Page 40 - Courbet

Fig. 42. Léonce Petit, G. Courbet, colour Yet the title, whether Courbet’s own or not, points to an ironic truth,
newsprint caricature, Le Hanneton, no. not only for Courbet and most likely his patron but, as everyone knows
18, 13 June 1867. deep inside and Freud would soon demonstrate, a deeply human one. It
is a visual version of the Latin vagina gentium — the womb of nations.
In the light of contemporary evolutionary theory, which had a history
in France well before the 1862 translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species
(1859), sexual reproduction and transmission were central factors in the
continuity of life itself. Yet even if Courbet were attuned to such debates,
his reference to them, unless it is simply crude, can only be tongue-in-
cheek.Truncating the female body and matter-of-factly exposing the vagina
in a way unprecedented in the art of painting regardless of any conceivable
justification was a patently daring test of Realism’s limits, private or public.
It is impossible to say whether or what kind of pleasure, erotic or sadistic,
Courbet may have taken from painting the Origin of the World. One can
imagine his brush forming certain delicate zones, an act far less clinical
than photography.That he obviously found no displeasure still leaves open
questions. Given the taste he probably shared with his patron, it is unlikely
he was indifferent, no matter how objectively ‘realist’ the image may
appear. Is it an act of libertinage, sadism or a cynical response to a dare?

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RESOLUTIONS

M other and Child on a Hammock, like the vast majority of Courbet’s paintings, has an outdoor setting.
Even among his nudes outdoor settings are the rule, the one major exception being Sleep. Courbet’s
Venus pictures and Woman with a Parrot have indications of furniture possibly associated with
interiors, but in all cases their backgrounds open up to landscapes.There was nothing exceptional about such
choices, given that the female nude was often viewed as a metaphor for nature itself – or herself, la nature being
gendered feminine in French and other languages based on Latin. In English we speak of Mother Nature. Even

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