Origin Of Universal Joy Poem by gershon hepner

Although the critics mainly were censorious,
Courbet, the artist, being territorial,
described in paint what he considered glorious,
refusing cover-ups that were censorial.
Considering a woman’s open thighs
to be the organ of the origin
of universal joy, his work defies
polemics made by critics against sin.

Roberta Smith reviews an exhibition of work by Gustasve Courbet at the Metropolitan Musuem (“Seductive Rebel Who Kept it Real, ” NYT, February 29,2008) :
Courbet’s life story is a rousing read, with its early fame, recurring controversies and tragic end. In 1873 he fled to Switzerland to avoid reimbursing the French government for the reconstruction of the Place Vendôme Column. (It was destroyed during the short, chaotic rule of the Paris Commune, when he was in charge of protecting all things artistic, public monuments included.) He died there, bitter and broken, four years later. But stick with the paintings. No artist before Picasso left so much of himself on canvas. The first large gallery, dominated by Courbet’s tall, dark and handsome self-portraits, provides an almost sickening dose of his high self-regard, dramatic flair and roving attention to the old masters, variously Italian, Spanish and Dutch. In the earliest and smallest, he is a long-haired, wan Pontormo prince. In “The Desperate Man” he tears his hair, wide-eyed and wild, like Johnny Depp’s pirate rendered by Caravaggio. And in “Self-Portrait With Pipe” we see an early version of the disengaged gaze, at once dreaming and sardonic, that would characterize many of his images of women….This show proceeds more thematically than chronologically, which makes sense because Courbet didn’t really proceed in a linear manner. He hopped around according to shifts in his interests, his attention span and the demands of his clients. His “Reclining Nude” of 1862 is a kind of joke on Titian: a rather loosely painted figure with Kewpie-doll knee socks surrounded by excesses of red velvet drapes and a brownish atmosphere. Next to it, the steamy giantesses of “Sleep, ” from 1866, offer a vision of crystalline Rococo pinks and whites. This work was a commission for Khalil-Bey, a Turkish-Egyptian diplomat, as was Courbet’s most confrontational work, the infamous “Origin of the World, ” an unembellished close-up of a woman’s lower torso and open thighs. (The work is sequestered in a narrow space along with a nearly identical stereographic image by Auguste Belloc and several photograph of nudes.) This painting resurfaced only in the 1980s, from the collection of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. More clinical than erotic, and more territorial than acquiescent, it identifies woman as proud possessor, revealing the ultimate object of the male gaze with a forthrightness that can stop the gaze in its tracks. More than perhaps any painter of his great painting century, Courbet built elements of rebellion and dissent into the very forms and surfaces of his work. Some were on purpose; others were left for us to discover, to feel in our bones. Even at the end he expressed his defiance in still lifes of fruit that seem impossibly large and overbearing, like him, and in magnificent trout hooked and struggling against the line, even more like him. Since then, generation upon generation of painters have responded to his art and its challenges, but his example of stubborn nonconformity has many uses.


2/29/08