The history of 'The Origin of the World'

Thierry Savatier
L’ORIGINE DU MONDE
Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet
231pp. Paris: Bartillat. 20euros.
2 84100 377 9

When Gustave Courbet’s painting “The Origin of the World” went on permanent display at the Musée d’Orsay in 1995, it was emerging from what must be one of the longest periods of visual quarantine in the history of art. Painted sometime in 1866, for the better part of 130 years it had been cordoned off in private collections, its existence known only to a small group of people, few of whom left any record of the work. Even Courbet, with his swashbuckling disregard for convention, seems for once to have erred on the side of caution. Neither signed nor dated, the picture was never mentioned by him in writing, and it is only on the strength of two small contemporary documents (the report of a dinner at which the painter, never more fulsome than when singing his own praises, likens his little figure to the nudes of Titian and Veronese, and a description by Maxime du Camp so slapdash that one doubts whether he had actually seen the picture with his own eyes) that we can be sure Courbet painted it at all.

Everywhere you turn in the painting’s history, you meet with the same pattern of secrecy and obfuscation. The man thought to have commissioned the picture, a wealthy Turkish-Egyptian diplomat named Khalil Bey, kept it hung behind a green cover in his private dressing room. When Edmond de Goncourt came across it, some twenty-three years later, in 1889, it was concealed by a second Courbet, “Le Château de Blonay”, in a double-bottomed frame. In 1913, it passed into the hands of a Hungarian collector, Baron Ferenc Hatvany, who kept it under lock and key in his town house in Budapest. The last and best-known of the private owners, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, hung it in his workroom at Guitrancourt, where it was again concealed by a sliding panel, painted by his brother-in-law André Masson. The earliest known reproduction, in an obscure gynaecological publication in 1967, in fact depicts a copy, now missing, but thought to have been made by Magritte. In 1988, the painting was shown in public for the first time, at the “Courbet Reconsidered” exhibition in Brooklyn; today, it hangs in the same room at the Musée d’Orsay as Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”.

Why all the fuss? The reason, of course, is the subject matter of the painting: a slant view of a truncated female nude which sights up from a vantage point very close to the model’s pudenda. There’s nothing particularly sensual about the picture, however. Courbet painted quite a few voluptuous nudes, but “The Origin of the World” (which is not really a nude at all, but a life study) has neither the torpid opulence of his sprawling “Bacchante”, nor the hushed erotic charge of those signature nudes in which the painter gazes down on a sleeping woman. Nor can it really be said to be obscene, for, unlike the much more provocative “Woman with White Stockings”, painted a few years earlier, the focus of the picture is not the model’s genitalia as such, but the “matted Rorschach blot”, as John Updike once described it, of glinting, inky-black pubic hair. Painted with the same warmth and awed attention to detail as the rich, creamy flesh-tones, it is a reminder that you can lift the veil on anything in art, provided you do so in the same spirit that caused the veil to be put there in the first place.

The French have a long and, for the most part, happy tradition of sexual candour, and the installation of the painting at the Musée d’Orsay was greeted with an excitable outpouring of books and articles, much of it froth. The most serious of these was Bernard Teyssèdre’s Le Roman de l’Origine (1996), a book that is a mine of information but is marred by garrulousness and an awkward mix of registers and genres – part essay, part biographical novel, part private confession, part notes – that makes it almost impossible to read. Ten years on, in L’Origine du Monde: Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet, Thierry Savatier has reviewed these earlier productions and carried out some first-hand research of his own. He has not by any means solved all the mysteries: there are still huge gaps in the narrative, notably between 1868 and 1889, and 1889 and 1912. He has, however, cleared up a host of minor errors and approximations, uncovered the identities of certain characters in the story (notably Mme Vial and Ernest Feydeau, the author of a hitherto anonymous piece of doggerel about the painting) and, by questioning certain assumptions made about the work, opened up further avenues for research.

The same scrupulousness is evident in the sketches Savatier gives of the main protagonists. This is particularly true of the early part of the story (1886–1913), to which he devotes nearly half his book. Like Teyssèdre, he finds Khalil Bey, whose collection also included not just Ingres’s “Bain Turc” but a range of landscape and history paintings, a rather more interesting and congenial figure than the Oriental sex-pot conjured up by his contemporaries, and Savatier is similarly generous towards Bey’s erstwhile mistress, Jeanne de Tourbey, whose ascent from provincial bottle-washer (or brothel-girl, depending on which account you choose to believe) to society hostess and Comtesse de Loynes reads like something out of Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. Antoine de la Narde, the dealer who showed the painting to Edmond de Goncourt, turns out to have been a more substantial figure than the petit brocanteur he is usually portrayed as, and the chapter reviewing the possible models for the painting is nuanced and persuasive. (The author finds none of the flesh-and-blood candidates, least of all Whistler’s mistress Jo, very plausible, and thinks that Courbet, who had a large collection of nude photographs, probably worked from a “stereograph” by Auguste Belloc, who employed some of the same models as Courbet.)

