The origin of the world, famous nude by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), was tagged with red paint on Monday May 6. The painting, preserved by the Musée d’Orsay, is currently on display at the Musée Pompidou-Metz as part of an exhibition dedicated to one of its most famous owners, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
The work was “protected by glass”specified the museum’s communications department, reporting that the police were on site to carry out analyses.
This painting is among the most famous of 19th century painting.e century. For a long time it was only known to art historians and connoisseurs, but after Lacan’s death in 1981, his heirs bequeathed it to the State and, in 1995, the painting joined the collections. from the Musée d’Orsay.
The work was created in 1866 for Khalil Bey, a Turkish-Egyptian diplomat and collector of erotic paintings (including Turkish bath, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres), before changing owners several times.
His model, who remained anonymous for more than one hundred and fifty years, is the dancer Constance Quéniaux, according to a discovery made in 2018 by a great specialist in Alexandre Dumas, Claude Schopp.
Read also | The face of Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” revealed
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