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Moving Beyond Beauty

Gustave Courbet’s Work Retains the Power to Shock

By Blake Gopnik

Washington Post Staff Writer

Of all the jaw-dropping paintings in “Gustave Courbet,” the landmark survey of the great French artist now at the Metropolitan Museum, the jaw drops farthest for one that was painted in 1866, for a Turkish diplomat in Paris. It is called “The Origin of the World.” Even now, 142 years later, it’s too shocking to be reproduced in these pages or on our Web site.

Good manners barely let us describe it.

The painting shows the open crotch of a naked woman, painted in such extreme close-up that her legs, arms and head, as well as most of her torso, are cut off by the edges of the canvas.

As you round a corner at the Met and come up to it for the first time, Courbet’s “Origin” still feels extreme. So just imagine what it meant in 1866.

L’Origine du monde, par Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) en 1866.
“L’Origine du monde”, par Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) en 1866.

“There is a word for the people capable of this kind of filth,” wrote one contemporary Frenchman, ” . . . but I shall not pronounce it for the reader.” Another described the painting as “a little monstrosity.”

Except for their contempt, these writers got this picture right: It was meant to shock, by rewriting every notion of what fine art could be. It took old-fashioned ideas of beauty and aesthetics right out of the equation.

Courbet is often described as the genius at the source of all of modern art. That makes perfect sense, especially if you jump right from him to the most radical work of the past 40 years. He’s the ancestor of Richard Serra throwing molten lead into the corner of a room, of Bruce Nauman screaming nonsense phrases into a video camera or of the feminist Cosey Fanni Tutti presenting porn shots of herself as art.

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