Red paint, shocking action… Who is the woman who has just attacked Courbet’s “The Origin of the World”?

The painting “The Origin of the World” by Comtois painter Gustave Courbet (1866) was targeted and sprayed with red paint this Monday, May 5, 2024. The events occurred early in the afternoon at the Center Pompidou-Metz .

The painting which represents the most famous of the female sexes in art was on loan from the Musée d’Orsay. Fortunately it was protected by glass. Red paint was spilled there. The police took samples for analysis and made arrests, specifies Agence France Presse.

The painting has been on display since December 31, 2023, as part of an exhibition dedicated to Jacques Lacan, a major figure in psychoanalysis. The latter maintained a very intimate relationship with the artists of the 20th century and their works. He met, among others, Dali, Picasso and Dora Maar. Among the exhibited works which resonate with the complex thinking of the psychoanalyst, the famous and long object of scandal: “The Origin of the World” painted in 1866 by Gustave Courbet.

This attack on the most famous of Courbet’s paintings was led in particular by the Franco-Luxembourgish performance artist Deborah de Robertis. “We do not separate the woman from the artist”, this is the name given to the action carried out today. For the Luxembourger, women cannot be reduced to one sex.

She wanted to be part of a “global movement” of “young women artists from all fields”, a lawyer for one of the parties involved in the action told AFP.

What was allowed in the past, now young people no longer want it,” she continued. “Deborah de Robertis is a great artist who questions us, challenges us, disturbs us.

Deborah de Robertis was fined 2,000 euros in 2020 by French courts for showing herself naked in 2018 during one of her performances in front of the grotto of the Lourdes sanctuary (south-west).

She has also been acquitted several times after similar actions, notably in 2017 after showing her genitals at the Louvre Museum in front of the Mona Lisa in Paris.

The name of Deborah de Robertis also appears in 2018 at the time of the yellow vest crisis. On the Champs-Élysées, she brought together for a happening five women who presented themselves topless in front of the police, with a costume evoking Marianne.

In Metz, Deborah de Robertis, however, is very present. And on the walls. A work called “Mirror of the Origin of the World” is exhibited near “The Origin of the World” as part of the exhibition dedicated to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. We see the artist posing, naked, under Courbet’s work, a performance which was carried out on May 29, 2014 at the Musée d’Orsay.

Thierry Savatier is the author of the reference book on The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet, published by Bartillat. He was scientific co-curator of the exhibition at the Courbet d’Ornans museum in Doubs, “This obscure object of desire, around the origin of the world” in 2014. This attack against the painting only surprised him half.

“I expected that we would attack “The Origin of the World”, because there are certain neo-feminist currents which consider that “The Origin of the World” is a sort of outrage against women, because we would reduce women to their sex. I am of the opposite opinion. In my book, I called this painting “monument to the unknown woman” because Courbet in a single painting restores to woman the sex that all the conventions of the history of Western art had denied her since ancient Greece”.

This performance at Orsay does not shock me. It is the free expression of an artist. On the other hand, there, Déborah de Robertis attacks the work of art itself. It’s a way of saying “We don’t want that.

Thierry Savatier, specialist in Gustave Courbet

“Attacking a work of the past in the name of today’s values ​​is an anachronism of the past.. It is attacking the heritage of humanity,” he regrets.