L'Origine du monde (translated as "The Origin of the World") is an 1866 oil-on-canvas painting by Realist French artist Gustave Courbet. The painting is on display at the Musée d'Orsay, in Paris.
It depicts a close-up view of the genitals and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed with her legs spread. The model's identity has never been found, though there are several plausible candidates.
The painting served as an inspiration for many artists, such as Dada member Marcel Duchamp for his last major work, Étant donnés (1946–1966), which also features a naked woman lying on her back with her legs spread giving a view on her genitals.
Since this work of art might be deemed Not Safe for Work on this site, here's a link
◊ to it.
L'Origine du monde provides examples of:
- Hairy Girl: The woman surely has bushy pubic hair.
- It's Not Porn, It's Art: Courbet rejected academic painting and its smooth, oneiric, mythological, idealised nudes, but he also was up in arms against the hypocritical social conventions of the French Second Empire, where eroticism and even pornography were acceptable in paintings as long as it was not in realistic contexts.
- Modesty Bedsheet: Subverted. There is a bedsheet, but the only thing it covers is one of the woman's nipples, the rest in is plain view.
- Nipple and Dimed: The woman's left nipple is hidden by bed sheets, but the other is very visible, even though the whole breast is not shown.
- Our Nudity Is Different: Nude women depicted in paintings in Courbet's time by artists such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau were normally goddesses and other mythical, oneirical figures, so the fact that the nude woman here is a regular human without the pretense of myth or idealisation was seen as outrageous and scandalous in its day like it was the case for Courbet's contemporary Édouard Manet with works such as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia.
- Reclining Venus: The inspiration there with the woman's reclining pose, but also a subversion as seen under It's Not Porn, It's Art above.
