It’s about as unlikely as it gets: in the National Gallery from now until February 21 you walk through a part of Amsterdam’s red light district.

A life-sized installation, an evocation of the district as it was in the 1980s, complete with girls in windows and doorways, garish crimson lighting, litter, bollards, bicycles . . . and raincoated men wandering dingy claustrophobic streets.

It’s dark and sleazy in The Hoerengracht (Whore’s Canal), a world of voyeurs, of those peddling sex. Rain or damp runs down walls and windows.

Varnish (or tears?) glistens on faces of women who offer their bodies for sale. The Hoerengracht was made in the 1980s by American artists Ed Kienholz (1927–1994) and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, and was last seen in this country in Gateshead in 2005.

Untrained as a sculptor, Ed Kienholz was one of the originators of installation art – calling it ‘assemblage art’ – and his often controversial work blending heavy psychological content with social realism is said to have influenced many a young artist, from Mike Nelson to the Chapman brothers and Tracey Emin. This is ground-breaking stuff for the gallery. Normally the province of pre-20th century art, the gallery now plans to show the occasional piece of contemporary art that has resonance with the classical works in its collection.

There’s nothing new in portraying scenes of prostitution, or for that matter, murder, mutilation, incest – many ‘traditional’ paintings are full of squalor and nastiness, curator Colin Wiggins points out. And that’s the point. Wiggins considers the Kienholzes’ installation a modern version of those paintings, not that the artists created it as such. When he first saw it at the Baltic, Wiggins said it was like “walking into a painting by Pieter de Hooch or Vermeer”. This gave him the idea to link their polemical street scene with a selection of 17th-century Dutch paintings – works by Jan Steen, Godfried Schalcken, and de Hooch – to explore the age-old reality of ‘love for sale’. The Hoerengracht is raw. It forces us to be voyeurs, forces us to think. It addresses the theme of prostitution in a direct, unadulterated way, yet it has humanity. But I’m not convinced about it being in the National Gallery – unless they make more of the links they touch upon in this show, draw more on the great art in their collections (although, having said that, the catalogue essays expand this aspect). In the Sunley Room. Free admission. See: www.nationalgallery.org.uk