May 14, 2026 : Issue #113 (NSFW?)
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
WELCOME
(Note: This one may be NSFW, or, for that matter, not suitable for the younger or more easily triggered among you. Just saying.) Another in our series of deep-dive considerations of artists such as Titian, Morandi, and Richter. This time, a quartet of impromptu reveries on the origins of and follow-ons from Gustave Courbet’s own lifelong thrall to the spectacle of primordial sources.
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The Main Event
COURBET’S SOURCES
a reverie in four impromptus
I.
The Origin of the World
Start, perhaps, with the following sequence of paintings:
Fascinating in this regard how Courbet’s self-portrait as the Désespéré, (immediately above, right) has exactly but exactly the same structure as the Origine du Monde (left), his forearms angled as her thighs, his nose as her cleft, the transposed tufts of hair, the astonishing and astonished gazes face à face (not to mention that, juxtaposed like that, one beside the next, his right sleeved elbow seems to melt into her bedsheets)—all of which in turn helps to explain the eternal mystery of what that naked model on her break is doing there in the L’Atelier when the artist seems simply to be working on the painting of an otherwise neutral landscape (because of course she could have been its very model!).
Meanwhile, should you have happened to visit the Met a while back (before the recent re-hanging), you’d have come upon these juxtapositions in your own line of view:
Sources on Sources: A Methodological Note
In order of their appearance in this piece:
La Source de la Loue, 1863-4 Private collection (Sotheby’s sale, 16 Dec. 2015)
La Source de la Loue, 1863-4 Zurich, Kuntshaus
La Source de la Loue, 1863-4 New York,Metropolitan Museum
La Source du Lison, circa 1864, Berlin, Nationalgalerie
The Grotto of Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte Anne, 1864, Los Angeles, Getty Museum
Le Gours de Conche, Besançon, 1864, Musee des Beaux Arts et Archeologie
L’Origine du Monde, 1866, Paris, Musée D’Orsay
Le Deséspéré, 1844-5, Private Collection
L’Atelier du paintre, 1855, Paris, Musée d’Orsay
La Femme á la Vague, 1868, New York, Metropolitan Museum
La Source de la Loue, 1863-4, New York, Metropolitan Museum
La Source, 1862, New York, Metropolitan Museum
All of which is to say, what, exactly? The sequential progression in the foregoing reverie is of course entirely out of chronological order. And yet.
Because something equally intriguing emerges when you shuffle the deck back into its proper chronological sequence. For the primal shudder of the Deséspéré self-portrait comes first in 1844-5, a good twenty years before the artist’s full-bore grotto passion (as if, in premonition, the young Courbet were already gasping before the terminus of that eventual obsession) and then comes the Atelier painting ten years after that (1855, another self-portrait, the painter at work on a dark deep landscape banked to either side by the naked model on her break and the gaping child). And then, as a sort of prelude to the grotto passion proper, comes that strange painting of the standing nude (1862), her back to us, as if reaching out to embrace the waters coursing down the falls before her—a canvas the artist entitles La Source, which in turn seems to launch him out onto that whole series of vantages upon headwaters, the sources of actual rivers and streams, as they come pouring forth from between banked rockcliffs (1864-5). Only after which, two years later, at the behest of Khalil Bey (Halil Serif Pasha), an Ottoman diplomat whose personal collection of erotic art already included Ingres’s Le bain turque and Courbet’s own Le Someil (with its intertwined naked
dozing sleepers, from 1866), did Courbet go on, that very same year, to produce his Origine du Monde, in a sense (reversing polarities), the very source, the headwaters, of everything that had preceded it. (There is currently a heated debate over which of the two sleepers in Le Someil may have been the model for l’Origine.) One wonders in this context, whether it might not have been the more forthright and unabashed Bey who came up with the idea for the suggested image after himself having perused the prior series of Courbet’s grotto vantages—or, conversely, was it the offer of the commission for inclusion in such a secret private collection that at long last freed Courbet up to confront and produce the ur-image in the series to which all the others had all along (half-consciously? unconsciously? fully consciously?) been tending?
Who knows? And how could one, definitively, ever? It’s all a reverie in any case. The daydream perhaps of that lady in the waves, from two years further on, in 1868. (Or for an entirely different dreamy drift of speculation regarding the origin of the Origin, see this recent scholarly passion dive.)
Perfect, at any rate, how once the Ottoman diplomat went bankrupt, a few years later, owing to his profligate gambling habits, and thereupon had to sell L’Origine, the painting launched out on its own near-century-long divagations,
finally ending up in the collection of that eminent psychoanalyst-provocateur Jacques Lacan, whose heirs managed to settle their own inheritance tax issues by deeding the painting to the French State, hence its current lodging at the Musée d’Orsay.
