Bought in the sale at Verso Books:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/1605-lacan
Discovered new things about a famous painting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Origine_du_monde
Lacan: In Spite Of Everything (Élisabeth Roudinesco)
It is precisely because in his view woman’s genitals are impossible to represent, speak and name that in 1954, on Bataille’s advice, Lacan acquired Gustave Courbet’s famous painting L’Origine du monde, done in 1866 for an Ottoman diplomat, Khalil-Bey, who lived in Paris. In it we find, in all their nudity, the open genitals of a woman just after the convulsions of love – that is, what is not shown and what is not referred to, if we set aside the discourses and sites reserved for pornography.
The canvas caused a scandal and stunned both the Goncourt brothers, who deemed it beautiful ‘like the flesh of a Correggio’, and Maxime Du Camp, who regarded it as ‘filth’ fit only to illustrate the works of the Marquis de Sade.
After the diplomat’s death, the painting disappeared from view, passing from one private collection to another. It turned up in Budapest during the Second World War, when the Nazis seized it, and then passed into the hands of the Soviet victors, finally being resold to collectors. In the course of these travels, it had been covered with a panel of wood on which a landscape had been painted intended to conceal the eroticism, deemed too horrifying, of these genitals in the raw state.
Shocked by the sight of wide-open female genitals, which resembled those of Bataille’s Madame Edwarda (1941), Sylvia Lacan asked her brother-in-law André Masson, husband of her sister Rose, to do a second painting to cover Courbet’s. The painter created a wooden cover representing a different set of female genitals, abstract and far removed from the real ones imagined by Courbet. When we view this sketch by Masson, we have the impression that he is presenting a puritanical imitation of the original genitals, because it is a simulated representation of them. In short, a neo-painting had repressed the original work, while exhibiting it.
In 1994, after Sylvia’s death, the canvas was donated to the Musée d’Orsay. Divested of its fig leaf, and free of any control, L’Origine du monde is now exposed to the eyes of all.
There have been numerous copies of Courbet’s painting by different painters, sometimes to conceal its subversive power, sometimes to proclaim it. But it was in 1989 that a feminist visual artist, Orlan, partisan of perverse sex, performance art, transvestism, body surgery and revisitation of works in the western pictorial tradition, realized the most stunning Lacanian version of the painting: an erect phallus in lieu of the woman’s genitals. With this ‘work’ entitled The Origin of War, Orlan sought to unmask what the painting concealed by fusing the unrepresentable ‘thing’ and its denegated fetish.