The Origin of the World - Gustave Courbet

The year was 1866 and Courbet was already a well-known painter in France for his technical skill, but mostly for his critical and corrosive attitude towards the bourgeois society and its moral values, which he criticized whenever he had the chance. Courbet was a staunch socialist, arrogant and self-confident. However, this isn't enough to justify the work of art he created during that year and that would become his most famous. Depicting frontally a woman's thighs and female genitalia, The Origin of the World (L'Origine du monde) deeply shook the artistic community at the time. And then some!

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This painting emerges, then, as a protest against academism, but also against the phoniness reigning in nineteenth century Art and Society. It represents the definitive liberation of the artist from every possible stereotype! Meaningful is the fact that the controversy is due to the topic not the pictorial qualities of the painting - whether it was well painted or not. The Origin of the World was an inspired work of art, visionary even, a most important aesthetic act and a work of grandeur, Modern painting might just have begun here, with the origin is a woman's sex.

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