On Paradise Now: Sappho in the Age of the Suicide Bomber
A discussion of the nude in art & my 72 Virgins In Paradise

The common theory of Egyptian art is that it only begins to represent ordinary life rather than gods, pharaohs and queens when a sandstone sculpture places one foot in front of the other. Motion signifies human existence. Humans move, therefore there is history. In a similar sense, the frescoes on the walls of Minoan palaces in 1700 BC show figures, full breasts popping out of cinched, tight-waisted, flouncy dresses, bending to smell flowers or leaping over racing, raging bulls or elegantly leading religious processions. The sculpture of 4th century BCE Greece embodies human sexual nature when, borrowing from the posture of male warriors and athletes, a female nude leans on one hip, extending the curve of the hip upward to meet the curve of a breast while an opposite curve indicates the ribcage between them. She invents the S. The body is undulating stillness, desirability frozen in space, enhanced by a gentle tease when suddenly for the first time statues of Aphrodite are holding their draperies away from their bodies for the viewer to admire. In the previous century, male statues were unclothed in a celebration of athletic or soldierly health, a male union with the community at large--the Olympic athletes, after all, wrestled, ran, spear-chucked in the nude. Women, more often than not goddesses, were fully clothed, with perhaps a single breast tentatively visible behind a bit of dressage slipping from a shoulder. One hundred years later, the traditional art history narrative tells us, the female nude is born as a representative of the union of sex and geometry.
In Kenneth Clark's standard analytic narrative, once mathematical precision measured the relative distance of body parts into harmonies derived from Pythagoras and Vetruvius, the female nude could link "our most elementary notions of order and design." As he writes: the female nude predominates in art, and will become the dominate form of art for all time when "the intellectual analysis of parts dissolves before a sensuous perception of totalities." (p. 457) The classical nude, which establishes the western world's understanding of beauty, balances body parts according to mathematical proportions, and, in so doing, establishes the erotic identity of the desirable woman. The conformity of proportions makes the nude woman literally "presentable," at once admirable as a geometric figure removed from quotidian life because no single model was used for a sculpture, and sensuous, desirable and admirable as a geometric figure removed from ordinary life because no single female ever modeled for a sculpture; instead parts from various models became a whole -- perfect fingers met perfect hands that were later joined to the perfect forearm, and so on until a sensuous and curvaceous artificially construed female could represent womanhood and remain, of course, literally unavailable. It isn't dissimilar from advertising models today -- hand models, ankle models, eyes, cheeks, etc, though the ancient Greeks had a higher calling. As Allen White and Peter Stallybrass say: “...the classical statue is the radiant centre of a transcendent individualism, put on a pedestal, raised above the viewer and the commonality and anticipating passive admiration from below. We gaze up at the figure and wonder... The classical statue has no openings or orifices." In other words, the beautiful nude female retains her interior mystery -- perfectly proportioned, anatomically inaccessible, embodying the presentably unattainable. As a result of her creation, the ancient Greeks used to say that the Trojan War must have been fought over a statue of Helen, because only a statue, a composite of parts, could have been perfect enough, long enough, to send armies across the oceans and to keep them there for a decade, to say nothing of the Trojans not tossing her into the sea.
Of course, the “universal” beauty understood by the female nude is redefined constantly by changing historical circumstances: for example, proportions of the bourgeois nude expand to suggest the fleshiness of wealth, so that the nudes whose proportions most remind us of classical beauty are the commodified women--prostitutes, courtesans, dancers, paid models who litter the economic landscapes throughout Europe for several centuries. In effect, because they are nude rather than clothed, the nude women art depicts can only be read by their surroundings and their physical conditions--where they are, the furnishings, the company they keep. The discourse on beauty from culture to culture and age to age reiterates the quirky position of Kenneth Clark: that the history of art is the history of the female nude. The nude persists in our discourse because when we are not idealizing it, we are sublimating it, and in both instances we are marginalizing it because even to celebrate it we are objectifying it.
For instance, is Courbet's infamous "Origin of the World" a celebration of realized womanhood in a world of salon nudes stared at by young men who wouldn't dream of depicting genitalia? Or is it a headless torso gratuitously mutilated to remind women of their place, especially moneyed women? Is the painting a gynecological tool the way Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson" was justified as by those who admired the painter but loathed the painting? Or is Courbet's elegantly crafted revolution in realism (pornography, according to the French Government for 150 years) a commentary on the history of the female nude's missing genitalia? No one hid Michelangelo's "David" in spite of a relatively oversized penis, and Italy is no less Catholic than France. Courbet's nude is not on a pedestal but laid nearly flat at a vantage reserved for doctors and for lovers. In her book on pornography, Linda Williams writes: "The history of hard-core pornography is the history of visual strategies to overcome the anatomical invisibility of the female orgasm." So Courbet's painting addresses the unattainable interior that nudity represents, as if to say even completely accessible to our visual perception, the female body is to men a mystery.
The confident nudity of classical Greece that idealizes and perfects through the simplicity of proportions not only does so by lifting the cool figure above our gaze but by fixing for eternal contemplation the absence of physical decay and death, in a sense preserving the concept of beauty that youth alone understands in its limited life experience. That is why as soon as the nude becomes exaggerated or "deformed" in the history of art, we refer to the grotesque or even to Michelangelo's Mannerism, his super muscular female nudes that are about as classical in their idealization as his statue of the uncircumsized David is Jewish. It may be that our eyes prefer circles to straight lines, that fecundity is by nature curvaceous, that both are biologically determined but culturally defined. If the classical female nude is by definition an unattainable female to the one who gazes at it, it is partly because of its material e and overwhelming master narrative in art because it is almost exclusively the province of what we have come to call the male gaze. It is an overwhelming history because of the longevity of the form, which we owe to both the male artists who drew, sculpted and painted female nudes, and to the men who wrote the history of their attempts to do so for several hundred years. The gaze per se is a psychoanalytic construct most famously posited by Jacques Lacan. As a formulation regarding child development into its Oedipal stage, the gaze symbolizes the child's narcissistic need for others in order to unify itself as a being in the world. By seeing itself in a mirror, the child sees itself as something other than a subject, and in fact delights in seeing itself as an object for others to admire. The gaze unconsciously organizes framing devices, delimiting mechanisms and interpretive techniques to create a narrative of development for the child. The understanding of oneself as an image in the world, derived from Sartre's famous moment of feeling looked at because we are looking at someone else, enables us to fulfill narcissistic needs as we overcome them, integrating them into our wider understanding of the need for others to know us, others who make us feel good about ourselves and who one day summarize our lives after we are dead.
Based on that concept of the gaze, in 1975 Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the male gaze in her article "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema." She argued that a film audience can only read a film by identifying with a heterosexual male protagonist as he comes to desire a leading female figure, by that generalization simply reiterating that an overwhelming number of films are made by men with men's money for the pleasure of men, who earn the income to form the audience. A director directs our vision to the protagonist's, as he scrutinizes, evaluates and judges a woman in the film to be an object of his desire. If he falls in love with her, so do we--or we have misread the movie, or the director is incompetent, or the director is out of the mainstream. Mulvey's point was that the audience must identify with the male gaze to work its way through the film. In reply to the numerous articles taking exception to her theory, in 1981 Mulvey revised her piece to suggest that the only way a female audience member could read the male gaze was either by "a masochistic identification of the female object" or by an act of aesthetic transsexualism, in effect becoming a faux purveyor and adopter of the male gaze herself, watching through the eyes of the patriarchy.
