THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD
(L'ORIGINE DU MONDE)
by Gustave Courbet
L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) is an
oil-on-canvas painted by French artist Gustave Courbet in 1866. It is a
close-up view of the genitals and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed with
legs spread. The framing of the nude body, with head, arms and lower legs
outside of view, emphasizes the eroticism of the work.
 |
Joanna Hiffernan
by James Whistler |
Identity of the model
At the time Courbet was
working on the painting his favourite model was a young woman,Joanna Hiffernan,
also known as Jo. Her lover at the time was James Whistler, the American
painter and friend 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 Hiffernan. She was probably the model for
L’Origine du monde, which might explain Courbet’s and Whistler's brutal
separation a short while later. Whistler then returned to London. In spite of
Hiffernan’s red hair contrasting with the darker pubic hair of L’Origine du
monde, the hypothesis that Hiffernan was the model for it prevails.
 |
La belle irlandaise
Portrait of Jo
by Gustave Courbet |
L’Origine du monde in the Musée d'Orsay.
Owners
The commission for L’Origine du monde is believed to
have come from Khalil Bey, an Ottoman 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), for which it is supposed that Hiffernan was one of
the models.
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 in 1889, hidden behind a wooden pane decorated with the painting
of a castle or a church in a snowy landscape. According to Robert Fernier,
Hungarian collector BaronFerenc Hatvany bought it at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery
in 1910 and took it with him to Budapest. Towards the end of the Second World
War the painting was looted by Soviet troops but ransomed by Hatvany who, when
he emigrated, was allowed to take only one art work with him, and he
tookL'Origine to Paris.
In 1955 L’Origine du monde was sold at auction for 1.5
million francs. Its new owner was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Together
with his wife, actress Sylvia Bataille, he 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 opportunity
to viewL’Origine du monde in 1988 during the Courbet Reconsidered show at the
Brooklyn Museum; the painting was also included in the exhibition Gustave
Courbet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008. 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.
Provocative work
During the 19th 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 eroticismand 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 to the work’s
purchaser, and his sight of a painting “giving realism’s last word”.
By the very nature of its realistic, graphic
eroticism, the painting still has the power to shock and triggers censorship.
Influence
The explicitness of the picture may have served as an
inspiration, albeit with a satirical twist, for Marcel Duchamp's last major
work, Étant donnés (1946–1966), a construction also featuring the image of a
woman lying on her back, legs spread apart.
L’Origine du monde in the
Musée d'Orsay.
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
anti-establishment. When the Ministry of the Interior, in 1970, banned Pierre
Guyotat’s book, Eden, Eden, Eden, bookshops had been places of resistance.
Today, they anticipate censorship....”[citation needed]
On February 23, 2009, a similar situation happened in
Braga, Portugal, when the police confiscated the book "Pornocratie"
by Catherine Breillat, displayed in bookshops using L’Origine du monde as its
cover. A great deal of controversy was sparked by the police action. The reason
given was the need to maintain public order. Also, the book title incorrectly
hinted at pornographic content. Portuguese law forbids public displays of
pornography.
In February 2011, Facebook censored L'Origine du monde
after it was posted by Copenhagen-based artist Frode Steinicke, to illustrate
his comments about a television program aired on DR2. Following the incident,
many other Facebook users defiantly changed their profile pictures to the
Courbet painting in an act of solidarity with Steinicke. Facebook which originally
disabled Steinicke's profile finally re-enabled it without the L'Origine du
monde picture. As the case won media attention, Facebook deleted other pages
about the painting.
In October 2011, again, a complaint was lodged against
Facebook with the "tribunal de grande instance de Paris" (Paris court
of general jurisdiction) by a French Facebook user after his profile was
disabled for showing a picture of L'Origine du monde. The picture was a link to
a television program aired on Arte about the history of the painting. As he got
no answer to his emails to Facebook, he decided to lodge a complaint for
"infringement of freedom of expression" and against the legality of
Facebook's terms which define the courts located in Santa Clara County, California,
as the exclusive place of jurisdiction for all litigating claims.
Although moral standards and resulting taboos
regarding the artistic display of nudity have changed since Courbet, owing
especially to photography and cinema, the painting remained provocative. Its
arrival at the Musée d'Orsay caused high excitement.
The Serbian performance artist Tanja Ostojić parodied
the work in her so-called "EU Panties" poster in 2005.
According to postcard sales L’Origine du monde is the
second most popular painting in the Musée d’Orsay, after Renoir’s Bal du moulin
de la Galette.
The image is also referenced as inspiring Catherine
Breillat's filming of the female genitalia in her 2004 film Anatomie de l'enfer
(Anatomy of Hell).
In 2010, British composer Tony Hymas composed "De
l'origine du monde" a musical suite dedicated to the picture as well as
relations between Courbet and La Commune de Paris, and based on texts by
Courbet himself, Charles Baudelaire, Pierre Dupont and Christian Tarting.
Illustrators such as Daniel Cacouault, Simon Goinard Phélipot, Rocco, Stéphane
Courvoisier, Zou, Eloi valat, Jeanne Puchol, Benjamin Bouchet, Sylvie Fontaine,
Chloé Cruchaudet, Stéphane Levallois, Nathalie Ferlut took part to this project
published by nato record.
Source: Wikipedia
