Hands off my baby!

Enough! Something needs to be done about the growing wave of art vandalism in the name of misguided activism. The justification for such horrific acts of vandalism against defenseless cultural icons usually falls under the banner of Just Stop Oil. What? You mean to tell me that by disrupting art lovers all over the world from enjoying the fruits of human creativity, you are going to impact the fossil fuel crisis. Really? Finally today, following the most recent act of vandalism perpetrated upon Claude Monet’s Poppies at Argenteuil, the French Culture Minister announced that they will be seeking criminal charges against vandals.

Most recent act of vandalism at the Orsay Museum

This is the timeless painting before being vandalized

Gustav Klimt painting being vandalized

WHEN IT GETS PERSONAL…

I was blindsided by how angry I felt when these violent acts came too close to home. A few weeks ago, Gustave Courbet’s iconic and controversial masterpiece L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) was attacked when out on loan to the Centre Pompidou-Metz for an exhibition dedicated to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Courbet’s L’Origine du monde was defaced with the notorious hashtag ‘ME TOO’ in crude red paint. If not for the protective glass barrier, this painting may have been destroyed forever. This was a bridge too far – L’Origine du monde is my baby and I get all ‘Mama Bear’ if someone touches my baby. Many of my blog readers know why this painting is so precious to me but for those who are not familiar with the story, here’s a quick recap. In 2011, I was in Paris on an extended artist residency. To make a long story short, in a totally unanticipated turn of events, a serendipitous encounter with Courbet’s L’Origine at the Orsay Museum inspired me to become the first authorized copyist of this infamous work. After spending six weeks replicating this beautifully painted portrait of a woman’s exposed genitals, I emerged more liberated and more empowered as a woman.

Still from a video of my time as a copyist at the Orsay Museum

The painting has received a bad rap thanks to a dearth of art historical schooling and a conscious refusal to accept that in art, context is everything. During my stint as a museum copyist, I had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of museum visitors about the painting and what it meant to them. I arrived at the conclusion that the painting is like a Rorschach test. Some people saw a beautiful symbol of motherhood, a memory of a past lover or a wife. Others frowned upon the painting with distaste and shock. Yes, the painting is shocking in that Gustave Courbet broke centuries of tradition by removing the hand, the fig leaf or carefully placed fabric and presenting a realist depiction of a woman’s vulva in all its glory. But shock was NOT the original intention of the artist. I say this with authority after spending ten years researching the painting’s remarkable clandestine history and writing my award-winning historical fiction ‘L’Origine: The Secret Life of the World’s most Erotic Masterpiece’ (Girl Friday Books, 2021).

The painting was never intended to be seen by millions of gaping museum hordes. It was a private commission, admittedly to a Turkish diplomat with a hankering for erotic art. So what? What one does in the privacy of one’s own home is still sacrosanct. The fact that it survived a century and a half before being publicly exhibited is in itself miraculous. And the fact that it now takes its place in one of the world’s most venerable museum speaks to its importance along the continuum of art history.

I was horrified by the Guardian’s headline: ‘Hurrah for the Courbet vandals: defacing the vulva painting is basic feminism’. This contemporary form of protest is an abomination. It smacks of hubris and threatens the very notion of creative freedom – a principle that ironically was the golden rule by which Gustave Courbet lived his life.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter!