L'Origine du Monde

"L'Origine du Monde" (1866) - Gustave Courbet

Don't you just love it when art is translated into pornography by a mere social network, when cultural heritage is made out to be something offensive...
There is an epidemic spreading throughout Facebook: intolerance.
The cause: L'Origine du Monde, Gustave Courbet's 1866 work of art depicting his vision of the origin of the world.
A soon as a person posts a representation of this work on Facebook, their profiles disappear.
Though some people might find this piece "shocking", it still remains non the less a work of art and Facebook's actions simply underline a clear lack of culture of behalf of the people moderating it's content.

What I find offensive is Facebook's mistaking and acknowledging a key pieces of France's artistic legacy as "vulgar erotica".
When ignorance overcomes art, history and respect, there is a problem.

Well done Facebook!
I wasn't aware that the Musée d'Orsay (where this painting hangs in Paris and where I saw it for the first time when I was 7 years old) was a temple of pornography.
It's strange though, why do schools take children there on class outings...?
Oh yes thats right, to corrupt their young minds and turn them into sexual deviants!

Or maybe it's because there is absolutely nothing offensive about "L'Origine du Monde", nor the will to share the history, context and message of this powerful piece of art.

Half of the world has a vagina, and I personally find Courbet's work to be a beautiful message to women, in no way demeaning or abusive.

He demonstrates in the simplest and most direct of ways that we, women (or more precisely, our female organs), are the origin of the world. We all come from the same place he depicts.

The message of this painting is one of the most beautiful odes to the female species ever made.

How could anyone find that offensive.

Why plant the idea that nudity is "wrong"?

There is nothing more natural than a naked body, why fear it.
Here's a question Mark Zuckerberg, do you even know who Gustave Courbet is?
Rather than being dictatorial bigots and simply disabling profiles without any possible dialogue, why not simply send a message saying "this work of art goes against our nudity policily therefore please be so kind as to remove it". Though it remains ridiculous, the simple act of entering into a dialogue on the subject would show some form of human intelligence reassuring us on the state of the mindless drones behind Facebook.

Dialogue is the road to enlightenment.

La Marseillaise

Photo: Unknown

Today is the French independance day, where they celebrate the overturn of the Bastille.

La Marianne represents the French Republic.

Past Mariannes include Brigitte Bardot in 1969, Catherine Deneuve in 1985 and Laetitia Casta in 2000.

This is Serge Gainsbourg's version of the French national anthem.

Song of the day.

Serge Gainsbourg - Aux Armes Et Caetera

Pierre Soulages

Pierre Soulages is a French painter, engraver and sculptor.
He is known as "the painter of black" because of his interest in the colour.

"Both a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens up a mental field all of its own." - Soulages.

He sees light as a matter to work with, striating the black surface of his paintings enables him to make the light reflect, allowing the black to come out from darkness and into brightness, thereby becoming a luminous colour.

One of my all time favorite artistes.
What I love about Soulages is how he manages to find endles possibilities with one single subject.
The way he works texture.
How powerful yet perfect each brush stroke is in the never ending black of the canvas.

Degas

Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917), was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. A superb draughtsman, he is especially identified with the subject of the dance, and over half his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement. His portraits are considered to be among the finest in the history of art.

His scenes of Parisian life, his off-center compositions, his experiments with color and form, and his friendship with several key Impressionist artists, most notably Edouard Manet, all relate him intimately to the Impressionist movement.

I do not care for Degas as a human being, for he was a well known anti-semite, but I love his ballerinas.
Their movement, texture and colour are so very beautiful.
Though he may have been a terrible human, he was a great artist.

Egon Schiele

was an Austrian painter, a protégé of Gustav Klimt, and a major figurative painter of the early 20th century.

Egon Schiele is known for being grotesque, erotic, pornographic, and disturbing, focusing on sex, death and discovery.

I find his work so beautiful, because it is always so tragic.