Relating this argument to visual art in general, and leaving behind the complexity of film visuals unfolding in time, Griselda Pollock has written that "the sign of masculine sexuality is the bodies of women." A male gaze is always present when a nude female in a work of art is objectified. The narcissism of the male gaze narrates the psychosexual longings of the male artist and his male viewers. The artist is always telling the story of the female's mystery, even as he places her in surroundings that frame her -- brothels, dance halls, boudoirs, bathtubs, woodlands, artist's studios, and often in front of mirrors--so she can display the vanity that makes her mysterious to the artists who want to paint her vanity. Most female nudes have no surroundings, and often defy gravity, or as in the case of Philip Pearlstein, are exhibited in notoriously uncomfortable positions. Manet's "Olympia," depicting a self-satisfied courtesan, treats the female nude as a commodity but within the sexist social conundrum that she is in charge of her nudity because she successfully sells it. At a different register, the milieu depicted in Manet's "Dejeuner sur l' herbe" enables the same model, Berthe Morisot, to stare back at the (male) gaze of the viewer because she is "comfortably" nude in the company of the dressed men beside her, including Manet himself, her brother-in-law. Each of these nudes addresses the male gaze directly, but differently, and yet, as Griselda Pollock notes in an essay on women painters of early modernism, we do not find art by women artists like Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt that depicts male nudes gazing back at the male gaze. As a result of the history of the nude in art, the theme of that history is first and foremost the viewer's response to nudity, itself a changing subject from culture to culture and era to era, so that the viewer is never the same, and is subject to cultural perceptions of nudity as well as the male gaze, and of the master narrative's traditional gaze.
Recently, feminist art has replied to the male gaze the female nude evokes by demythifying the female body, often showing it in aging, damaged, mutilated states. Obese, pimply, warty, sometimes reduced to innards turned outer, female bodies have become anything but objects of desire for the male gaze. Alice Neel painted herself as she aged--as did Rembrandt, as has Avigdor Arikha, the male Israeli artist--but by revealing her changing naked body, Neel can address the tradition that male nude self-portraits cannot engage; which may be the best evidence that the male gaze is a palpable category of visualization. When Lucian Freud first painted his immense impastoed obese nudes, they were considered acts of misogyny. What if they had been immense impastoed supermodel nudes? Would they too have been creative acts of misogyny? Wouldn't they have had a wider audience? Twenty years later, when Jenny Saville painted immense impastoed obese nudes, she was praised for liberating the female body from the male gaze. Similarly, Marlene Dumas paints immense watercolors of erotically charged semi-abstracted female nudes, and openly confesses that they are her sexual fantasies writ large, so her (female) gaze at the female nude legitimates the gaze of ‘pure’ sexual longing, even though nobody is free of the collective cultural gaze and beauty is mostly culturally construed.
In short, no matter what position or ideology one adopts, the viewer cannot help but confront female nudity in art history as the elaborate example of Hegel's remark: everything after the Greeks is romanticism.
I am interested in the topic of the female gaze with respect to the female nude because of my personal aesthetic quest during which I have not found any artist who has resolved female nudity as something beyond looking at female otherness, or at marginalized females, or women as male hieroglyphs or the objects of ideological autopsies from the left and the right. I see, as one central problem in thinking this through, that the discourse has been constrained by the binary vocabulary of subject/object relations, including self and other, inside and outside, mind and body, ways of seeing that are male and female rather than predualistic. I refuse to limit the thinking of my art to binary terms. Sexual difference in art and the reading of art does not mean to me an either/or proposition, nor do we get very far in creation or understanding by perceiving one set of examples or one glossary as fitting all history or all discussion. I hope to create a space between desire and danger regarding myself and all others, regarding the concept of the Other. If the viewer is by turns uncomfortable in and attracted to the active presence of my life-size nudes, it is my way of tweaking cultural assumptions, trying to destabilize the conversation about identity and its visual representation by valuing, in a visual sense, the high and the low equally, and on a grand scale. My take on the nude is firmly antidualistic. I eschew the GrecoRoman/JudaeoChristian, Hindo/Chinese link of archetypes to tables of opposites (such as male-female, eros-logos, yin-yang, dark-light, odd-even, internal-external, east-west, right-left, straight-gay, good-bad) because I can see the oneness of the female form which happens to be the form I live in and know well.
So what do women see when they see female nudes in art? People look at the page, look at the camera, look at the painting, look at the screen, but look in the mirror. Because mirrors objectify us to ourselves, we see ourselves as others see us, but in doing so we bring our personal history to bear on the reflection. My nude reflection is part of a narrative, by which I mean that I see myself seeing myself, I see myself self-consciously. I am consciously nude when I see myself reflected in a mirror, which is to say I may scrutinize and judge my nudity, but seeing myself cannot make me embarrassed, as I might be if I were nude in front of an audience. It cannot make me confident in the way Manet's courtesan is confident, or in the way a statue of Aphrodite is a confident nude, because I have no audience. The nude in art does not convey the self-consciousness of nudity except as a violation of privacy—it’s how late Renaissance painters justified female nudes: their ample bodies illustrated tales from the Bible.
In my work I invoke classical tradition because I self-consciously work from it, not only in posed figures that may remind us of ancient stillness, in the calm of ancient Greek art, but in bound tortured figures whom I depict in repose. I was raised in a culture steeped and stuck and trapped in that past glory so I can hardly escape and deny it. I consciously revisit female archetypes that connect my work to the unbroken arc of culture. In the history of art, female archetypes have been the first and, for a long time, most important subject. They were carved into cave walls and megaliths, they were the first (Neolithic) sculptures and paintings. Their images, representations of matriarchal deities, had the metonymic power of amulets. They embodied the divine force of nature, which is primarily the power of fertility. Fertility, of course, is creativity, which is what artists throughout the ages depend on, which is why female archetypal imagery has thrived to our day. Typically, female archetypes are representations of mothers, whores, warriors, priestesses--big-hipped big-breasted goddesses of justice, love and destruction, Christian or pagan holy females (ranging from the Cycladic ‘steatopygic’ women and the Minoan Snake Goddess, to Mary Magdalene and Brigitte Bardot.)
The self-conscious male gaze may or may not define the female gaze, but the male gaze that my provocatively posed females address becomes voyeurism instead of viewerism. It is my effort to destabilize the conversation about identity and its visual representations, and at thirty feet long this piece reinforces its epic origins and the immensity of its theme. Even if the male gaze won't blink, it will, on occasion, avert itself.
What my epic tapestry tries to do, specifically in relation to the nude as I've conceived it in this occasion, is to lower the viewer's gaze so that the figures in the canvas, deliberately provocative in one way or another, can get a better look at who is looking at them. The history of writing about the nude, which may in fact be the fundamental theme in art history, is always a story of how we situate ourselves in relation to the nude figure. Our individual subjectivities use the nude in art and culture to search for an adequate representation of a collective sense of self. Who are we when we represent ourselves to each other? This is why we argue about it as vehemently as we do.
