L'Origine du Monde

Courbet painted the female body in unflinching, close-cropped intimacy - a frank, headless view of a reclining nude torso rendered with his characteristic dense, sensuous realism. Long considered too explicit to show, the picture passed through private hands for over a century, kept behind curtains and screens. Now in the Musee d'Orsay, the Origin of the World remains startling for its directness and its refusal of any mythological excuse - the human body presented as plain, bodily fact. It stands as the most radical statement of Courbet's lifelong insistence on painting only what is real.