Fruit de plusieurs années de recherche, ce livre retrace toute l'histoire de L'Origine du monde, des arcanes de sa création en 1866 jusqu'à son entrée au musée d'Orsay en 1995, en passant par la collection de Jacques Lacan. Scandale majeur de l'histoire de l'art, le tableau de Gustave Courbet a connu un itinéraire des plus extraordinaires que Thierry Savatier éclaire d'un jour nouveau. De nombreuses personnalités des XIXe et XXe siècles ont croisé le chemin du tableau: Théophile Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, Edmond de Goncourt, Sylvia Bataille, Alain Cuny, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Dora Maar, René Magritte...
Cet essai a obtenu le prix Lucien Febvre 2006.
L'origine du monde
L'or y gît, noeud du monde...
Frédéric Saenen
Sitartmag, juillet 2006
À la mort de Khalil-Bey, sa collection fut dispersée, et les traces du tableau se perdent. Un savoureux racontar atteste de son acquisition par le Procureur Ernest Pinard, celui-là même qui instruisit, en 1857, les procès de Baudelaire et Flaubert pour atteinte à la morale ! Piquant, mais infondé. Toujours est-il que c’est ensuite par un aristocrate juif hongrois, le Baron Ferenc Hatvany, que le Con Suprême fut racheté, peu avant 1914. Il restera donc à Budapest jusqu’en 1944, année durant laquelle l’Allemagne hitlérienne envahit le pays. Et le récit de Savatier prend ici toute son importance, puisqu’il y relate enfin l’histoire réelle, sans souci des versions convenues et dénuées d’esprit critique qui nous parvinrent : il révèle en effet que l’œuvre ne fut pas spoliée par les Nazis mais volée par les Soviétiques, qui l’extirpèrent illégalement – et au pied de biche – avec maints autres biens, du coffre-fort dans lequel elle avait été déposée dès 1942, au moment de la promulgation des premières lois anti-juives.
Revenue après mille tribulations en France, L’Origine fut enfin dénichée (dans des circonstances qui, là aussi, sont loin d’être claires) par Lacan et son épouse Sylvia, ex-Madame Georges Bataille. La légende se cristallisa alors autour de ce chef-d’œuvre, plus oublié qu’inconnu, que le psychanalyste avait dissimulé derrière un paysage en trompe-l’œil de Masson et qu’il découvrait avec délectation devant ses hôtes privilégiés (Picasso, Leiris, Duras, etc.).
L’enquête de Savatier, minutieuse, se lit d’une traite, comme un bon polar. L’intelligence de l’essayiste est d’avouer les (rares) lacunes de ses informations ou le degré de fiabilité de certaines sources, et de préférer à l’assertion hasardeuse le fourmillement des supputations, à l’irrépressible envie de lever le voile la délicatesse de laisser planer des zones d’ombre. Du grand art.
(Sur Internet : http://www.sitartmag.com/courbet.htm)
Ce livre de Thierry Savatier est ce que j’ai lu de plus excitant en histoire de l’art depuis L’Envers du visible, un éloge de l’ombre par Max Milner dont la lecture m’avait passionné cet été. Moins érudit, moins porté aux analyses philosophiques et esthétiques, celui de Savatier se veut avant tout une enquête sur L’Origine du monde. Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet (229 pages, 20 euros, Bartillat). L’auteur est plutôt un littéraire, spécialiste du XIXème siècle. Mais son essai, qui relève autant du reportage, du récit, de l’étude, de la thèse que de la pure enquête policière, emporte le morceau par le ton et par la qualité de l’information. Pas évident lorsqu’on sait toute la littérature, dans les deux acceptions du terme, que ce fameux tableau, l’un des plus petits formats du peintre, a suscité. Il vient donc après les livres de Serge Teyssèdre, Linda Nochlin, Michel Boujut, Serge Rezvani, Christine Orban, Jacques Henric, tous exclusivement consacrés à cette toile, sans compter les biographies de Courbet et les articles psychanalytiques.