The other way I engage classical tradition is by hand-stitching on vintage textiles, hand-weavings of silk and cotton, including ribbons from traditional priestly vestments, against high-art canvas. By hand-stitching with hand-dyed thread on rough canvas, I am invoking the work and work methods the unfaithful Helen and the faithful Penelope would have engaged while Odysseus was building the Trojan horse on the beach of Troy. Larger than life, the foreground icons gaze unabashedly, even radically, at the viewer, confronting the dominant gaze born out of millennia of male supremacy, lifting the veils that the more traditional figures in the background could not. They evoke the adorants and houris that were frescoed on the wet walls of sacred sites thousands of years ago. Whether draped or undressed, coy or brazen, pacific or violent, these nudes express the nomadic consciousness of women over the same millennia in which women have embroidered and woven for domestic use and private aesthetic pleasure. The background figures are their ghosts haunting the provocative present, echoing repressed living women in much of the world. The background addresses my ancestors from Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece---murdered, exploited, exiled women—and speaks equally to cultures east and west. This canvas forms in my imagination a timeless tent where the pop star, the pin up, the lover, the killer, the rebel, the suicide bomber, the stripper and the hopeless mother meet, even if they collide. I want a collision between ecstasy, stasis, powerlessness, and the unbounded.
This artwork comments on my heritage in more ways than these. I was born on the Greek island of Lesbos, burdened by the weighted cultural inheritance of being a Lesbian, which to the world outside the island has a more potent meaning of the woman who loves and desires women, since the 6cen. BC poet Sappho is my most famous ancestor. I was raised under a military junta and was educated to the fanaticism of a nationalist cult, until as a teenager I joined illegal underground leftist political groups, illegally spray-painted graffiti on public walls at night, passed out pamphlets advocating resistance, recruited other youths willing to die for the cause of freedom (the motto in every situation like that is always Freedom or Death). I demonstrated daily against American imperialism, since the Junta was supported by American interests. And I became an American citizen after 9/11 in support of my adopted country, only to find myself living again in conditions akin to those of my childhood and to discover, slowly and uncannily, that the Middle-Eastern part of my heritage understood suicide bombers who, as I had once, hoped to die in a burst of flames for a noble and heroic cause. For my first two decades Motherland, not individuality, was my idealized connection to life and its reason. So I can see both sides of the long conflict between old world and new. Both my grandmothers always dressed in black, in perennial mourning for their dead kids lost to the evil eye, and covered up their head to go outside the house. My mother and father never spoke before they were married and my father was stoned at the courtyard of a chapel for sneaking there to meet a young female neighbor. So I am not unfamiliar with the excessive reverence that proposes to adore and admire women and associates women with modesty and “respect” in contrast to the excessive liberation and self-objectification of Western women. Greece is the cradle of Western culture but also stands at the crossroads between East and West and, after 500 years of Turkish occupation, its culture resembles the secular Muslim cultures of the Middle East as much as it resembles that of its fellow West European powers. I rebelled against what I saw as female repression and became committed to “coming out”, “lifting the lid”, to performing exposure of every sort.
But I have remained deeply interested in the conflation of art and religion, so potent in earlier times, and so important to artists in all ages. This tapestry is a visual spiritual pilgrimage. My original plan was to hang it on a plywood construction that was an exact replica of the holy Ka’bah in Mecca, which every Muslim aspires to visit in a hajj (pilgrimage) and circle around it 7 times. The Ka’bah is worshipped with such reverence that hundreds die each year during high holy times, crushed by the stampeding crowds trying to get close to the monument. The Ka’bah is covered with a finely textured cloth, which is how I envisioned draping my replica with this tapestry. My nudes evoke worshippers-guardians along the path to many a temple that have been found in ancient sites in Greece, Egypt, Summeria, Mesopotamia (Iraq, Iran), the Hindu valley and China. The Karyatids, for example, the women-shaped columns that support the temple of the Parthenon, are called Kouroi and kore, and from that name derives the name Houri, which is the Muslim name for the beautiful women waiting to reward the faithful in Paradise (the word sounds ominously close to “whore”). According to Muslim sacred texts, carnal adventures in Paradise take place under a tree (of life) by a river (of life), where the martyrs feast on grapes and diverse sexual acts with the wives of friends they may have coveted or with movie stars (for example, Bin Laden is known to have been in love with Whitney Houston). My never-exhibited full installation was predicated on the vexing Muslim religious concept that a man is rewarded for dying a gruesome and murderous suicide bomber’s death with free sex with 72 blissfully liberated virgins. The obvious contradiction in Western eyes between earthly piousness and afterlife lasciviousness stems from the West’s opposite experience of life and afterlife: we see Paradise as the absence of the bodily pleasure which we are allowed to experience, in varying degrees, in life; Muslims see in Paradise the fulfillment of the sexual urges and pleasures they are forbidden in life. No wonder so many young Muslims are eager to give their lives for entry to sexual heaven. So this tapestry, which is all I can exhibit safely of my installation, is also my fantasy, were I Bin Laden or an associate, of Paradise.
It is ironic in the rich history of the nude in art that no less than Francis Bacon wrote: "There is no beauty that has not some strangeness in its proportions." Notably, that was the 16th century Bacon, the modern painter's famous ancestor. Francis Bacon heeded the philosopher's comment on our fall out of classical tradition, and more than any late 20th century painter struggled to find a nexus with the human nude without dismembering it, as had Picasso, or drawing it in paint, as had Matisse, or making it into a cartoon, in the manner of pop and neo-pop art. Kenneth Clark loathed Bacon's paintings: they did not fit the history. But Bacon’s model was Michelangelo, looking for a way through contortion, distortion, and anguish for an active beauty that nonetheless evoked stillness. That is my model as well, underscored by my lifelong commitment to the theme of Apocalypse, Revelation, the lifting of the veil, which, veil after veil, longing after longing, page after page, layer past layer, never ends.
> Thinking, as I often do, of Bacon, and others as committed to the female body as the subject of the whole history of art as I am, I wonder if a male artist can hand-stitch nude women in bondage with the impunity of a female artist. Actually, can a female artist do it with impunity? Can a stitch (in time) replace a stroke of the painter’s brush and sustain the high esteem and deference of the art viewer?
I’m here to find out.

ORIGIN OF THE WORLD: THE NUDE IN ART



For a talk that will focus on two of the most notorious nudes in art history, I would like to begin by recalling that for the nude to constitute a provocation, society must prefer its concealment. But the nude as a form constitutes the overwhelming master narrative of art history; therefore masterpiece-status nudes have been approved by the cultures in which they were exhibited and by the subsequent centuries. Western culture, starting specifically with ancient Greek culture, posited a mathematically perfect nude based on Pythagorean and Vitruvian theories of harmony. The perfect hand, the perfect wrist, chin, breasts, ass, constituted an artificial whole designed to represent the image 4th century BCE wanted to have of itself. The great statues of Greece had no models, which is why they came to define a universal concept of beauty. A female nude leans on one leg, extending the curve of her hip upward to meet the curve of a breast while an opposite curve indicates the ribcage between them. Classical beauty unfolds in the shape of an ess (S). The still body evokes undulation, subtle motion, in effect, sensuousness, but a desirability frozen in space, enhanced by statues of Aphrodite holding their draperies away from their bodies for the viewer to admire them. Mathematical proportions established the erotic identity of the desirable woman. Conformity made the classical nude a desirable image of woman because, despite her sensuous and curvaceous appearance, she was literally unavailable on earth. The classical Greek nude is impersonal -- that is her allure. Put on a pedestal, raised above the viewer, the classical figure is gazed up at from below, a statue that has no openings or orifices. In other words, the beautiful nude female retains her interior mystery--perfectly proportioned, anatomically inaccessible, embodying the unattainable, what some call the divine. As a result, the ancient Greeks used to say that the Trojan War must have been fought over a statue of Helen, not the world's most beautiful flesh and blood queen because only a statue, a composite of parts, could have been perfect enough to send armies across the seas and to keep them there, dying, for a decade. At any age, an artist who wants to freeze and frame a moment of erotic recognition acknowledges by doing so the inherent loss of the object, which is why it has often been said that Greek statuary nudes have the look of constantly being looked at and never touched.
