The performer who wrote ‘MeToo’ on Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World is right to think the painting is misogynistic: the model doesn’t even have a face!
On Monday afternoon, a group of feminist artist-activists tagged “MeToo” in red paint on Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. Currently on loan to the Centre Pompidou-Metz for an exhibition dedicated to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the painting is a notoriously tight close-up of an unnamed woman’s vulva. It has never not been startling. It operates as a kind of social lightning conductor, consistently illuminating the invisibility women too often experience – in art as in life.
Luxembourgeois artist Deborah de Robertis, who is also exhibiting in the show, has claimed authorship of the action. Its title, she’s said, is On Ne Sépare Pas La Femme de l’Artiste, which translates as “You do not separate the woman from the art.”
