BEHIIVD

THE

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Even to describe Gustave Courbet's painting The
Ox\qm of the World requires all manner of delicate and
challenging choices among various synonyms for
the female genitalia. Most critics take refuge in
describing the subject's borders. They write that the
painting portrays a naked woman's body between
the chest and the thighs or, in the words of the 19th-
century politician Léon Gambetta, who saw the
painting in 1866, when it was first displayed, "a naked
woman, with no feet and no head." Braver or more
exacting critics and viewers add that the woman's legs
are spread. The New York Times critic Roberta Smith
described the painting as "an unembellished close-up
of a woman's torso and open thighs" that, Smith was
careful to add, is "more clinical than erotic ... revealing
the object of the male gaze with a forthrightness
that can stop the gaze in its tracks."

MODERN PAINTERS 65

The painting is on view through May 18 at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in a
traveling retrospective that started at the Grand
Palais in Paris. Its inclusion in the show seems
bravetome, given thatweare in the midst of an
historical moment, when self-righteous puritan-
ism and religious fundamentalism are so often and
so unfortunately allied with prosecutorial litigious-
Lilting tlxe veil; one was stupexiea to
see a lixe-sÍ2;ea woman in irontal view,
convulsively aroused. Remarkaoly
painted, sW was tne last \vord in realism
ness. The painting is placed in a narrow room,
behind a sort of partition, in the company of sev-
eral period photos of nudes, an erotic stereoscopic
photograph by Auguste Belloc, and the painted
wooden panel byAndréMasson that Jacques Lacan
used to cover the work when it was in his posses-
sion. A freestanding wall separating the work from
the rest of the show is partly the high-art version of
a parental-guidance sticker; partly an acknowledg-
ment of the way the painting was first displayed
(behind a green veil) by the collector who commis-
sioned it for his private collection of erotic art; and
partly a reflection of its intrinsic power Thanks to
its subject matter, to the realism of its depiction,
and to a certain authority that it assumes. The
Origin of the Worid is one of those privileged works
that gets a room of its own (at least while it is at
the Met), like Velászquez's Portrait of Pope innocent X
66 MODERN PAINTERS | WAY 200S|Vv'WW.ARTINFO,COM
in the Gallería Doria Pamphilj in Rome and
Caravaggio's The Fíageiíation of Christ in the Museo
Nazionaledi Capodimonte in Naples. Or, forthat
matter, Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés... behind
its wooden door at the Philadelphia Museum of
Art—another work in which a woman's legs are
splayed, and which is likely indebted to Courbet's
groundbreaking painting, though the Duchamp
(in which the woman is glimpsed through a key-
hole) also carries an edgy frisson of serial murder
that takes it beyond the realm of Gourbet's com-
paratively garden-variety sex.
And yet, while all the above-mentioned works
are widely reproduced, The Origin of the Worid
retains its mystery (and perhaps some of its power)
by virtue of its near-obscurity. I can still remember
the tone of knowing, above-it-all world-weariness,
in which our college art-history professor explained
to my beginningfine-arts survey class that Manet's
Le dejeuner sur l'herbe and his Olympia were, when
theywere first exhibited in 1863 and 1855, consid-
ered shocking, scandalous, and obscene. But I
don't remember seeing a slide of The Origin ofthe
Worid. I would have remembered if I had. Perhaps
his reticence on the subject was due to the fact
that the painting remained in private hands until
going on permanent view at the Musée d'Orsay in
1995. and so the French public who saw Manet's
work never had a chance to be scandalized by
Gourbet's intimate canvas. But I imagine that
there is another reason, that the Gourbet must
have been more than our untenured art-history
professor would have wanted to deal with.
Though I wish he'd chosen to show it. I would have
liked to have heard what he had to say about a
painting that, after a century, still has the power
to shock us, regardless of context or our degree of
cultural sophistication.
That sense of shock, along with a sense of illicit
pleasure, is certainly what it seems to have given
the early fans who saw the work in its first venue,
behind that green veil in thehomeof Khalil-Bey.
The Turkish-Egyptian diplomat, a former Ottoman
envoy to Athens and St. Petersburg and a passion-
ate devotee of high living and high culture, com-
missioned Sleep—Gourbet's similarly erotic, if less
graphic, depiction of two female lovers—in 1865,
and The Origin was thrown in as a bonus.
"There was no end to our enthusiastic reac-
tions," Gambetta told Ludovic Halévy. the author
and vaudeviiiiste. "It's marvelous—a masterpiece, it
seems. Gourbet didn't bat an eye. We began
enthusing again. This went on for ten minutes.
Gourbet couldn't get enough of it." Almost a cen-
tury later, the art historian and biographer James
Lord, on seeing the painting at the country house
of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
(whose revolutionary writings on female sexuality
encouraged gender equality), was also stopped
cold, so to speak, when, in the company of the
artist Dora Maar, he was shown "a detailed, mag-
nificently executed close-up on the genitals of a
plump, almost obese woman." It's difficult to
understand how Lord could have so incorrectly
guessed the weight of Gourbet's fleshy and volup-
tuous (but not in the least bit blimpistl) model,
who is commonly believed to have been Jo
Hiffernan. the mistress of James McNeil
Whistler—and perhaps the cause of a serious rift
in the friendship between the two artists.
Others were less impressed than Léon
Gambetta and James Lord. Maxime du Gamp, the
writer, photographer, and traveling companion of
Flaubert, wrote, "Lifting the veil, one was stupe-