The elaborate history of the female nude in art is really the province of what art theorists have come to call the male gaze. It is an overarching history because of the longevity of the form, which we owe to both the male artists who drew, sculpted and painted female nudes, and to the men who wrote the history of their attempts to do so for several hundred years. The gaze per se, as we now mean it, is a psychoanalytic construct posited by the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. (Lacan's name will reappear in this talk as an art collector who serendipitously happened to own the famous Courbet painting on which I'm going to focus.) For now let me say, in an absurdly abbreviated summary, that Lacan formulated a theory of child development based on Freud, and one of his central themes is the concept of the gaze; the gaze symbolizes the child's narcissistic need for others in order to unify itself as a being in the world. By seeing itself in a mirror, the child first sees itself as something other than a self, and delights in seeing itself as an object for others to admire. The gaze unconsciously organizes our narrative of social development. The understanding of oneself as an image in the world for others enables each child to fulfill narcissistic needs even as it integrates those into a wider understanding of the need for others in the world, as well as the inevitability of others. In part, Lacan's concept of the maturing gaze is influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the inevitability of others that causes the human gaze to mature can be understood via Sartre's famous statement: "Hell is other people."
Elaborating from this concept of the gaze, in 1975 Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the male gaze in her article "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema." She argued that a film audience can only read a film by identifying with a heterosexual male protagonist as he comes to desire a leading female figure in the story. With that generalization, Mulvey intends to emphasize that an overwhelming number of films, and virtually all master narratives in film, are made by men with men's money for the pleasure of men, who earn the income to form an audience that includes their wives and girlfriends, who might become more like the wives or girlfriends seen in the movies if they watch the movies. A director directs our vision to the protagonist's vision as he scrutinizes, evaluates and judges a woman in the film to be an object of his desire. If he falls in love with her, so do we -- or we have misread the movie, or the director is incompetent, or the director is out of the mainstream. Laura Mulvey's point was that, for the most part, the audience must identify with the male gaze to work its way through the film. In reply to the numerous articles taking exception to her theory, in 1981 Mulvey revised her argument to suggest that the only way a female audience member could read the male gaze was either by "a masochistic identification of the female object" or by an act of aesthetic transsexualism, by becoming a faux purveyor of the male gaze. By now the concept of the male gaze, and the vocabularies attending it, have become standard in critiques of culture, and nowhere more useful than in discussions of the female nude in art.
Applying the concept of the male gaze to visual art in general, the scholar Griselda Pollock suggests that we know a male gaze is present when a nude female in a work of art is objectified. The male gaze expresses the psychosexual longings of the artist and his male viewers first by insisting that the female body exhibits its otherness from the male. The artist is always telling the story of the female's mystery, even as he places her in surroundings that frame his desire of her -- brothels, dance halls, boudoirs, bathtubs, woodlands, even artist's studios, and often in front of mirrors so the female other can display the vanity that makes her mysterious to the artists who want to paint her, and paint her vanity, perhaps especially her vanity. So tonight I want us to look at works that comprise masterpieces of the female nude not only because of their greatness or importance, but because the way each of these paintings implicates the viewer in relation to the nude tells us much about how art works in general, how cultures differ and change, and how our expectations influence what we see when we see art. The theme of the history of the nude is first and foremost the story of the viewer's response to nudity, itself a changing subject from culture to culture and era to era, so that the viewer is never the same even though the viewer is always positioned as every other viewer who came before.
The history of the nude, which may not be distinguishable from the history of writing about the nude, is primarily occupied with defining or dedefining beauty. This consistency alone determines that there is no beauty without its decay and death. For a form as obsessive within each culture as the nude has always been, its fate must be linked to a collective sense of self as surely as national pride. Are we looking for an adequate representation of ourselves to ourselves? Are we adequately representing the failure to represent a collective, the way Greek art was sustained by a collective definition of self? Who are we when we represent ourselves and each other to ourselves and each other? In short, who is the gaze for if not for me? Who is being seen when I look at a nude if not myself?
To answer these questions, I'm now going to tell the story of the most notorious painting in Western art, the painting Robert Hughes has called "the most transgressive work of the 19th century." In order to do it justice at all, I want to place it in the context of a few famous nudes that preceded it, paintings that established and revised the tradition. If we look for a moment at Titian's Venus of Urbino, painted in 1538, we see a modest woman, confident in her beauty, casual about her nudity, whose servants are rifling a trunk in search of her clothes. She holds a nosegay of flowers, a gift from a suitor perhaps, and has her dog -- a symbol of loyalty -- asleep at her feet. She reclines on a daybed of red that has been covered with linen, a daybed placed behind a screen that has itself a green drape across it. Titian's Venus is in a secluded spot in her palazzo with the sun going down outside her window. Though she is surely someone's lover, her frank gaze at the viewer is disarmed by the modest hand that covers her private parts. What speaks to the past in this painting is the perfection of her body, its golden hue of youth, the grace of her hands and feet, the roundness of her breasts -- in short, she is elegantly--classically--proportioned. What puts the painting in the Renaissance, and what makes it among the great nudes of all time, is the humanity of her facial expression. She has the eyes and mouth of a contemporary, not a mythic figure and not a painted sculpture. In a sense, the casualness of her hair against her radiant perfect body resolves the tension concerning what she is preparing for, who she is expecting. Titian establishes one of the ironies in the painterly tradition of the female nude, namely the viewer's concern over how the figure looks out of the painting at her audience. This painting already turns us toward modernity by its frankness, though it preserves the idea of perfection. This Venus is not a natural nude, but her confidence acts as if she is.
If we look now at Velasquez's Venus at her toilet, otherwise known as the Rokeby Venus, painted in 1651, we find that the simple perfections have been complicated. This Venus gazes at us from her mirror, where she has been gazing at her beauty. We see her reflected face, and we see her vulnerable S-shaped backside, which she cannot see. She can see, if she adjusts her mirror, the full frontal nudity denied the viewer. From our vantage that sees her face in reflection, the reflection seems to be looking at her, thereby establishing the vanity and narcissism of which Velasquez is critical, without however suggesting that Venus is anything but beautiful. And the confidence of the painter deliberately exceeds that of his subject, because he provides the viewer with a wide horizon of beautiful backside. His Venus enjoys her reflection almost as much as the reflection enjoys her, but only we can judge what she cannot see. Velasquez uses the grammar of the nude against itself, by showing the insecurity of this vain Venus. If she were confident, says the painting, she would be facing us, as does Titian's Venus, so Velasquez raises the stakes regarding the nude by addressing the tradition of facing the audience. He acknowledges the fourth wall, as if his Venus knows people are looking – which is one of the reasons art theory refers to the viewer as the beholder and the spectator.
