L'Origine du monde
Encyclopedia
L’Origine du monde is an oil-on-canvas painted by French artist Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...

 in 1866. It is a close-up view of the genitals and abdomen
Abdomen
In vertebrates such as mammals the abdomen constitutes the part of the body between the thorax and pelvis. The region enclosed by the abdomen is termed the abdominal cavity...

 of a naked woman
Woman
A woman , pl: women is a female human. The term woman is usually reserved for an adult, with the term girl being the usual term for a female child or adolescent...

, 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
Eroticism
Eroticism is generally understood to refer to a state of sexual arousal or anticipation of such – an insistent sexual impulse, desire, or pattern of thoughts, as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality and romantic love...

 of the work.

History

Identity of the model

At the time Courbet was working on the painting his favourite model was a young woman, Joanna Hiffernan
Joanna Hiffernan
Joanna "Jo" Hiffernan was an Irish artists' model and muse who was romantically linked with American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler and French painter Gustave Courbet.-Early life:Hiffernan was a Roman Catholic...

, 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.

In her novel J’étais l’origine du monde (I was the Origin of the world), published in 2000, French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 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.

Owners

The commission for L’Origine du monde is believed to have come from Khalil Bey
Khalil Bey
Khalil Sherif Pasha was an Ottoman diplomat and art collector, whose collection was described by Théophile Gautier as "the first ever to be formed by a child of Islam"....

, an Ottoman diplomat, former ambassador of the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

 in Athens
Athens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...

 and Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

 who had just moved to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. Sainte-Beuve
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history.-Early years:...

 introduced him to Courbet and he ordered a painting to add to his personal collection of erotic pictures, which already included (The Turkish Bath) from Ingres
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...

 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
Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond de Goncourt , born Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt, was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt.-Biography:...

 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
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

 collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany
Ferenc Hatvany
Baron Ferenc Hatvany was a Hungarian painter and art collector. A member of the Hatvany-Deutsch family, he graduated in the Académie Julian in Paris...

 bought it at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1910 and took it with him to Budapest
Budapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...

. 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 took L'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
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...

. Together with his wife, actress Sylvia Bataille
Sylvia Bataille
Sylvia Bataille was a French actress, born Sylvia Maklès in Paris , of Romanian-Jewish descent. When she was twenty, she married the writer Georges Bataille with whom she had a daughter, the psychoanalyst Laurence Bataille . Georges Bataille and Sylvia separated in 1934 but did not divorce until...

, he installed it in their country house in Guitrancourt
Guitrancourt
Guitrancourt is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France.-References:*...

. Lacan asked André Masson
André Masson
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.-Biography:Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris...

, 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
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 public had the opportunity to view L’Origine du monde in 1988 during the Courbet Reconsidered show at the Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....

; the painting was also included in the exhibition Gustave Courbet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

 in 2008. After Lacan died in 1981, the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 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
Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture,...

, 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
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....

. Courbet rejected academic painting and its smooth, idealised nudes, but he also directly recriminated the hypocritical social conventions of the Second Empire
Second French Empire
The Second French Empire or French Empire was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France.-Rule of Napoleon III:...

, where eroticism
Eroticism
Eroticism is generally understood to refer to a state of sexual arousal or anticipation of such – an insistent sexual impulse, desire, or pattern of thoughts, as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality and romantic love...

 and even pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...

 were acceptable in mythological
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

 or oneiric paintings.

Courbet later insisted he never lied in his paintings, and his realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

 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
Maxime Du Camp
Maxime Du Camp was a French writer and photographer.-Life:Born in Paris, Du Camp was the son of a successful surgeon. After finishing college, he indulged in his strong desire for travel, thanks to his father's assets...

, 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 (see below).

Influence

The explicitness of the picture may have served as an inspiration, albeit with a satirical twist, for Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

's last major work, Étant donnés
Étant donnés
Étant donnés is Marcel Duchamp's last major art work which surprised most of the art world who believed he'd given up art for chess almost 25 years earlier...

 (1946–1966), a construction also featuring the image of a woman lying on her back, legs spread apart.

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
Clermont-Ferrand
Clermont-Ferrand is a city and commune of France, in the Auvergne region, with a population of 140,700 . Its metropolitan area had 409,558 inhabitants at the 1999 census. It is the prefecture of the Puy-de-Dôme department...

, maintained the book, but others, such as Les Sandales d’Empédocle in Besançon
Besançon
Besançon , is the capital and principal city of the Franche-Comté region in eastern France. It had a population of about 237,000 inhabitants in the metropolitan area in 2008...

, 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
Pierre Guyotat
Pierre Guyotat is a French writer. He was born on January 9, 1940 at Bourg-Argental, Loire.- Biography :In 1960, Guyotat wrote his first novel, Sur un cheval. He was called to Algeria in the same year. In 1962 he was found guilty of desertion and publishing forbidden material. After three months...

’s book, Eden, Eden, Eden, bookshops had been places of resistance. Today, they anticipate censorship....”

On February 23, 2009, a similar situation happened in Braga
Braga
Braga , a city in the Braga Municipality in northwestern Portugal, is the capital of the Braga District, the oldest archdiocese and the third major city of the country. Braga is the oldest Portuguese city and one of the oldest Christian cities in the World...

, Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

, when the police
Polícia de Segurança Pública
The Polícia de Segurança Pública - PSP is the Portuguese police force that works in large urban areas. Rural towns and areas are under the protection of the Portuguese Republican National Guard...

 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 Frode 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
Arte
Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...

 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
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 and cinema
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

, the painting remained provocative. Its arrival at the Musée d'Orsay
Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture,...

 caused high excitement.

The Serbia
Serbia
Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...

n performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...

ist Tanja Ostojić
Tanja Ostojic
Tanja Ostojić is a Serbian feminist performance artist.-The "EU Panties":In December 2005, Ostojić became well known in Europe as a result of the "EU Panties" poster, a satire of Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde. Ostojić's version displayed her own crotch, clothed in blue underwear complete...

 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
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to...

 Bal du moulin de la Galette.

The image is also referenced as inspiring Catherine Breillat
Catherine Breillat
Catherine Breillat is a French filmmaker, novelist and Professor of Auteur Cinema at the European Graduate School.-Life and career:Breillat was born in Bressuire, Deux-Sèvres, but grew up in Niort...

's filming of the female genitalia in her 2004 film Anatomie de l'enfer (Anatomy of Hell
Anatomy of Hell
Anatomy of Hell is a 2004 film by Catherine Breillat. The film was adapted by writer/director Breillat from her novel Pornocracy. The explicitly sexual film stars Amira Casar as "the woman" and porn star Rocco Siffredi as "the man". Renowned movie critic Leonard Maltin's review of the film was...

).

In 2010, British composer Tony Hymas
Tony Hymas
Anthony 'Tony' Hymas is an English keyboard player, pianist, composer and is well known for being a founding member of Ph.D. He is a very versatile musician and contributes in different styles of music....

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.

External links

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