Avec un sens aigu de l’exactitude et un humour toujours bienvenu, Thierry Savatier nous raconte dans un style assez palpitant les aventures du fameux tableau. Il écrit sa biographie depuis sa conception, reprenant tout le dossier à zéro pour tout revérifier s’agissant du modèle de Courbet (Joanna Hifferman ou… une photo ?), de la personnalité de son premier collectionneur Khalil-Bey le magnifique, de la période de clandestinité qui s’en est suivie, de son long séjour chez des aristocrates hongrois, de sa disparition au lendemain de la guerre à la suite du vol par l’Armée rouge (et non par les nazis comme on l’écrit généralement), de sa réapparition secrète et longtemps dissimulée derrière un Masson dans la maison de campagne de Jacques Lacan, de ses démêlés avec les censures, enfin de sa réception au musée d’Orsay par un ministre de la Culture (l’ineffable Douste-Blazy) qui s’emmêle les pinceaux entre les inventions romanesques et les références académiques tant il est préoccupé de ne pas être photographié devant la chatte scandaleuse. Le tableau ne provoque plus comme avant, mais il bouscule encore, et embarrasse quand il ne heurte pas. Il paraît qu’au musée d’Orsay, L’Origine du monde (copyright RMN) ne choque plus personne. On en veut pour preuve le fait qu’elle y est la deuxième carte postale la plus vendue après Le Moulin de la galette de Renoir. N’empêche, certains voyageurs en face de moi dans le métro, faisaient une drôle de tête en découvrant la couverture du livre que je lisais. Ils essayaient de regarder ailleurs, ou baissaient les yeux. Comme dit Benoite Groult : " c’est tout de même un comble : on ne peut pas écrire "vagin" sans choquer, d’ailleurs on ne l’écrit plus, alors que toute l’humanité sort de là !" Tout cela me donne une idée de nouvelle ou de roman : un jour, un restaurateur s’avise de gratter la toile et découvre, en la passant aux rayons, un homme dans la même pose… Sacré Courbet ! Ils nous a tous bien eus ! On décrasse la toile, on rend "L’Origine" à son statut d’origine et on expose le gros plan cet entrejambes viril. Et d’abord sous quel titre ? On imagine les réactions à cette révélation, et les aventures de ce Courbet revisité …
(Sur Internet : http://passouline.blog.lemonde.fr/?name=2006_04_les_aventures_d)
Everywhere you turn in the painting’s history, you meet with the same pattern of secrecy and obfuscation. The man thought to have commissioned the picture, a wealthy Turkish-Egyptian diplomat named Khalil Bey, kept it hung behind a green cover in his private dressing room. When Edmond de Goncourt came across it, some twenty-three years later, in 1889, it was concealed by a second Courbet, “Le Château de Blonay”, in a double-bottomed frame. In 1913, it passed into the hands of a Hungarian collector, Baron Ferenc Hatvany, who kept it under lock and key in his town house in Budapest. The last and best-known of the private owners, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, hung it in his workroom at Guitrancourt, where it was again concealed by a sliding panel, painted by his brother-in-law André Masson. The earliest known reproduction, in an obscure gynaecological publication in 1967, in fact depicts a copy, now missing, but thought to have been made by Magritte. In 1988, the painting was shown in public for the first time, at the “Courbet Reconsidered” exhibition in Brooklyn; today, it hangs in the same room at the Musée d’Orsay as Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”.
Why all the fuss? The reason, of course, is the subject matter of the painting: a slant view of a truncated female nude which sights up from a vantage point very close to the model’s pudenda. There’s nothing particularly sensual about the picture, however. Courbet painted quite a few voluptuous nudes, but “The Origin of the World” (which is not really a nude at all, but a life study) has neither the torpid opulence of his sprawling “Bacchante”, nor the hushed erotic charge of those signature nudes in which the painter gazes down on a sleeping woman. Nor can it really be said to be obscene, for, unlike the much more provocative “Woman with White Stockings”, painted a few years earlier, the focus of the picture is not the model’s genitalia as such, but the “matted Rorschach blot”, as John Updike once described it, of glinting, inky-black pubic hair. Painted with the same warmth and awed attention to detail as the rich, creamy flesh-tones, it is a reminder that you can lift the veil on anything in art, provided you do so in the same spirit that caused the veil to be put there in the first place.