I want now to conclude my concealment of the main attraction by considering two famous works that are contemporaneous with it: Manet's Olympia and his Luncheon on the grass, both painted in 1863. The Olympia ironically refers to the goddesses of ancient Greece, who resided on Mt. Olympus. Manet's goddess resides on the same daybed, before the same screen and even the same green drapery as Titian's Venus. What is different and new here is that the female nude has opened her gown and removed it while she meets our gaze directly, which is the gaze of the suitor who has brought the bouquet of flowers. The flower in her hair, the ribbon at her throat, even the slippers still on her feet, speak not of a confident or even an amorous nude as the ones we have seen before, but of a commodity—a concubine. It is also true, I believe, that with Manet the nude does not gaze at us so much as stare, pointedly. At the time the painting appeared in 1863, it was castigated for Manet’s use of paint as loose and haphazard, in itself an implicit criticism of the loose woman at whom the viewer may not be gazing at so much as staring in return, probably in shock. As for the nude herself, she was viewed as a short-legged "gorilla," because of a line of hair running along her belly as well as inexplicable shadows along her thighs. The candor of her expression is not one of pleasure, or even interest in the beholder, and, unlike the modesty we expect in the traditional nude, Olympia does not cup her hand to cover her genitals; instead, her short, clubby fingers are spread open, in invitation, and the right hand still holding the gown is apparently responsible for opening it to the viewer, just as the fingers of the right hand direct us to the thick long fringe of the gown, itself more like human hair than the pasted, pinned hair on Olympia's head. Is it the displaced or concealed fringe we can expect to find under the open hand? Does it allude to her pubic hair? Contemporary critics of the painting wondered why anyone would want to see such a lowly ‘ape-like creature.’ Manet's realism was more social than psychological: even in the appearance of a black maid at the vanishing point of the painting, Manet refers us to a modern and alienating eroticism. This is no palazzo, and that is not a lady in love or an ardent mistress--she is a common displayed prostitute available to anybody. In fact, her frankness is her strength; she owns her body because she sells it. She hasn't married it away. She is capitalizing on it.
At a different register, the nude female in Luncheon on the grass is comfortably, confidently nude in the company of the dressed men beside her. She meets our gaze with her chin in hand, casually but thoughtfully, as if interrupted during an intellectual conversation. Even more shockingly, she is outdoors, lying naked in public, and that is her provocation, because her nudity among dressed men could otherwise be said to resemble the artist's studio on any given day. Again Manet's audience was outraged, this time by the intelligence in the woman's face, and by an utter indifference to public mores, similar to the indifference we find in Olympia, though we discern a hardness in the prostitute. The freedom of the nude causes the provocation. Manet used the same model for both nudes, his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot, who is today among the most celebrated painters of the 19th century, perhaps due to her association with Manet and the dearth of women artists in that era, though her own paintings depict domestic scenes, full of interiors and quiet moments among women and children. I wonder if she wouldn't have wanted to paint nudes of her own, perhaps even her brother-in-law, who is the man next to her at the picnic. One thing we can discern from the reception of nudes in history is that the more natural the nude, and the more human the expression, the more anger and derision culture mongers have expressed; which brings us to Gustave Courbet.
Already in 1844, twenty years before Manet's Olympia, Courbet had staked his claim, where the nude was concerned, in his painting Bacchante, which depicts a sleeping maenad having drunk too much, having frolicked too much, and therefore having passed out, not in a mythic or generic woodland, but on a vibrant red blanket or cloak surrounded by the trunk bases of enormous shading trees. She lies deeply hidden from the rest of nature. What separates this nude from those that have come before it is, first of all, the foreshortening, which affords the viewer a revolutionary vantage of her body, by which I mean not only are we at an angle we would be at if we were coming towards her while she sleeps, say to take advantage of her nudity abandoned thoughtlessly in nature, but we are at an angle that affords us the best view of her full-bodied curvaceousness from head to toe. She is nothing but curves--head, shoulders, arms, breasts, ribcage, hips, belly, thighs, knees. This angle even allows us to consider her heavy eyebrows and strong chin without at the same time thinking her masculine. The critic Michael Fried has written that this painting is suggestive of a "post-coital aftermath," I believe more in the form of a sleeper's memory than in the aftermath of a recent sexual encounter. The painting's title certainly refers to more than getting drunk in the forest. The red cloth, which we will see elsewhere, surrounds the nude with liquefaction, and while it may refer us to sex itself, it separates this so-called maenad from her mythic counterparts. Her face and body are contemporary in their sturdiness, though in the way they are lit we are put in mind of masterwork techniques, as we are by the brush and palette-knife work, a decision we see time and again in Courbet's nudes. The artist showcases his mastery of his medium flamboyantly but disdains the traditional effects of those techniques and instead utilizes them to subvert aristocratic elegance and to showcase republican realism.
As with most of Courbet's eroticized nudes, his Reclining Nude of 1862–this was the decade of the great nudes for him--is also asleep and available, in effect spied upon by the viewer who sees she has fallen asleep with her stockings on, a slipper on one foot, and wearing an earring. Her shawl or chemise has fallen open so that we see the full glowing big-bellied and big-thighed body thrust forward against the dark brocade draperies beside the window. Her arm across her neck thrusts her breasts toward us, and reveals the hair of her underarm. Courbet has taken a traditional setting for the nude and turned it into a provocation by showing us misplaced stockings and shoes and hair where we are not accustomed to finding them. They rub against the innocence of the sleeping nude, suggesting a grammar of male fetishes even as they beg the questions, why are the stockings there, why are they partially rolled down, why the shoe, where has the other earring fallen? What kind of siesta preparation is that? Why are we seeing the hair of an underarm--is it the displaced or misplaced pubic hair this nude nearly shows us, as the Bacchante nearly showed us, as Manet’s Olympia a year later nearly showed us? Sleep makes Courbet’s nudes safer for the male gaze to peruse, objectify, take its time with, and eroticize. As in all Courbet's major nudes, his shocking decision to light provocative material the way Caravaggio lit biblical scenes may have a simpler explanation. Many of Courbet's nudes were copied from photographs that got their photographer, Auguste Belloc, arrested. The lighting that places this reclining nude so starkly against her background reminds us of the garish lighting used in the daguerrotypes on which he relied for his paintings.
Sleepers, painted in 1866, the same year, and for the same client who commissioned Origin of the world, reiterates not only the erotic sleep of the female nude but also offers direct evidence that we have arrived too late to see the sexual adventure. The two lesbian lovers are asleep in each other's arms and legs--again, there are curves everywhere--and beside them on a table are a wineglass and a carafe. The right hand of the dark-haired lover touches the dark pink, labia-like, inside fold of the coverlet, which directs our attention to the broken strand of pearls, whose missing two can be found, beside a barrette, at the bottom of the sheet next to the lovers' feet. The pearls evoke vaginal fluids. This has been a passionate encounter between beautiful young bodies of different hues. The pearl necklace that has been broken during the encounter is the proof of sexual bliss, why the redhead holds the calf of the voluptuous brunette in her hand--so that she will not slip away, so that they can feel each other's flesh and pulsing blood in their sleep. As with other erotically charged Courbets, we are presented the afterglow of sexual encounters, sexual reveries, and even masturbation. By 1866, Courbet was viewed as a dangerous man by both government and the church, and his exhibitions, for which he charged a fee, were monitored by police. Despite the known eroticism of his nudes, until 1866 Courbet had maintained one feature of the long tradition by concealing the female genitals, instead alluding to them elsewhere in his paintings, or positioning his figures so that modesty was irrelevant, and indeed, as in the paintings we've just seen, the concealment retained for the works a lyricism for which Courbet was admired most in his landscapes and portraits, and of course in his most famous self-portraits of despair and madness that began his mature work. Until Origin of the world, neither Courbet nor any other serious Western painter chose to combine the idea of transgressing against society at the same time as he viscerally challenged our sensibility. And even Courbet only did it for a private party.