The high point of the narrative, and the single most impressive piece of detective work, concerns the Hungarian aristocrat Ferenc Hatvany and the looting of his collection during the Second World War. The period in question extends from September 1942, when Hatvany deposited “seventy-one canvases and drawings, plus twelve precious rugs”, under the name of a non-Jewish friend, in a series of banks, to 1949/50, when he escaped to Paris. By trawling through the Hungarian national archives and the records of local banks, Savatier has established that it was not, as had previously been believed, the Nazis who had made off with the booty in question, but the Red Army, which sent in a special commando during the “liberation” of Budapest to clean out the city’s bank vaults. (The Nazis did indeed help themselves to the major part of Hatvany’s collection, which he had been unable to protect, but, with ghastly logic, they respected goods deposited in banks “so long as the owners of the vaults weren’t Jewish”.) The story of how Hatvany subsequently retrieved, with the aid of a corrupt Soviet functionary, a tiny fraction of his once 800-strong collection and smuggled it out of the country is a little book in itself, and involves, among others, the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, whose actions are estimated to have saved the lives of between 30,000 and 100,000 Hungarian Jews.

After the grim drama of the Hatvany period, the Lacan chapters verge at times on farce. Savatier does his best to unravel the conflicting accounts given (to confound the taxman) by Lacan’s widow, Sylvia Bataille, of how the couple came to acquire the painting, and which of them actually owned it, but much of the fog remains. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this whole period is how well guarded the secret of the picture’s whereabouts was. At one moment it is reported to be in a collection on the West Coast of America; at another, in Japan. Yet, as the author reveals, a long list of distinguished visitors, from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Leiris to Marguerite Duras and Dora Maar, had seen the painting at Lacan’s. One of these guests, Marcel Duchamp, is of particular interest, since his famous posthumous installation, “Étant Donné”, appears to have been directly inspired by Courbet’s picture as a final riposte to the bête noire of “realism”. But had Duchamp actually seen the painting? He and his wife, Teeny, are known to have dined with the Lacans, at their flat in the rue de Lille, in 1958, and Savatier thinks it likely that Lacan would have brought the little canvas up to Paris for the occasion. He concludes, however, that even if Duchamp did see the picture there, it cannot have provided the inspiration for “Étant Donné”, a preliminary sketch for which had been made as early as 1947.

At this point, the reader may find himself wondering about Émile Vial, the man Savatier has identified as the likely owner of the painting in the early part of the century. Not much is known about Vial, who was a scientist by profession and a collector of Japanese art, but the little that Savatier has been able to glean about his life is full of curious details. For one thing, he seems to have been interested in precisely the kind of speculative science that engaged Duchamp’s brothers and their friends in the “Section d’Or” at Puteaux. For another, three of Vial’s publications (which have titles like Le positif + le négatif – duo d’amour en un acte and La Machine humaine) are listed in the general catalogue of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, where Duchamp, as we know, did a great deal of reading. Equally intriguing, the address given on a card Vial sent to Ernst Mach in 1911 reveals him to have been living only a short walk from Duchamp’s studio in Neuilly at that time. If I were a Duchamp scholar, I would want to know more about M Vial.

This is one of the more riddling episodes in the picture’s history that the author has been unable to elucidate satisfactorily. For the rest, he has done a remarkably good job of disentangling fact from fiction, and his book, encouragingly for a small-press publication, is now in its second printing. As for the corpus delicti itself, despite the odd scrape with the censors, its emergence into the limelight seems to have passed off surprisingly well. “There are paintings”, Kenneth Clarke wrote, “in which Courbet achieves comfortably and with hardly a trace of defiance that conquest of shame which D. H. Lawrence attempted in prose.” Museum-goers, it seems, would agree: not only has no one taken a meat-cleaver to it, but, if postcard sales are anything to go by, it is the second most popular painting in the Musée d’Orsay, after Renoir’s “Moulin de la Galette”. As Thierry Savatier says, for a painter who, in his hunger for fame, set so much store by his huge canvases of contemporary life, it is not the least curious twist in the tale.
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Mark Hutchinson is a freelance translator.