Courbet’s L’origine du Monde with reference to Lacanian theory of the gaze and Fried’s account of theatricality
I wish to consider Gustave Courbet’s 1866 work, L’origine du Monde through study of the various settings in which it was housed — with emphasis on the distinct ways that it’s hanging was approached by its different owners — and within the framework of Jacques Lacan’s writing on the Gaze. Before becoming part of the collection at Musee d’Orsay, Paris where it hangs today, the painting was housed at Lacan’s country house at Guitraneourt, France, and before this a flamboyant Turkish-Egyption diplomat owned it. I will discuss the hanging of the painting in its various settings in greater detail later on.
Lacan’s ownership of the painting is rather interesting when we consider its subject alongside his contribution to the field of psychoanalysis, for this study I will focus on his writing on the Gaze and on L’objet Petit a. The extent to which L’origine du Monde and Lacan’s contribution to psychoanalysis are reconcilable is debateable and somewhat unstable, however I think this is an interesting juxtaposition to consider and may provide another way of looking at this particular painting. In the words of Jacqueline Rose; ‘The encounter between psychoanalysis and artistic practice are staged, but only in so far as that staging has already taken place.’[1] In including this quote I hope to make clear that although the link between the painting in question and Lacanian theory may not be self-evident, there is a relationship here which may have already been enacted.
It is also necessary to view this painting within a discussion of embodiment in Courbet’s paintings, something which has been widely debated by art historians. I will compare this use of embodiment in L’origine du Monde and other paintings by the artist, with reference to debates around spectatorship. Along with a look to feminist theory concerning psychoanalysis, I hope to bring together the concepts of Michael Fried and Jacques Lacan with Courbet’s painting at the centre. Through this I will assess the extent to which L’origine du Monde can be seen to be a positive representation of female sexuality and the bodily.
Of course we must first examine the painting itself and its implications in ninetheenth-century Paris. L’origine du Monde — The Origin of the World — is an almost anatomical depiction of female genitalia, with the canvas reaching its limits before the subject’s face is shown. Following the trajectory of the painting tradition of the nude, we find no other painting like it. Typically we find depictions of women utterly removed from their bodies and their sexuality — in the case of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), her swathes of blonde hair enable her modesty, and in paintings by Peter Paul Reubens his subjects are typically turned away from the viewer or covering themselves with drapes of fabric. When we do catch a glimpse of their genitals they are hairless and barely visible between voluptuous thighs and stomach.
Edouard Manet’s 1865 Olympia comes closer to an empowered depiction of female sexuality — she is not modest, she stares from the canvas meeting the male gaze of the nineteenth-century salon. Venus has become a prostitute, the style uncompromising — a reflection of contemporary society. L’origine du Monde, however, goes further still, here the artist is not concerned with a nubile desexualised nude, nor even a woman empowered by her sexuality. But rather — as I hope to demonstrate — a realist picture of what makes a woman, indeed Manet seems also to contemplate the role of women in society.
The painting’s title takes it even further into this exciting new ground — what was considered taboo — claiming this as ‘The Origin of The World’, Courbet questioned not only the male-dominated Paris art world, but God himself. We could even go so far as to say that the painting represents a celebration of the fact that all human beings have been carried and delivered into this world by female bodies. For this reason I believe L’origine du Monde to be among the first conceptual artworks, it demands the viewers attention and holds it, no doubt the subject and its title caused outrage among the bourgeoisie. Even today the painting is the subject of debate and controversy with Luxembourgian artist — Deborah de Robertis — reenacting the painting at the Musee d’Orsay in her 2014 work Mirror of Origin.
Robertis, quoted below, was swiftly removed by Museum security.
There is a gap in art history, the absent point of view of the object of the gaze. In his realist painting, the painter shows the open legs, but the vagina remains closed. He does not reveal the hole, that is to say, the eye. I am not showing my vagina, but I am revealing what we do not see in the painting, the eye of the vagina, the black hole, this concealed eye, this chasm, which, beyond the flesh, refers to infinity, to the origin of the origin.[2]
Here we see that nearly 150 years after Courbet revealed the painting to the salon, female nudity — when removed from the context of the tradition of the nude and placed simply before us as the origin of us — is deemed inappropriate and offensive. It would be interesting to question — as something of a side note — the view of those outraged by Robertis’ performance, on pornography. The fact that — in the above photograph- the artist has been afforded a black circle to cover her modesty but the depicted vagina in the painting has not, further exemplifies this point. Could it be that we are willing to look at a woman’s genitals only when her body is sexually charged and not within the context of the art museum?