The private party was Khalil Bey, a wealthy Turkish diplomat living in Paris, who commissioned Courbet to paint an erotic work that would only be seen in private by him and a few friends. Courbet painted it for a large unknown sum, and, out of fear of the authorities, he did not sign it. Khalil Bey kept the painting, which measures 18" by 21 1/2", behind a green veil in his apartments, in windowless rooms called toilet rooms that adjoined his dining rooms. To show it, he would remove the veil and announce, like a master of ceremonies, "It's a Courbet." The guests who saw it never forgot the experience and often described being utterly “stupefied by the debauching life-size frontal-view filth” they were confronted by. Most wrote a version of the following description of it: “No, I would never say what I saw behind the veil.” Poems were written about it, and I quote a couple of lines from one such, titled “On a Picture from the Khalil-Bey Collection”: “Do not lift the curtain/ that hides this image from your eyes. ..It’s this that makes you stop before your time,/ turning your hair from black to white. /It’s this that eats away your teeth, /..All hail from miles around,/ all bow down.. /for, to our shame, alas, /it’s this that make the world go round.” Critics like Maxine du Camp, who attacked Courbet in his anti-Commune tirades in Les Convulsions de Paris, took great objection to the contemptible action of painting such an unseemly canvas of a French woman for a Muslim, and equated obscenity with political disorder. When Courbet refused the Legion of Honor in 1870, “the little monstrosity hidden behind a little curtain” was repeatedly attacked in the press.
Two years later, in 1868, the extravagant Khalil Bey went broke, and his collection of some 80 paintings was auctioned, except for Courbet's Sleepers and Origin of the world which went to unidentified private buyers.
The Origin resurfaced in January 1889 in the shop of Antoine de la Narde, a gallery owner specializing in Far Eastern art, who showed it to the famous critic Edmond de Goncourt, who had despised Courbet, by now dead for eleven years, having died at the young age of 59. By then the Origin was hidden behind another Courbet, a mediocre painting of a chateau in winter called Chateau de Blonay. La Narde unlocked the painting with a key, lifted the outside panel that showed a village church in the snow, and revealed the hidden panel that showed the dark prominent mons veneris. Now Courbet was hiding Courbet. Upon seeing Origin, still notorious despite having disappeared for twenty years, Goncourt said he owed Courbet an apology, for the belly in the painting was the most beautiful belly since Correggio, though which Correggio we don't know.
The double painting resurfaced 24 years later, in November of 1912, when the Gallerie Bernheim-Jeune bought it from a Mme Vial who had inherited from Emile Vial, a scientist and collector of Japanese art who had purchased it from La Narde. In June 1913 the dual acquisition was sold by the gallery to Baron Herzog who kept the chateau in winter and sold the Origin to his friend Baron Ferene Hatvany, a Hungarian Jewish industrialist and a painter himself who also owned Reclining Nude as part of his 800 piece art collection. When the Nazis invaded Hungary 30 years later, the Baron hid the best of his collection in bank vaults in banks specifically not owned by Jews, in order to protect the art. He guessed correctly that the Nazis would only steal the art and jewelry they found in Jewish-owned banks and homes. However, in February 1945, the Soviet Army found the Courbet and the rest of the Baron's collection in the Hungarian Commercial Bank in Pest, and began to transfer it to Moscow. Wanting to save at least Origin of the world, the Baron persuaded his friend, Raoul Wallenberg, the heroic Swedish diplomat who had saved as many as 15,000 Jews during the war, to intercede with the Soviet general in charge. The Baron paid a bribe and the Courbet left Hungary for Paris, as did the Baron. Wallenberg was arrested within a week for unknown reasons. He was imprisoned in Moscow and two years later was shot on Stalin's orders, again for unknown reasons. He was thirty four years old.
In 1954, after the Baron's death, the painting was sold to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his wife Sylvia, who had previously been married to the novelist and erotic philosopher Georges Bataille. Housing the painting in a separate building at his country estate, Lacan wanted to protect it from both thieves and the police, so he had his brother-in-law, the painter Andre Masson, draw an abstract landscape of large strokes vaguely reproducing Courbet’s open thighs and Courbet’s grotto landscapes on a brown background painted on a thin plane which was placed in a heavy gilt frame. Lacan would announce to his select guests, “I am now going to show you something extraordinary,” slip the thin panel out of the frame to reveal the detailed, magnificently executed close-up of a plump woman’s genitals, and say, “It’s a Courbet”. As he learned of the painting's history of concealment, starting with Courbet's refusal to sign it, Lacan also wrote a seminal lecture titled "The function of the veil," where he states the concept that "the curtain placed in front of something, or the veil in front of the body, enables us better to imagine the importance of love of the object." The veil reveals the invincibility (not invisibility) of society’s cloaking of the nude in countless inventive ways. The curtain's presence symbolizes our desire to love, and therefore to idolize the image it conceals. The more hidden and taboo the object of our love, the more it can become a subject and deserve our respect. Love is easier to give than respect. As the prime thinker and mover in the concept of the gaze, it seemed appropriate that Lacan own and protect the most notorious challenge to the role of the spectator and viewer in the history of Western art.
I'll pick up the history of the painting soon, but for now let's focus on the work itself. This is the painting that the official history of the female nude scrupulously avoided for centuries. Courbet's "headless torso" supplants the tradition of the classical nude with the body part that has been displaced and symbolized for thousands of years; therefore it must be the body part that most instills desire and fear—which was Aristotle’s definition of the “awe’ produced by a true artistic masterpiece--and of course reiterates the history of the nude as the history of a male preoccupation. For Courbet to paint the forbidden subject elegantly only enhanced the taboo. Even his detractors respected his talent, so that for Courbet to paint the great male mystery, in effect the cultural mystery of all time, was to risk transforming muted desire into open disgust. In case you think I'm overstating this, it was not until 1995 that the French government, which by then owned the painting through a gift from Lacan's widow, placed Courbet's painting on permanent display at the Musee d'Orsay, at last rendering the painting into an artwork that nothing could render banal. Up to then, it was publicly shown only once, in Brooklyn in 1988, at the instigation of Linda Nochlin, for the first time officially restored to its creator, to test the waters of public outrage outside France.
