Ah, Courbet...
According to the artist, this is where we come from, this is « L’Origine du Monde ».
This famous masterpiece was painted by the Realism pioneer Gustave Courbet, in 1866.
I find the paintor’s work and story fascinating, and I would like to share some of it with you.
The picture here above shows a fairly innovative point of view given the particular framing (presenting a close-up of the genitals and breasts of a woman, and concealing her face) and the historical context ( the XIXth century) in which it was created.
Indeed, Courbet’s paintings were often banned from art exhibitions and galleries; The well known parisian exhibition of the time, the “Salon”, regularly refused his artwork for it was seen as vulgar and shameful.
Nevertheless, the paintor would organize his own events in rented buildings in order to exhibit his modern works.
Courbet meant for his paintings to show roughness, imperfection, effort, and wanted to depict subjects that usually were not dealt with in XIXth century art, such as the poor, sexuality, and politics. He notably emphasized the poor and the working class by making huge paintings and portraits of them. In doing so, he both attracted praising and acerbic critiques, because it was such a revolution to represent the poor on a dimension scale until then only used for aristocratic, historical and biblical themes. Courbet despised conventions, as we can observe in this reproduction of his painting below, dating back to 1863, “Le retour de la conférence”.
The original painting was destroyed, for it drew much attention after the scandal it aroused.
As we can see, the picture shows staggering drunk clergymen supposedly walking home.
Which is remarkable is that the artist's satyre lives through time; Nowadays, his works still have the power to suprise, and even maybe to shock.
This kind of controversial painting is naturally a consequence of Courbet's main will: that to reform art and to evolve.
As Courbet said himself: “ Historical art is contemporary in essence”.
Léa Couty