UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
Las Vegas, Nevada
We believe everyone deserves access to art that challenges our understanding of the present and inspires us to create a future that makes space for us all.
MessageIn 1866, the French artist Gustave Courbet painted L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) for a collector of erotic paintings, the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Sherif Pasha. The painting is a realistic depiction of a woman’s vulva and torso with her head cropped off by the top of the work. Courbet was a self-proclaimed Realist who presented his chosen style as a facet of his democratic political outlook. The Realist movement in general was influenced by contemporary developments in politics, science, and visual technology—photography, for example—and included other arts, such as literature. It can be seen as a predecessor to Impressionism and other Western art movements that have stressed the importance of authentic observation over Romantic or Neoclassical mythologising.
People have been reacting dramatically to L’Origine ever since it was created. At least two of the painting’s private owners, Pasha and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, kept it hidden behind a cover when it was on display in their homes. Images of it have been censored several times, both in the real world and on social media. In 2019, Facebook lost an 8-year legal fight against a French teacher whose account was deleted after he posted a link that included it in a thumbnail. Currently the painting is in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where you can sometimes see it—uncovered and uncensored—for a general admission price of €16.
- Created: 2012