The painting was quarantined for 130 years, consistently concealed, and yet never destroyed. The issue of its obscenity has never been severed from its extraordinary quality; it is its brilliance that has tested people's nerves, and, because of it, it can not be ignored or destroyed. The strategy of placing nothing but the most extreme and therefore absent anatomical part in the history of painting in the viewer's face, if you will, brings to the fore all the issues of audience, painter and subject that have been discussed since the first nude female smiled from a fresco. In her work on pornography, Linda Williams has come close to explain the prolonged discomfort so many viewers have felt in the presence of Courbet's painting. She has described "the history of pornography as the history of visual strategies to overcome the anatomical invisibility of the female orgasm." This is relevant to the Courbet insofar as the gossip surrounding the painting in its time, rumors by satirists who had not seen it, was that Courbet's realism had extended to being able to paint the female orgasm, and that since the model had had an orgasm for Courbet to paint, she must have been a prostitute. In fact, as was his common practice, Courbet painted from a photograph, which we have. There doesn't seem to be an orgasm anywhere.
Though we can recognize Origin of the world as the culmination of decades of progressively more modern nudes, it is clearly most disturbing because its matter-of-factness equals its lyricism. John Updike has referred to the pubic hair in the painting as a Rorschach blot, and the modern art critic Roger Scruton has called the painting "a lower portrait." The social context shouldn't be lost. There were courtesans of great renown, called les grandes horizontales, one of whom, for instance, served herself to her richest clients on a large silver platter. These were the subjects of most erotic art at the time, and to some extent are reflected in Manet's Olympia. On the other hand, there were common prostitutes who often modeled for artists--known as lunettes, or mooners, because their buttocks were often unusually round and large, evoking faux classicism or Renaissance fecundity. Courbet worked among these nude outsiders, the low culture society fears most. What makes Courbet's Origin even more provocative than its subject is our angle of incidence, meaning we view the open legs of the nude as an approaching lover would. As with Bacchante of 1844, Origin's vantage is that of a voyeur, so that we are violating the privacy of this genitalia, just as we violated the privacy of the sleeping nudes, as we did not violate the privacy of the nudes who stared straight back, or who invited us to violate their privacy. As a result, Origin is the most intimate nude ever painted, despite the absence of facial expression, the position of hands, the accoutrements or furnishings of real life or artistic tradition. While it does not depict the invisible female orgasm, as its contemporary attackers claimed, it depicts the site of one. It shows its audience not merely the arena of sexual pleasure, and where babies come from--it presents a realized and resolved sexual image that is as lyrical and desirable as the fantasies it evokes. That is, Courbet did not paint a gynecological study--though later a playful forgery and exact copy appeared in an obscure obstetrical journal--he painted the sexual longing of the voyeur and the lover, one of the reasons why Michael Fried sees the painting as Courbet's most courageous attempt to merge artist, subject and viewer into one. He demystified the mystery at the heart of painting the nude. The opened thighs are an invitation, a picture plane where artist, image and viewer touch each other. This is not a "touchy-feely" heart-opening experience, however; as all acts of dramatic revelation, which literally means unveiling, this is an act of aggression, of transcendence, and, lest you assume Courbet wants to mingle with his audience, by painting this piece he meant that “the only place we can meet is inside my artwork.”
Though Courbet did not sign the painting, and it is from the study of it and its history that we know it is by Courbet, the painter did acknowledge it once at a dinner party, shortly after its owner began showing it to friends. A dinner guest had seen it, and noted to Courbet that Khalil Bey said that he, Courbet, was the artist, at which point Courbet excitedly exclaimed that Titian, Veronese, Raphael, even he himself, Courbet, could not imagine doing it. He then remarked that the painting should be referred to as Origin of the world. As to its meaning to Khalil Bey, we can only guess, but some historians have noted that its pornographic association might have been muted by the fact that Khalil Bey had contracted a very noticeable and deteriorating syphilis, so that whenever he saw the painting he must have seen not only the breasts and belly and thighs of an anonymous woman, but the source of his deadly illness as well. It was suggested that the painting had been an ex-voto, a magic talisman, acquired to thwart the malady. It was at this time that the governments throughout Europe began to warn citizens of health hazards associated with the poor and the social outsider, so that Courbet's painting speaks not only to sexuality but to the constant socially-sanctioned efforts to censor and control it, fearing sexual chaos could cause social revolution. In a sense, by fetishizing the hidden female genitalia, Courbet transgresses against realism itself. The exposure is spontaneous, voluntary, willful, stubborn and in-your-face—empowering the nude female over the male viewer. It is a pudendum that has the look of being looked at. There is no facial expression, but the image gazes back at the beholder. The source for the painting is less the photograph, and his previous nudes, and more his numerous grotto and cave paintings, in which the hidden and dark interior opens out toward the viewer in waters that flow only in his direction. In fact, all of Courbet's seascapes and caves and grottos depict water coming toward the spectator, possibly alluding to female ejaculate, and, where the caves are concerned, they are always buttressed at left and right by thigh-like hills or mountains. So the source of the most notorious nude in history is a series of forgettable landscapes.
Is the painting beautiful? Erotic? Is it cold and analytical? Is it insulting and sexist? We are reminded that it is easier to have strong opinions about art when art refers to things outside itself. Nothing is more urgent in most first-time viewers’ judgment than their sense of violation or shame, their moral indignation. It is amusing that professional viewers have noted that Origin is anatomically incorrect, that in fact Courbet left out the labia and concealed the clitoral hood. They account for these decisions as the artist not wanting the viewer to think of anatomy but of effect, not of realism but of sensuality. Critical viewers at the time said Courbet forgot the small bits because the once incredibly beautiful young painter had become a hermit by 1866 whose obesity made him odious to women. In fact, he was being consistent in his aesthetic: by obfuscating a few details that would force us to remain outside the painting, Courbet's lyricism invites us inside. Voyeurs and lovers don't take inventory. Courbet wants the effect of realism: look closely, he says, it's just like being there! Is it possible that the painting is an instance of the ‘sublime’? That it is not about beauty, per se, and therefore it disquiets us with a sense that the painting implies more than the image should be able to bear? What causes a beholder to suffer an experience of the sublime is a spontaneous recognition of the force of a pure presence, mostly found in wild nature. The sublime strikes like lightning, overwhelming us with its instant of arrival. The sublime menaces us because it is absolute, excessive and formless. Nothing in nature or art is inherently sublime, said the philosopher Immanuel Kant who first introduced the concept, but we involuntarily attach an idea to something that creates a sense of danger, and of ambivalence, because we do it to ourselves. Kant said the sublime presents to us "delirium" as well as "finality"--what he considered together as "transparent, immediate tumult." We suffer the experience of forgetting boundaries, we undergo anxiety, even vertigo. The world loses its frame when we recognize the sublime, which in early Courbet, for example, we can find in his self-portraits and homages to Romanticism The Desperate Man and Man driven mad by fear, of 1843.
When the painting was in Jacques Lacan's possession, many notable writers and artists saw it. They all watched him ceremoniously lift the drawing by Andre Masson to reveal the infamous little painting behind it. The unveiling act echoed the intimate ritual of undressing a lover before a circle of voyeurs. One of the visitors actually reproduced the painting from memory, so that his own guests could see what the Courbet looked like. You weren't seeing the Courbet, but you were seeing what you would be seeing if you were seeing the Courbet through this specific viewer’s eyes. The artist was Rene Magritte. (It was one of his many copies of the erotic painting that was reproduced in the obstetric and gynecological journal.)