The painting is thought to have been commissioned by the Turkish-Egyptian diplomat — Khalil Bey — a member of the Paris bourgeoisie and collector of artworks celebrating the female form. It is not hard to imagine L’origine du Monde centre stage in this ‘oriental flaneur’s’[3] collection; a truly modern connoisseur of the arts, Khalil Bey moved within both Eastern and Western avant-garde circles. It is unclear what happened to the painting after this and before its coming into the hands of its other high profile owner; Jacques Lacan whom I will go on to discuss presently.
In stark contrast to Khalil Bey, Jacques Lacan chose to hang Courbet’s painting behind a wooden sliding door, hiding it from view. This was possibly on request of his wife for whom the thought of displaying such a picture in one’s household must have seemed inappropriate. The door, which had been specifically designed for this purpose, did however bear a simplified carving of the painting.
Thus here we can begin to consider the gaze — the act of viewing and the awareness that one can also be viewed. In looking at L’origine du Monde, one is conscious that others may be looking at you looking and, due to the painting’s subject, this is a source of discomfort. To quote Jacques Lacan from Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis:
…this is the essential point — the dependence of the visible on that which places us under the eye of the seer. But this is going too far, for that eye is only the metaphor of something that I would prefer to call the seer’s ‘shoot’ (pousse) — something prior to his eye. What we have to circumscribe, by means of the path he indicates for us, is the pre-existence of a gaze — I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.[4]
To gaze as opposed to other synonyms of looking is usually limited to the field of art in its usage; and within feminist art theory it is widely documented that this gaze is assumed to be male and of middle class origin. In the case of the aforementioned Olympia, the gaze is returned as the viewer finds himself studied as he studies the canvas — the viewer becomes the spectacle. This phenomenon is described by — among many others — Michel Foucault, in his reading of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Below is a short extract from the chapter on Diego Velazquez’ Las Meninas in The Order of Things in which Foucault describes the phenomenon by which the viewers gaze is met — and held — by the gaze of the depicted.
As soon as they place the spectator in the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the picture, assign him a place at once privileged and inescapable, levy their luminous and visible tribute from him, and project it upon the inaccessible surface of the canvas within the picture.[5]
Despite the fact that the depicted in the case of Las Meninas is radically distinct from in the case of L’orignine du Monde, I think this is an interesting notion of Foucault’s, that the gaze of the depicted, when it meets one’s own, draws one into the canvas. Of the painting in question, could we say that the same is true? As the image of female genitalia meets one’s gaze, does it not only reflect it back, but also draw one into the canvas, ‘assigning you a place at once privileged and inescapable.’[6] My understanding of Lacan’s notion of the gaze is that it represents the realisation that behind one’s desire lies nothing but one’s own lack; the materiality of the real staring back at us. It is also an important aspect of Lacan’s writing on the mirror stage — the gaze enables the infant to differentiate between himself and the other, thus enabling an awareness of the ego to develop. The gaze exists somewhere between the ego and the other. To quote Lacan; ‘The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the thrust of our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety.’[7]
For psychoanalysis, castration anxiety a crucial part of sexual development in both sexes — in males, the anxiety stems from the possibility of castration, and for females, anxiety originates from a castration that has already occurred — the thing that is already lost and unattainable to her. ‘The wish to possess a penis as the male does, passes normally, however, into the wish to share his penis in some coitus-like action by means of the mouth, anus, or vagina.’[8] Jones, building on the work of Lacan, therefore states that the envy that the female experiences materialises in a desire for the penis in the form of sexual acts. This envy resulting in desire is not reciprocated in the male, therefore the female sexual organ is subjugated along with the female body and is glorified in a different way — leading to objectification. I will discuss this difference further in due course, but first, to quote Jones once again; ‘for obvious physiological reasons, the female is more dependant on her partner for her gratification than is the male on his. Venus had much more trouble on Adonis, for example, than Pluto with Persephone.’[9]
Here the notion of female lack — manque — described by Lacan, or penis envy — penisneid — as described by Sigmund Freud, must be brought to attention. Both of these terms address the fundamental difference between man and woman — their biology, but, by this judgement women are seen to be not just different, but lacking. By this definition, to be female could be seen to be other, as Lacan states;
Perhaps this conceptualization simply means that everything can be attributed to a woman insofar as she represents the absolute Other in the phallocentric dialectic.[10]
This othering of the female has resulted in the female sexual organs being mythologised; this is illustrated by the fact that in the history of anatomical drawing and study, we find that an accurate representation of female genitalia is a relatively recent development. Ernest Jones addresses this in Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality thusly: ‘To meet this comes the unfortunate circumstance that many men do really evince disparagement of women’s sexuality together with a dread of the female organ.’[11] The dread described here is fascinating when we consider the painting in question in this essay, and its veiling in Lacan’s household.
