L'Origine du monde
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| ''L’Origine du monde'' |
| Gustave Courbet, 1866 |
| oil on canvas |
| 46 × 55 cm |
| Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) is an oil on canvas painted by Gustave Courbet in 1866. Measuring about 55 cm by 46 cm (21.7 by 18.1 inches), it depicts the close-up view of the genitals and belly of a naked woman, lying on a bed and spreading her legs.
The framing of the scene, between the thighs and the chest, emphasizes the eroticism of the work. Moreover, an erect nipple and the redness of the vaginal lips suggest that the model had just had a sexual encounter.
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[edit] A history strewn with famous names
[edit] A model of dubious identity
At the time the painting was done, Courbet’s favourite model was a young lady, Joanna Hiffernan, also known as Jo. Her lover at the time was James McNeill Whistler, an American painter and disciple of Courbet.
Courbet did another painting in 1866, La belle Irlandaise (Portrait of Jo), whose model was Joanna Hiffernan. During his whole career, Courbet did four portraits of Jo. She was probably the model for L’Origine du monde, which would explain Courbet’s and Whistler’s brutal separation a short while later. Whistler then returned to the United States, leaving a will in favour of Jo. In spite of Jo’s red hair contrasting with the darker pubic hair of L’Origine du monde, the hypothesis that Jo was the model for it prevails.
In her novel J’étais l’origine du monde (I was the Origin of the world), published in 2000, French writer Christine Orban takes sides, imagining how the narrator, Joanna Hiffernan, was Courbet’s lover and the model for the famous painting. Bernard Teyssèdre, in Le roman de l’origine (The Novel of the Origin), 1996, whose main character is the painting itself, had already suggested that Joanna Hiffernan was the model.
[edit] A few discreet owners
The commission for L’Origine du monde is believed to have come from Khalil-Bey, a Turkish diplomat, former ambassador of the Ottoman Empire in Athens and Saint Petersburg who had just moved to Paris. Sainte-Beuve introduced him to Courbet and he ordered a painting to add to his personal collection of erotic pictures, which already included Le Bain turc (The Turkish Bath) from Ingres and another painting by Courbet, Les Dormeuses (The Sleepers).
After Khalil-Bey’s finances were ruined by gambling, the painting subsequently passed through a series of private collections. It was first bought during the sale of the Khalil-Bey collection in 1868, by antique dealer Antoine de la Narde. Edmond de Goncourt hit upon it in an antique shop 1889, hidden behind a wooden pane decorated with the painting of a castle or a church in a snowy landscape. According to Robert Fernier, Baron Ferenc Hatvany bought it at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1910 and took it with him to Budapest. The Hungarian collector kept it until the Second World War.
The last owner of the painting was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Together with his wife, actress Sylvia Bataille, he acquired it in 1955 and installed it in their country house in Guitrancourt. Lacan asked André Masson, his stepbrother, to build a double bottom frame and draw another picture thereon. Masson painted a surrealist, allusive version of L’Origine du monde. The New York public had the unique opportunity to admire L’Origine du monde in 1988 during the Courbet Reconsidered show at the Brooklyn Museum. After Lacan died in 1981, the French Minister of Economy and Finances agreed to settle the family’s inheritance tax bill through the transfer of the work (dation en lieu in French law) to the Musée d'Orsay, an act which was finalized in 1995.
[edit] The impact of realism
L’Origine du monde was painted in an era when moral values were being questioned. By the very nature of its realistic, graphic eroticism, the painting still has the power to shock.
[edit] A provocative work
During the nineteenth century, the display of the nude body underwent a revolution whose main activists were Courbet and Manet. Courbet rejected academic painting and its smooth, idealised nudes, but he also directly recriminated the hypocritical social conventions of the Second Empire, where eroticism and even pornography were acceptable in mythological or oneiric paintings.
Courbet later insisted he never lied in his paintings, and his realism pushed the limits of what was considered presentable. With L'Origine du monde he has made even more explicit the eroticism of Manet's Olympia. Maxime Du Camp, in a harsh tirade, reported his visit of the work’s purchaser, and his sight of a painting “giving realism’s last word”.
[edit] An influence still present today
In February 1994 the novel Adorations perpétuelles (Perpetual Adorations) by Jacques Henric, reproduced L’Origine du monde on its cover. Police visited several French bookshops to have them withdraw the book from their windows. A few proprietors, such as the Rome bookshop in Clermont-Ferrand, maintained the book, but others such as Les Sandales d’Empédocle in Besançon complied, and some voluntarily removed it. The author was saddened by these events: “A few years ago, bookshops were counter-powers. When the Ministry of Interior, in 1970, banned Pierre Guyotat’s book, Eden, Eden, Eden, bookshops had been resistance places. Today, they anticipate censorship…”.
Although moral standards and resulting taboos regarding the artistic display of nudity have evolved since Courbet, owing especially to photography and cinema, the painting remained provocative. Its arrival at the Musée d'Orsay caused high excitement. A guard was permanently assigned to the monitoring of this sole work, to observe the reactions of the public.
[edit] References
- Thomas Schlesser, « L’Origine du monde » in Dictionnaire de la pornographie (sous la direction de Philippe di Folco), Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2005.
- Philippe Dagen, Le Musée d’Orsay dévoile « L’Origine du monde » in Le Monde, June 21, 1995
- Philippe Dagen, Sexe, peinture et secret in Le Monde, October 22, 1996
- Maxime Du Camp, Les Convulsions de Paris, 1878
- Isabelle Enaud Lechien, James Whistler, ACR Édition
- Stéphane Guégan and Michèle Haddad, l’ABCdaire de Courbet, Flammarion
- Florence Noiville, Le retour du puritanisme in Le Monde, March 25, 1994
- Bernard Teyssèdre, Le roman de l'Origine, Paris, Gallimard, 1996.
- Thierry Savatier, "L'Origine du monde, histoire d'un tableau de Gustave Courbet", Paris, Bartillat, 2006
[edit] Filmography
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- Jean Paul Fargier, L’Origine du monde, 1996
