Musée d'Orsay 1

And the sculptures!

What are they for? I like nudes, paintings and sculptures, but there is a difference between a positive appreciation of the human body, and the exploitation of the image for purely sexual purposes. And I thought that many of the 19C sculptures, wonderful as they are, cross that line into pornography rather than eroticism or celebration of form.

Take the life-size marble figure above - created by Auguste Clesinger in 1847. The subject may nominally be "A Woman bitten by an Asp", but it's just porn. It's great representation, but the choice of posture and figure is (in my mind) exploitative. The woman is bent backwards in agony but in a position indistinguishable from ecstasy. It's dishonest art.

There were many statues with a similar undertone of exploitation,both of male and female figures that made me feel rather queasy. And yet, and yet....

In the same way that the over detailed accuracy of the establishment's salon art created the counter-movement of impressionism, I feel that this near -porn helped the reaction of sculptors like Maillot, whose blocky throwbacks to Mycenean art echo the two-dimensional Impressionists. And in many ways, his work is more erotic than the hyper-realism which he started to supplant.