fied to see a life-sized woman in frontal view,
extraordinarily, convulsively aroused, remarkably
painted—reproduced, con amore. as the Italians
say—and offering the last vword in realism. But by
some incredible oversight, the craftsman, who
had copied his model from life, had omitted to
show the feet, legs, thighs, belly, hips, bosom,
hands, arms, shoulders, neck, and head. There is a
word forpeople capable ofthis kind of filth ,., but
I shall not pronouce it for the reader; it being used
only in the butchering trade,"
It's noteworthy that, like James Lord, Maxime
du Camp appears to have been so dumbfounded
by what he saw that he got certain essential facts,
ordetails, wrong, Actuafly, the painting includes a
gooddealof belly, and a certain amount of breast.
More important, the woman is anything but life-
size. Those who have seen itonly in reproduction
may be surprised by how small it is: only 18 by 22
inches. Its size only adds to the intimacy, and, to
be frank, the voyeurism that colors—that is meant
to color—our experience of the work. My husband
says that the painting is like Susanna and the
Elders, only without the Elders, You are the Elders.
Using only canvas, paints, and brushes, the
politically and aesthetically radical Courbet effec-
tively transforms his audience into eyewitnesses
at the moment when the sitter's blood supply has
found a good reason to migrate from elsewhere in
her body. She's not stretching, or bathing, or sleep-
ing, or simply lying there, like all the nudes that
we've agreed, as a culture, not to see as naked
people. (Much, of course, has been written about
our cultural consensus that looking at a nude in a
painting is nothing, or almost nothing, like looking
at a naked person or at a pornographic photo.) The
woman in TheOrigin oftheWorid is not only naked,
or naked enough, butshehaseitherjust hadsexor
is about to have sex. Her white petticoat has been
pulled up and billows around her like the streamers
that trail the angels in a Baroque painting. And
how you feel about all that affects how you
respond to the painting, regardless of how beauti-
fully it is painted, regardless ofthe realism and the
painterly technique that is (as even du Camp
admitted) remarkable in the extreme.
One thing i have always admired about Sister
Wendy's art criticism is her willingness—which is
sometimes mocked, doubtless because of her reli-
gious vocation—to talk and write about an artist's
rendering of pubic hair. In this case, it's nearly
impossible to discuss The Origin ofthe World with-
out mentioning the model's pubic hair, which is
painted with a fidelity to truth and a lack of ro-
manticization that, like the depiction of her vulva
and clitoris, is nearly unique in great art. Looking
at the painting this time, I was reminded of a line
in Scott Spencer's most recent novel. Witiing. in
which the narrator laments the current vogue for
the bikini wax, "in general, the sight of pubic hair
was one of my limbic system's visual clues; it
meant something special was going to happen,"
Courbet's painting is among the few master-
pieces that have that same limbic effect, great
art about sex being almost as rare as great art
about politics, thoughobviously works of genius
on both topics exist. What makes the painting
sexy (to both men and women) is the same thing
that, along with the subject matter, makes it
so unique: Courbet's gifts as a painter operating
in combination with his obvious affection and
fondness for what he's seeing and painting.
The work could hardly be more realistic, could
hardly seem more real—that is, more like a real
woman'sbody without soft focus, without the
mediating or distorting lenses of idealization or
disgust, without the aid of the airbursh or cosme-
tological intervention.
It's no accident that the painting is called The
Origin oftheWorid. Courbet is showing us nothing
less than the apparatus of baby making, the
reason why we continue to survive as a species;
and the species is, as they say, hardwired to
respond to what it is seeing. Part of what lifts
the canvas above the exploitative, or the reduc-
tivelyand narrowly voyeuristic, is its aura of trib-
ute and admiration—utterly sexual and at the
same time weirdly and openheartedly pure. It's
smart ofthe Met to have placed the painting
facing Beiloc's stereoscopic photograph of the
same body parts; a brief walk across the gallery
enables you to make a distinction between, on
PREVIOUS SPREAD:
Gustave Courbet
Thr Origin of ttir World. 1866.
Oiloncanvas. 18 1/8X22 in.
Musée d'Orsay. Courtesy
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art. NewYork.
FACING PACE:
Auguste Belloc
Obscene Photographs for the
Stereoscope, ca 1860.
Albumen print from
collodion glass negatives,
colored with transparent ink,
31/8X2 3/4 in. Bibliothèque
Nationale de France.
Courtesy HatjeCanz.
julien Vallou de Villeneuve
Study ^om Life, Nude
na. 1940. lSSi
Salted-paper print
from papernegative,
4S/BX61/8in.The
Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, purchase. Lila
Acheson Wallace Gift. 1993.
Courtesy Hatje Canz
THIS PAGE:
Gustave Courbet
SJeep, 1S&6
Oiloncanvas
S3 1/8x78 3/4
Petit Palais. Musée des Beaux-
Arts de la Ville de Paris, ® Petit
Palais/Roger Viollet, Courtesy
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, NewYork
the one hand, the workmanlike dutifulness and
the flat affect of porn and, on the other, the tech-
nical brilliance, the complexity, and the emotive
soul and beauty of art.
Yet for all its brilliance, the painting remains
a sort of secret, however well known. Among
the array of Courbet postcards for sale at the
Met's show, there is no reproduction of The
Origin ofthe World. Just as I would have liked to
have heard what words my college art-history
teacher might have found to describe the paint-
ing, so I would love to know: What would have
happened if some impassioned and intrepid, or
merely innocent, art lover had attempted to send
such a postcard through the mall?
MODERN PAINTERS67
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