And perfect, too, how once Lacan had procured the canvas in 1955, he asked his step-brother-in-law, the surrealist maître Andre Masson to fashion a sort of coverlet to serve as a kind of discrete overlay, shielding the scandalous image from everyday prying eyes, and Masson responded by creating, of all things, a sort of cloudstrewn oneiristic landscape:
Which in turn gets one to wondering about the taproots of Masson’s fellow surrealist Marcel Duchamp’s final masterpiece, the Étants donnés
upon which he was beavering away, in secret, in a backroom of his New York apartment, across the final two decades of his life, from 1946 through 1966. Is it possible to imagine that he could have been doing so without knowledge of Courbet’s secret Origine, and if not, might he in turn have first heard about that canvas by way of Masson, thereafter (a full decade into his initial labors) somehow himself gaining access to Lacan’s drawing room?
But enough already! Surely there needs come an end to such speculations.
II
Melamid’s Rear
Though, speaking of which:
The great artists see it coming.
Back in their native Soviet Union, in the 1960s, collaborative artists Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar fashioned a body of work that deployed socialist realist tropes in comically magic realist and even downright Warholian terms, anticipating, by a good half century, 2018’s film Death of Stalin (and for that matter the persistence of Putin). Following their arrival in America in 1978, they continued in much the same vein, though they broke up as a collaborative over 20 years ago.
In February 2016, for his part, flush off the success of his great urinal show (an extended revisioning of Duchamp’s epochal Fountain, on its 100th anniversary), Melamid decided to honor the 150thanniversary of Courbet’s Origin of the World (L’origine du monde) with his own End of the World (Le but du monde), a quite shocking portrayal of some guy’s (actually his own) naked rear end, cheeks spread, anus exposed and unabashedly rampant. Talk about dialectical materialism: if his two ass-cheeks represented thesis and antithesis, where did that put the rest of us, his painting’s viewers? With this work, he anticipated, well, everything that was to follow through the rest of that year and, frankly, the next four (and for that matter on to the present day!).
St Benedict might well have approved—or anyway understood. Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine Order in the sixth century AD, taught that the foremost virtue of the righteous monk was “discretion.”
Over the years, interpreters have differed over what exactly the good saint meant or was getting at, but some have cited the origin of the word, which is to say (as some, anyway, have surmised), dis-escretio, to infer that Benedict might have been heralding the ability to know the difference between food and shit and to understand that each has its place (shit being good for fertilizer, say, but not for eating). Discretion hence being precisely the virtue our civic culture would stand most desperately in need of across the coming Age of Trump.
And I’m sorry, if all of this seems a bit du trop, you can always just shield your eyes and remember that delicious old saw (about which Alex, of course, took scampish delight in reminding me): What did the one butt-cheek say to the other? If only we can just stick together, maybe we can put a stop to all this shit!
III
That Boy
To shift, perhaps, to a slightly less flagrant register.
Going back to Courbet’s Atelier, what exactly are we expected to make of that boy? What’s he doing there, so absorbed in the painter’s ministrations that he seems to have become utterly oblivious to the presence of the naked model just beyond?
(Then again, for that matter, what are we to make in this context of that puppy’s—or is it a pussy’s?—friskily wagging tail.) (Note that the vulgar euphemism in English tracks directly with its French counterpart, la chatte.)
At any rate, for some reason (maybe it’s just the shirt collar) Courbet’s boy recently put me in mind of Norman Rockwell’s wickedly sly Saturday Evening Post cover from Christmas 1956 (just about the same time, it occurs to me, that Lacan would have been acquiring L’Origine). Titled The Discovery, it is one of a series of such images in which Rockwell tagged the very moment when Little Johnny discovers the true identity of Santa Claus. In this instance, or so Richard Halpern construes the image in his own marvelously sly 2006 volume Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, Johnny would appear to have wandered into his parents’ bedroom and opened up the bottom drawer in their bed-facing chest, when what else should come pouring out than Santa’s entire costume, complete with frisky tufts of beard now lapping against his side—and suddenly our boy turns back toward us, having just figured everything out.
With the “it” (from the look on Little Johnny’s face) being a stand-in for that other far more primordially loaded “it.” Cue back to Courbet’s Désespéré.
Talk about stumbling upon the primal scene. And it’s not as if Rockwell, notwithstanding the wholesomeness of his scrupulously maintained public image, wouldn’t have been privy to precisely such knowledge. He may not have had Jacques Lacan for a therapist, but he did have Eric Ericson, and during exactly that period.
For his own part, at this point in his book, Halpern pulls back for a more general lesson:
There are sometimes moments of shocked discovery, to be sure, but these usually release a built-up reservoir of previously unacknowledged doubt. Otherwise, they can always be explained away. And this gets at a crucial truth about shocked recognition: it is not the moment of emergence from disavowal into enlightenment. Rather, it places the seal on disavowal by insisting (falsely) that up until that moment one did not know.
Halpern goes on to instance the pedophile priest scandals of the early 2000s, in which people kept insisting on being “shocked” at learning of abuses for which ample evidence had long been available. Whereupon he brings matters right up to date:
As I write these words in May 2004, the American public is absorbing the “shock” of learning that Iraqi prisoners have been regularly abused, tortured, and murdered in American custody, under the supervision of military intelligence. I don’t mean to belittle such enormities by comparing them to the uncovering of Santa Claus. But the protecting of a factitious innocence by pretending (to ourselves) to be shocked is an infantile stratagem of which people never seem to tire. Our own dresser drawer is Abu Ghraib prison, from which we extract not an empty Santa suit but hooded, naked prisoners, and we stand there with the wide-eyed surprise of Rockwell’s boy. Who knew?
