by Linda Lappin
The Musée d’Orsay is packed as usual over the holidays, with visitors swarming in and out of rooms displaying the spellbinding animal portraits of Rosa Bonheur, the nineteenth century artist who captured the wild gaze of beasts and deflected them to the viewer. My goal today, instead, is a little red room on the ground floor, Salle 6, which holds one of the most notorious if rarely viewed paintings in the world: L’Origine du monde, by Gustave Courbet, created in 1866.
There, at the far end of the wall hangs a small canvas richly enclosed in an opulent gilt frame. I go over to examine it, surprised that on such a crowded day, no one is standing in front of it. Except for me, the room is empty.
Courbet’s painting shows the truncated torso of a female nude sprawled inert on a rumpled sheet, her thighs parted to reveal in realistic detail what Anaïs Nin called the Delta of Venus, beneath a dark tangle of pubic hair. Head, arms, hands, knees, calves, feet lie outside the painting. Our eyes are instantly drawn to the triangular vortex, center of the composition, then follow a diagonal to a dimpled navel, then further upwards to a breast peeping out from beneath a twisted sheet.That is all – there is nothing to identify the woman as an individual. You can’t even tell if she is living or dead. Either way, she clearly embodies how men see the essence of female sexuality.
Never before had woman been portrayed with such anatomical candor — without fig leaves, strategically placed drapery, or literary allusions. L’Origine portrays a real woman on a real bed displaying the organ from which human life springs. Studying the painting, you wonder about Courbet’s intention back in the day. An insult to stuffy bourgeois propriety? A revolutionary glorification of women’s sexuality? Voyeurism plain and simple? In any case, it seems she was too explosive for public view.
Commissioned by Ottoman diplomat, Khalil-Bey, who collected erotic paintings, L’Origine spent nearly a century sequestered. Khalil concealed her behind a green curtain, and would bring her out only for very special visitors. When he lost his fortune through gambling debts, she vanished for awhile into the hands of other private collectors across Europe who kept her safely hidden. During the Second World War she was looted by Soviet troops, ransomed, and finally allowed to return to France.
Resurfacing in the nineteen fifties at an auction, L’Origine was purchased by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who saw in her a manifestation of Freud’s theories of male castration anxiety and female penis envy. He also locked her in a puzzle box which only he knew how to open. Upon his death, Lacan’s heirs donated her to the French state in order to settle a tax bill. Since 1995, she has been on full display at the Orsay – unabashedly free and uncensored.
Controversy has accompanied this painting since its inception. Is it immoral? Is it anatomically correct? Does she represent female liberation or patriarchal domination? Is this little square the whole painting, or has it been cropped out of a larger canvas? If so, where is the rest of her body? Who is the woman portrayed? What was her relationship with Courbet? And how did she feel about being painted in that pose?
We know how male viewers felt about her, but what about female viewers? Excitement, disgust, shame, empowerment? Many books have been written to answer these and other questions. Most recently Lilianne Milgrom, Parisian-born artist, addresses them in her fascinating book L’Origine du Monde, the Secret History of the World’s Most Erotic Masterpiece.
Milgrom first came face to face with L’Origine while engaged in a research project in Paris on artists and aging. Deeply impressed by the painting and all its multilayered meanings, she applied for permission to copy it. Museum copiers go through a rigorous selection process. Their level of skill and even the materials they will be using are are scrupulously evaluated by the museum’s experts. Milgrom was overjoyed when her application was approved. She was in fact the first artist to be approved for this particular painting. So for weeks, in 2011, she stood before Courbet’s masterpiece with her easel, paints and brushes —getting to know every detail, line, and shadow of L’Origine by recreating her.
It was an exciting if unsettling process in which Milgrom found her gaze doubled. To make a faithful copy, she had to see the picture as Courbet saw it, but could not help seeing it from her own contemporary perspective. Copying L’Origine became confrontational, a feminist act of vindication, for in Courbet’s time, women artists were not allowed to attend life drawing classes in French art academies. Nudes were not an appropriate subject for women to paint or even to contemplate.
Soon L’Origine became a mirror in which Milgrom saw herself. At the same time, Milgrom became the focus of the gaze of countless visitors to the museum who, intrigued, lingered in the room to observe her while working. Some took pictures of her with their phones. Her copying of L’Origine became an act of performance art.
Once she had finished her copy, highly praised by the museum, she began researching the history of the painting and decided to write a novel tracing L’Origine’s peregrinations over the years. The book she finally produced though is neither fiction nor nonfiction but mixes the two genres. It opens with an essay about how she came to copy Courbet’s painting and continues with a fictionalized history based on extremely detailed research. It ends with a reflection of the meaning of L’Origine in our time. For Milgrom, painting L’Origine was an act of self-creation, and self-affirmation of her identity as a woman and as an artist.
In the half hour I have been here, no one else has come in. A young couple poke their heads in, glance quickly around, and then wander elsewhere. They take no notice of Courbet’s notorious nude, who perhaps doesn’t seem quite so scandalous nowadays. Perhaps they have gone upstairs to see the Rosa Bonheur exhibition.
There is a curious correspondence between Courbet and Bonheur who were contemporaries. Courbet pushed the limits of how the female body could be portrayed. Rosa Bonheur cracked the taboos of how women artists should live and work. Denied permission to copy nudes in the Louvre as a young student, Bonheur dedicated herself to painting animals in their natural settings. Considered eccentric, she never married, lived all her life with a childhood friend, wore her hair short and smoked cigars. Her technical mastery and success were so great that she was the first woman awarded the French legion of honor, but, nonetheless, she had to get police permission in order to wear trousers in public.
Lilianne Milgrom, standing there in her jeans while copying the most sensational female nude in western art, is heir to both transgressive quests – to paint what is really there before our eyes and to live according to the dictates of who we really are – uncensored and unafraid, like L’Origine.
Linda Lappin, based in Rome, is the author of four novels and numerous essays dealing with the lives and works of women writers and artists. Her most recent novel is Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jeanne Hébuterne, 2020. Signatures in Stone: A Bomarzo Mystery, 2nd edition, will be released this fall from Pleasure Boat Studio.
After the Art 