Naked women on the walls, Part One.
Boy, does that sound nasty. Doesn’t it?
I have a real peekaboo relationship with the nude in art — and, frankly, the nude in any setting. Nudity makes me uncomfortable and excited — uncomfortable because excited, curious, even riveted.
So I walk away.
A few years ago, during another long-term stay in Paris, I came across Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (l’Origine du Monde) in its own little chamber (it seemed) in the Musée d’Orsay. I was, well, riveted. I wrote about that experience in a long-abandoned blog. I have linked the article, but I’m also going to quote some of it here (with a bit of additional paragraphing to break up those endless stretches of prose):
This day… I went to the Courbet room [in the Orsay] on the second floor. It is just beyond the photography room, so a natural spot for me to end up.
It is also the site of “l’Origine du Monde,” one of Courbet’s most famous paintings, at least since the Orsay acquired it in 1995. It seems to have been a private commission, and like so many European paintings, had a peripatetic life shuttled from one private owner to another in that era of world wars. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan owned it for several decades, and in fact rigged the painting so that there was another one on top of…