It is interesting to consider this painting in through a feminist perspective of psychoanalysis, as here by Jacqueline Rose — ‘we know that women are meant to look perfect, presenting a seamless image to the world so that the man, in that confrontation with difference, can avoid any comprehension of lack’[12] Courbet’s painting does not demand this his subject adheres to a conception of female beauty found in other paintings of its time; by isolating this aspect of his model, he removes much of the subjective criteria of female beauty the viewer brings with them when faced with an image of a woman. It is important to note though, that these criteria are to a large extent dictated by social and cultural norms. If Rose is to say that it is only through a perfect image of woman that the male viewer can comfortably address the difference, how can we imagine that L’origine du Monde would effect the viewer by her estimation?
In the case of L’origine du Monde; as the gaze is confronted by an image of female genitalia, this female lack is addressed and in fact turned on its head. Here, one could say, the vision of the female body is that of embodied power — this is further facilitated by the title of the painting through which its image is hailed as The Origin of the World.
The term, ‘Objet petit a’ was first used by Lacan in 1955, it can be translated to English as, ‘small a object’ but by this definition, the key word is lost. In Lacan’s French term, the ‘a’ stands for autre, meaning other. We can define La’Objet Petit a as the object cause of desire but also represents the unattainable object of our desires, revealing them as ultimately nothing but a screen for our own narcissistic projections. L’objet petit a is first encountered in the mirror phase of infant development, as the reflection is recognised as other to the self, this then enables the child to recognise others around himself. Thus this development enables conception of I for the child, but precedes the objectification of I in relation to the other — this is crucial in formulating the child’s understanding of the self in relation to his or her own reality. Lacan describes the mirror-image as ‘the threshold to the visible world’[13] — indeed this line of thought has transformed how we perceive and understand human subjectivity.
Here we could say that L’objet Petit a is depicted in L’origine du Monde, inasmuch as it seems to be concerned with addressing the gaze and notions of otherness. Indeed, as I have previously mentioned, femininity is bound up with, and enacted through, the notion that women are other. One could also say that it is a painting that is concerned with a realist look to female sexuality and the bodily.
Now to take a look at the theme of embodiment in Courbet’s paintings through close reading of Michael Fried in Courbet’s Realism (1990) and Art and Objecthood (1998). In many of Courbet’s works — as we have seen in L’origine du Monde — the subject is cut off, or obscured by the frame, this is also true in the case of The Wounded Man (1844–1854). Here the subject is framed within very close proximity to the viewer — a kind of spilling out or challenging of the frame, enables a sense of absorption. Courbet is successful in creating an image of a man who is bound entirely to his bodily self as he slumps towards the viewer, his legs — not seen within the frame — are imagined to be outstretched towards one as it is beheld.
Thus we could say that absorption is achieved through embodiment. In The Desperate Man (1843–5), the artist is at once the beholder and the beheld; this minimises the sense of confrontation between subject and viewer, as if the surface of the canvas had become a mirror. Fried writes of this painting how we are invited to consider the artist’s awareness of his own body, claiming it as ‘…an unprecedented attempt on the part of the artist to transport himself as if bodily into the painting on which he was working and by doing so to remove himself as a potentially theatricalising factor from the scene of representation.’[14] Here it is important to note what is meant by the term theatrical in this case, in Art and Objecthood Fried defines theatricality in art as a certain pandering to one’s audience. Painting involves a degree of internal governing, it is autonomous — it faces inwards — this is not the case in, for instance Literalist painting which faces outwards — demanding the attention of its audience.
