Coubert

Appropriately enough, the picture had an active, if secret, life. It was originally painted for Kalil-Bey, Ottoman ambassador to Paris in the 1860s. The ambassador had tried to buy Courbet's Venus and Psyche of 1863, yet another controversial piece because of its lesbian undertones. This had already been sold (and has subsequently disappeared from view). Courbet offered to paint a sequel to it, Le Sommeil (before and after the love act), and then threw in the Origine as an extra. It adorned the ambassador's palatial bathroom, hidden behind a green baize curtain. Kalil-Bey was eventually forced to sell his substantial collection to meet his more than substantial debts.

In the following decades the painting was presumably viewed furtively; then in 1913 it traveled to Budapest, to be housed once more in an opulent bathroom, that of Baron Ferenc Hatvany. It was now in a specially designed frame, which meant that when not being enjoyed the Origine could be shielded under a harmless Courbet winter landscape. At the time of World War II, when the city was threatened by advancing Russian forces, the picture was placed in a bank vault, only to be looted by the invaders. It was subsequently restored to its owner and eventually passed into the hands of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who kept it in his study masked by a quasi-abstract painting by his friend André Masson of the same subject, but veiled and opaque.

Depois não me digam que não há aí uma força qualquer superior a nós todos que regula o funcionamento do universo. Chamem-lhe deus, o espírito santo, a providência, jack bauer. Há algo. Ou então alguém me explique duas coisas sobre este maravilhoso quadro: a primeira é como é que um tipo chamado Thierry Savatier escreveu um livro (que vai na terceira edição) apenas e só sobre este quadro; a segunda, é como é que este quadro, depois de todas as voltas que deu, foi parar às mãos do rebarbado do Lacan. Na verdade eu nunca li Lacan, mas já li (e vi) Zizek, o seu mais famoso apóstolo, e o gajo passa horas a falar de sexo, e de drives, e do subconsciente e de sexo outra vez. Todos os filmes do David Lynch se resumem a sexo, repressão e drives subsconscientes . Os do Hitchcok também. E este quadro vai parar às mãos do Lacan. Alguém que se informe e que me diga. Cordialmente vosso.