Reading that passage at the time, in 2005, when I happened to be directing the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU, I invited Halpern to keynote an upcoming symposium we were pulling together around the legacy of Abu Ghraib. Here was the poster we put together for that event:
Shocked. Shocked: The origin of the world, indeed.
IV
The Vendome Column
Just a few years after the run of Courbet canvases surveyed in Part 1, the clownishly corrupt and incompetent Emperor Napoleon III (“first time tragedy, second time farce,” as Marx had earlier framed an account of his rise to power) foolishly declared war on Prussia and other German states (19 July 1870) and within weeks, following the Battle of Sedan at the beginning of September 1870, managed to get both himself and the better part of the French Army captured by the Prussians. With the fall of the Second Empire, a Third French Republic was declared, though its leaders quickly decamped from threatened Paris to a more secure Tours, from where they endeavored to continue the war, though not much more successfully than Napoleon III, with besieged Paris surrendering to the Prussians and signing an independent armistice (disarming local elements of the French army, though not the local militia) on January 28, 1871. Following the complete surrender of the rest of the French army forces, the increasingly disgusted militiamen, citoyens and ouvriers of Paris rose up in rebellion against the hapless Third Republic and established an independent and self-administering Paris Commune on March 18, and the vividly radicalized community persisted through the next two months (the first historic instance, Marx declared, of an actual “dictatorship of the proletariat”) until a reinforced French army returned to the city and ruthlessly suppressed the entire uprising.
Courbet had been a politically engaged artist from his earliest years (see the eminent TJ Clark’s landmark Image of the People, which covered Courbet’s transit through the events of 1848 and immediately beyond and in so doing documents the taproots of his anarchist socialist leanings)—indeed the Realist movement in painting of which Courbet came to stand at the very forefront was in many ways a conspicuous repudiation of the earlier academicist hegemony of establishment France.
But the extent of that engagement grew considerably during those years in particular. In September 1870, shortly after the capture of Napoleon III, Courbet wrote a public letter to the interim National Defense government, decrying the vainglorious (and decidedly phallic) triumphalist column which the recently deposed emperor’s uncle, Napoleon I, had originally erected in honor of his own army’s multiple victories, with a sculpture of himself at its pinnacle, in the heart of the Place Vendome (“a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation’s sentiment”) and requesting that the column be removed and remanded to some less enthralling setting. He subsequently wrote an open letter to the German army and German artists proposing that cannons from both sides be melted as the basis for a replacement monument, to be crowned by a liberty cap, and “dedicated to federation of the French and German people.” Nothing much initially came of either proposal.
But with the rising of the Paris Commune in March 1871, Courbet took the lead in forming a Federation of Artists and was elected to the leadership council of the Commune. There is some controversy as to what happened next—things were moving very quickly, and Courbet, always an oppositionist by nature, fell away from the leadership fairly quickly—but he now either did or didn’t advocate the complete demolition of the column (and its replacement now by a monument in honor of the founding of the Commune) and was or wasn’t subsequently present, when, on the 16th of May, the Column was indeed toppled amidst great celebratory display.
Nine days later, on May 28, it was the Commune itself that was decisively overthrown by rampaging French national army forces. Courbet dove into hiding but was apprehended on June 7 and tried before a military tribunal where, despite his protestations that he had tried to moderate the more radical tendencies of the Commune, for example advocating the transplantation rather than the destruction of the Vendome column, he was convicted on August 14 and sentenced to six months of prison. Allowed access to paint and an easel but not to human models, he completed a remarkable suite of still lifes, and in particular a wrenching study of an only-just-snagged trout, still straining at the hook lodged in its mouth, bleeding at the gills, signing the canvas in red in the lower left with the Latin inscription vinculus faciebat (“made in bondage”).
Courbet was released in September 1872, something of a broken man, but his troubles were far from over. The newly elected president of the French Republic, Patrice MacMahon, announced plans to rebuild the Vendome column, with the entire costs to be borne by Courbet himself. Facing bankruptcy, Courbet went into self-imposed exile in the Jura region of Switzerland, where in the ensuing years he reverted to what might be seen in retrospect as two of his life themes. A series of rampant landscapes reminiscent in their open-spread composition of his ur-Origine…
…and an ongoing series of fatally gasping landed trout, like these two here, from 1873:
A sequence which the contemporary Brooklyn artist Kyle Staver has deemed “as tragic as the last act of King Lear.”
The concluding paragraph of Courbet’s Wikipedia entry poignantly captures the anguish of those final years:
On 4 May 1877, Courbet was told the estimated cost of reconstructing the Vendôme Column; 323,091 francs and 68 centimes. {And sixty-eight centimes!} He was given the option of paying the fine in yearly installments of 10,000 francs for the next 33 years, until his 91st birthday. On 31 December 1877, a day before the first installment was due, Courbet died, aged 58, in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, of a liver disease aggravated by heavy drinking.
And thus, alas, amen.
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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive (please check out Weekly Strip).
Feel free to get in touch: animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com
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