It was considered a great honor to be invited to see the Courbet painting, and not being invited was a way for Lacan to let people know how he felt about them. Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress, saw the painting, but not Picasso--because Lacan, who was Dora's psychoanalyst, knew of the damage Picasso had done to her. After all, Picasso had brought Dora to Lacan, complaining that she was no longer the masochist he had fallen for.
Among the guests to Lacan's country house was Marcel Duchamp, in 1958. Duchamp had begun a secret art project 12 years before, one that would take him 20 years to complete, and would not be shown until after his death in 1968, when he was 81. By the time he saw the Courbet, which he of course knew about, he had made a small plaster cast of a woman's body -- an homage to a Brazilian sculptor he loved from the early 1940s until his death, though she ended their affair in the early 50's, returning to Brazil with her husband and children, after her career in New York fizzled. Whether the plaster cast was taken from an actual mold of Maria Martins' body is not known, but Duchamp was sexually obsessed by her for the rest of his life.
In his playful subversive effort to attack the very notion of the art museum, Duchamp constructed throughout his working life 300 items he called La boite-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase), 300 separate wooden cases that opened up and out, and included drawings, sketches, notes, and postcard reproductions of works by Duchamp. The owner of a box had a portable Duchamp museum, or, put another way, as Duchamp did, you’d find Duchamp in every possible "box," referring to the slang in both French and English for the vagina. As with the mustache Duchamp had painted on his perfect reproduction of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, or the public urinal which he signed R. Mutt and placed on exhibit, the Box in a Suitcase series demonstrated his restlessness with the boundaries and nomenclatures of publicly acceptable art. He created an alter ego in drag that Man Ray photographed, calling himself Rose Selavy: Rose That's-life. One of his exhibitions consisted entirely of a chess match, in which he played opposite a voluptuous nude woman, challenging both the chess-lover’s and the museum-goer's capacity to focus, to know what was important, to tell nature from art, to define art. The whimsy of his aesthetic belies Duchamp's visceral discomfort with limits and with permanence. He feared that, if galleries and museums decided what was and was not art, they would become the same oppressive authority he had fled in France. In speaking against the tyranny of museums, Duchamp became the great anti-authoritarian authority and therefore an icon by the 1960s. His critique of culture extended to the 1942 Surrealism in Exile show in New York City. His contribution was to entangle the entire show in a mile of string, so that guests could not view the works without navigating his obstacle course.
When he began the Box in a Suitcase series, Duchamp lived out of a suitcase in Nazi-occupied Marseilles. In the disguise of a traveling cheese salesman, Duchamp trained back and forth from Paris for two years, carrying photos and brochures regarding cheeses mixed in with the reproductions of his art, which had been banned by the Vichy government. Eventually he filled numerous suitcases with his reproductions and fled France for New York, taking a safer route than the critic Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide at the Spanish border, and whom I mention only because his most famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, gave Duchamp the origin of his aesthetic that reproductions such as postcards and magazine photographs and film posters could be placed in contexts that made them art in and of themselves. The suitcases that became a series of 300 portable museums were autobiographical miniatures including detached souvenirs of Duchamp's identity and life. They embodied his aesthetic of mobility, transience, a life without borders.
In the case of the Box in a Suitcase he made for Maria Martins, before it went on display at the Menil Foundation in Houston in 1988, the curators were unable to discern what material he had used as a priming ground for an abstract painting he made as an inlaid cover to the wooden suitcase. The FBI office in Houston agreed to test the material, which proved to be entirely composed of his own seminal fluid, which Duchamp had painted over. In short, his sexual obsession with Maria was absolute, beginning with drawings, maquettes and the first molds of her nude torso in 1946, and ending twenty years later in the wire and painted leather of the show he called Etant Donnees--Given. (The title can refer both to what is a given and what is given freely to the artist and then to the viewer.)
After seeing Courbet's masterpiece in 1958, Duchamp conceived the framework of his last, greatest, and most provocative, work, as his homage to Courbet, who after all had painted the first portable "box" when he painted Origin of the world. Because the blunt vaginal display might be shocking to those who recognized it as ‘pornographic’, the painting had always been closeted, framed and displayed as if it were a guilty pleasure. It was the combination of its blunt imagery and compulsive concealment that provided Duchamp the framework for his final spectacle and statement.
First of all, Duchamp insisted in elaborate notes found after his death--which was the first time anyone saw the completed “boxed” project--that the assemblage could only be shown in a public museum. He left page after page of instructions on how to disassemble and reassemble the exhibit. He left specific instructions on how the exhibit should be displayed: the viewer enters a room, seeing a door of bricks, wood, and iron across the way that is built into a brick threshold. At the door, the viewer finds that there is an opening within it, once the latch is lifted. By opening the latch one sees another section of brick wall a few feet away, but that a section of brick has been jaggedly removed so that the viewer can see beyond the peephole a woman's nude hairless body made of leather on metal wire lying on an artificial bed of grass and twigs. Beyond her there is an artificial wood and an artificial waterfall. In her left hand she holds a small gas lamp that illuminates the scene, enabling the viewer to now realize that the body is partially dismembered. The genitalia are stylized and gaping. Museum-goers who see Given for the first time are shocked, many are disgusted, in part because it is a Duchamp, and he was not a threatening or violent artist. The sense of shock turns quickly into embarrassment, because the viewer is being observed by the next viewer politely waiting in line to look through the peephole. The suddenly shocked and embarrassed viewer realizes he or she has been made self-consciously ashamed to be viewing such a macabre sexual scene in public. This experience, for Duchamp, duplicates the great existential moment, first found by Jean-Paul Sartre, which is the recognition that you are an Other to others--a source of shame when you realize that someone is watching you look through a keyhole—and in this case, a public peephole. Suddenly, the innocent museum-goer becomes an object of other people's scrutiny--all the others waiting in line who look to judge the viewer by the viewer's response to what he or she sees through the peephole. In his seminar on the Duchamp homage to Courbet, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard says that Duchamp placed the viewer in the same position as the viewed. What was a private violation of a woman's vagina for Courbet becomes in the 1960s in America a public spectacle for Duchamp, and a posthumous statement about the definition, or de-definition, of art. As Lyotard says in his lecture, "the beholder suddenly realizes he is the vagina everyone's looking at." In effect, Duchamp's assemblage both recreates and comments on the museum-goer's discomfort with Courbet's painting, but, by including the viewer as part of the spectacle, finds a way to merge image, artist and spectator that Courbet would not have considered when he was trying to shrink the distance between the image and its observer. Duchamp updated the discomfort and the unmasking of the viewer that Courbet initiated. Duchamp considered all of his art "a game between I and me." Whether Courbet would have divided his identity as easily is doubtful, nor would he have accepted the premise of art for art's sake, but in the ambiguity of his nudes with regard to their observers, Courbet did grasp the revolutionary tendencies inherent in the female nude from the beginning. After all, he was the first artist to show us what the entire history of the nude was hiding under gowns, bed linens and tactfully placed hands. Neither Courbet nor Duchamp would have satisfied Kenneth Clark's characterization of the nude as the "civilizing" of the flesh, when he wrote in his famous study that "a mass of naked figures does not move us to empathy, but to disillusion and dismay." For both Courbet and Duchamp, the female nude is the source and also the solution of dismay, of disillusion, and of illusion itself: the alpha and omega of why we keep making art.

Eurydice