiquette. In In a or 1876-77, Brothel Salon (fig. 26), the solitary fille attending to an itch functions in a similar way Both of monotype, these particular prints showcase Degas's tendency to suspend the standard hierarchy of the ap- Musee peal of particular body parts seen from certain viewing angles and to fix the prostitute's primor- Picasso, dial inelegance by these bodily means. In short, in monotypes such as these, Degas distances Paris. himself from the voyeuristic male protocols of the Salon nude. But the alternative way that Degas showed and used the backside of the prostitute's lower 26. (r.) body is exemplified by the enticing display of the posterior in The Serious Customer (see fig. 15), Edgar which appears daring but darkly erotic at the same time. The sculptural, erotic, and tactile ap- Degas, peal of the buttocks is also on view in Conversation (fig. 27) and The Procuress (fig. 28), both of In a Brothel which feature carefully rounded, strategically placed posteriors. And it is not at all surprising Salon, ca. that the darker partner in the lesbian monotype called Two Women (Scene in a Brothel) (fig. 29) 1879-80 or consists almost entirely of buttocks and is without a head. (Note too that a rather conventional 1876—77, white nude is used here for the passive partner, similar in shape and position to Lefebvre's Re- monotype. clining Woman [fig. 16].) I wish to suggest that the latter way of representing the brothel prostitute's derriere, the way that inscribed its erotic appeal, on the one hand exceeds the limits of any purely physiog- nomic project, and on the other hand connects Degas's approach to that of contemporary paint- ers of the Salon nude (not to mention the old Picasso). See, in this connection, another prototypical Salon nude, again by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre: his Odalisque of 1874 (fig. 30). In it, the painstakingly modeled, sculptural curves of the woman's lower body seen from the back constitute the most heavily eroticized zone in the pic- 51