Sex Scenes: Lacan Hid “The Origin of the World” Behind a Surrealist Version of the Same Painting

The Origin of The World by Gustave Courbet, 1866, depicts an intensely intimate nude: a foreshortened study of a female model’s lower abdomen, hips, and pubic hair, the legs slightly spread, a rumpled white cloth concealing her chest; the frame truncates the figure before we see her face. It’s a portrait of pussy, a concept so potent that for more than two centuries, the painting was kept hidden as it shifted from owner to owner. “Would you like to see the origin of the world?” they’d ask, and lift the veil to reveal…a pussy.

The painting’s provocative effect comes from what it omits: with face, hands, arms, and legs cropped or covered, the gaze is focused on its object and nothing else. For the modern viewer, it’s reminiscent of encountering a similarly cropped image in a sex shop, the text on the box inviting a would-be pocket-pussy customer to feel the life-like, squishy silicone through a small window.

In Courbet’s rendering, tufts of pubic hair cascade against the curve of the dismembered body, creating a shroud. Look closer (closer than Courbet apparently did) and it’s not only the limbs and face that are omitted—the vagina depicted in the painting has no outer labia, no clitoris. It’s possible that Courbet found anatomical verisimilitude too explicit, but is it this fantasy, the sort of proto-labiaplasty on canvas, that makes the painting truly obscene?

The painting was commissioned by a Turkish prince named Khalil Bey, who lived a Parisian life of leisure, taking rooms on the Rue Taitbout, gambling, partying, and collecting art, especially erotic art and nudes. The Origin of the World was installed in the home of the prince, beneath a green veil, prompting voyeuristic guests to draw it aside. The painting later passed into the possession of a Hungarian baron, who hid it behind a painting of a Bavarian castle, supposedly by an apprentice of Courbet; in the system he devised, the viewer had to remove two locks to open the frame which hid the pussy-portrait like a treasure.

It becomes a painting about the beastliness of our origin, recalling the quote Freud misattributed to Augustine: “We are born between feces and urine.”

The painting disappeared during World War II, probably looted by Nazi troops, only to clandestinely reappear in Paris in 1955 in the private collection of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In 1955, Lacan had yet to achieve the cult-like status that he would later in life and was known only as a fashionable dandy who would happily drive Dalí around town for hours in search of a pair of pants. He had just married Sylvie Bataille, actress and ex-wife of Georges Bataille, the famed writer, philosopher, and surrealist literary pornographer. (First Lacan snatches Bataille’s wife, then he manages to make off with the The Origin of the World. Of the two feats, perhaps the latter is more amazing: Imagine a time when an academic could afford an artwork that once belonged to princes and barons.)

The Origin of the World, Gustave Courbet. Image via Wikimedia Commons

They acquired the painting soon after their marriage as a sort of wedding gift to themselves, and it would remain, true to tradition, hidden. It hung in Lacan’s country home in Guitrancourt beneath another artwork, a surrealistic version of The Origin of The World, which slid open to show the prized painting of a vagina below. When Lacan died in 1981, it was a shock to learn that the painting was in the hands of the famed psychoanalyst. He never publicly disclosed that he owned the infamous work; only a select few knew, including the novelist Marguerite Duras, whom it seems he was, understandably, trying desperately to charm.

When The Origin of the World was finally exhibited publicly in 1995 at the Musée d’Orsay—no longer hidden under a curtain—historiographer Bernard Teyssedre commented: “For one hundred and thirty years the painting was hidden, almost nobody saw it. Now that the whole world may see it, nobody, absolutely nobody, will see it any longer.”

For all the shock and opprobrium the painting inspired, it’s essentially a joke, for which the veil provides a symbolic framing and a structure. The metaphysical claim of the title—this is the origin of the universe—piques our curiosity, and behind the curtain lies the punchline: it’s a pussy. We don’t further interrogate the canvas. The image is the final word: the object in its materiality. God is brought down to the level of the human body, of sweat, blood, and dirt. It becomes a painting about the beastliness of our origin, recalling the quote Freud misattributed to Augustine: “We are born between feces and urine.”

Teyssedre knew that the pussy wouldn’t be veiled and unveiled any longer. It would now sit exposed in the sanitized air of the museum, where every image is elevated to the rarefied status of art. Canonization is the process by which an artwork achieves the status of masterpiece, but also refers to a person becoming a saint within the Catholic church: The very earthly body of The Origin of the World, a body that belonged to a woman, would now be elevated to the status of a heavenly body in the history of art.

When the curtain is removed and the punchline is diminished, only the metaphysical meaning remains—the title, The Origin of the World, suggests something beyond the canvas, and as we read the painting as a metaphor, it becomes abstract, no longer about the body itself.

There is something otherworldly in the corporeality of the subject and its ability to short-circuit memory, producing a vivid response, whether its lust, disgust, or awe. After all, there are many who accept the conceptual claim of the painting. There are those of us who recognize, in the angle of its gaze, a worshipful state—the origin of the world; those of us who lick pussy, who’ve felt the surge, pulsing, the tumbling forth of its orgasm, who are equally awed by the ability to fake a vaginal orgasm; those of us who have witnessed birth in all its mesmerizing, brutal calm, who recognize that pussy gives life and can also sustain it. Pussy pays the bills, pussy can keep the lights on—even in the joke, the veiled pussy, there is an element of giddiness that comes from recognizing the undeniable power of the image.

But maybe the unveiling marks a new era altogether in this bodily-determined line of thinking: in universalizing the image, we forget that, at one point, the body belonged to a particular individual woman, entering the painting into a post-pussy era.