By this analysis from Michael Fried, L’origine du Monde can be seen to achieve absorption through emphasis on the bodily. It could also be said that the artist’s own bodily awareness is present in the painting as he places himself within the place of the other. I now wish to draw Jacques Lacan back into the debate; ‘If the sexes have different positions with respect to the object, it is owing to the distance that separates the fetishistic form of love from the erotomaniacal form of love. We should find its salient features in the most ordinary lived experience.’[15] So Lacan makes a further distinction between the sexes, in that the differing relations each sex has to the object can be put down to the difference between two forms of love, one in which the object of desire is fetishised and the other delusional form, in which the subject believes they are the object of their object’s desire. In Courbet’s painting the female body is not fetishised as we might imagine psychoanalysis would have him do, instead the subject is elevated by its title and painted literally resulting in a painting that addresses the bodily.
Fried further illustrates this, ‘although Courbet in ordinary life was a representative male of his time, the measures he was forced to take in his efforts to defeat the theatrical meant that the art he produced is often structurally feminine.’[16] Although Fried does not address this painting; through this reading of Courbet’s work, the artist could be seen to be more closely associated with the other — with passivity of being seen as opposed to the activity of seeing — with being the object of the gaze, as opposed to beholding the gaze. Therefore within the discourse of spectatorship, Courbet has reversed or entangled his role; becoming both spectator and spectacle. This is due, I believe, to the strong rendering of physicality in Courbet’s work more generally, and despite the fact that Fried does not speak about L’origine du Monde, I think it is interesting to consider when viewing this work. Of course we must also make clear that Fried is stating that it was a need to escape the theatrical — and not a wish to produce structurally feminine works — that lead to this.
From whichever critical standpoint one views L’origine du Monde, it remains shocking to some extent; whether this be because of the dread associated with female genitalia I have previously outlined, or simply because we are not used to being confronted with an image such as this in a gallery setting. In this essay I have made attempts to consolidate three strands of thought within Courbet’s painting, resulting in the essential conclusion that it will not cease to be discussed and viewed because of its nature. For me, the painting lends itself easily for discussion within the framework of Lacan’s writing which in turn wove neatly into Fried’s account of the femininity of Courbet’s body of work. Although I do not agree necessarily with some of Lacan’s writing on female sexuality, there is no doubt that women are othered in our society so this provided an excellent backdrop on which to view the painting. It was necessary to keep in mind feminist art theory, which, although based mainly upon psychoanalysis, provided an alternative voice to the phallo-centric debate that has arisen in this work. Ultimately, considering the line of enquiry I have taken, I believe L’origine du Monde to be a positive presentation of the female body, forcing the viewer to address the fundamental difference between men and women, without reinforcing an idea of female lack.
[1] Rose, Jacqueline, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, 1988, p228
[2] Sutton, Benjamin, Artist Enacts Origin of the World at Musée d’Orsay — And, Yes, That Means What You Think, artnet.com 5th June 2014
[3] Turker, Deniz, The Oriental Flaneur: Khalil Bey and Cosmopolitan Experience, 2007
[4] Lacan, Jacques, Four Fundamental Concepts in Psychoanalysis, 1978, page 72
[5] Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, 1970, Page 5
[6] Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, 1970, page 6
[7] Lacan, Jacques, Four Fundamental Concepts in Psychoanalysis, 1978, page 73
[8] Jones, Ernest, Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, 1966, p27
[9] Jones, Ernest, Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, 1966, p24
[10] Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, 1966, p616
[11] Jones, Ernest, Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, 1966, p33
[12] Rose, Jacqueline, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, 1986, p232
[13] Lacan, Jacques, Four Fundamental Concepts in Psychoanalysis, 1978, p170
[14] Fried, Michael, Courbet’s Realism, 1990, Page 262
[15] Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, 1966, p617
[16] Fried, Michael, Courbet’s Realism, 1990, p189