The French have a long and, for the most part, happy tradition of sexual candour, and the installation of the painting at the Musée d’Orsay was greeted with an excitable outpouring of books and articles, much of it froth. The most serious of these was Bernard Teyssèdre’s Le Roman de l’Origine (1996), a book that is a mine of information but is marred by garrulousness and an awkward mix of registers and genres – part essay, part biographical novel, part private confession, part notes – that makes it almost impossible to read. Ten years on, in L’Origine du Monde: Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet, Thierry Savatier has reviewed these earlier productions and carried out some first-hand research of his own. He has not by any means solved all the mysteries: there are still huge gaps in the narrative, notably between 1868 and 1889, and 1889 and 1912. He has, however, cleared up a host of minor errors and approximations, uncovered the identities of certain characters in the story (notably Mme Vial and Ernest Feydeau, the author of a hitherto anonymous piece of doggerel about the painting) and, by questioning certain assumptions made about the work, opened up further avenues for research.
The same scrupulousness is evident in the sketches Savatier gives of the main protagonists. This is particularly true of the early part of the story (1886–1913), to which he devotes nearly half his book. Like Teyssèdre, he finds Khalil Bey, whose collection also included not just Ingres’s “Bain Turc” but a range of landscape and history paintings, a rather more interesting and congenial figure than the Oriental sex-pot conjured up by his contemporaries, and Savatier is similarly generous towards Bey’s erstwhile mistress, Jeanne de Tourbey, whose ascent from provincial bottle-washer (or brothel-girl, depending on which account you choose to believe) to society hostess and Comtesse de Loynes reads like something out of Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. Antoine de la Narde, the dealer who showed the painting to Edmond de Goncourt, turns out to have been a more substantial figure than the petit brocanteur he is usually portrayed as, and the chapter reviewing the possible models for the painting is nuanced and persuasive. (The author finds none of the flesh-and-blood candidates, least of all Whistler’s mistress Jo, very plausible, and thinks that Courbet, who had a large collection of nude photographs, probably worked from a “stereograph” by Auguste Belloc, who employed some of the same models as Courbet.)
The high point of the narrative, and the single most impressive piece of detective work, concerns the Hungarian aristocrat Ferenc Hatvany and the looting of his collection during the Second World War. The period in question extends from September 1942, when Hatvany deposited “seventy-one canvases and drawings, plus twelve precious rugs”, under the name of a non-Jewish friend, in a series of banks, to 1949/50, when he escaped to Paris. By trawling through the Hungarian national archives and the records of local banks, Savatier has established that it was not, as had previously been believed, the Nazis who had made off with the booty in question, but the Red Army, which sent in a special commando during the “liberation” of Budapest to clean out the city’s bank vaults. (The Nazis did indeed help themselves to the major part of Hatvany’s collection, which he had been unable to protect, but, with ghastly logic, they respected goods deposited in banks “so long as the owners of the vaults weren’t Jewish”.) The story of how Hatvany subsequently retrieved, with the aid of a corrupt Soviet functionary, a tiny fraction of his once 800-strong collection and smuggled it out of the country is a little book in itself, and involves, among others, the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, whose actions are estimated to have saved the lives of between 30,000 and 100,000 Hungarian Jews.
After the grim drama of the Hatvany period, the Lacan chapters verge at times on farce. Savatier does his best to unravel the conflicting accounts given (to confound the taxman) by Lacan’s widow, Sylvia Bataille, of how the couple came to acquire the painting, and which of them actually owned it, but much of the fog remains. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this whole period is how well guarded the secret of the picture’s whereabouts was. At one moment it is reported to be in a collection on the West Coast of America; at another, in Japan. Yet, as the author reveals, a long list of distinguished visitors, from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Leiris to Marguerite Duras and Dora Maar, had seen the painting at Lacan’s. One of these guests, Marcel Duchamp, is of particular interest, since his famous posthumous installation, “Étant Donné”, appears to have been directly inspired by Courbet’s picture as a final riposte to the bête noire of “realism”. But had Duchamp actually seen the painting? He and his wife, Teeny, are known to have dined with the Lacans, at their flat in the rue de Lille, in 1958, and Savatier thinks it likely that Lacan would have brought the little canvas up to Paris for the occasion. He concludes, however, that even if Duchamp did see the picture there, it cannot have provided the inspiration for “Étant Donné”, a preliminary sketch for which had been made as early as 1947.
At this point, the reader may find himself wondering about Émile Vial, the man Savatier has identified as the likely owner of the painting in the early part of the century. Not much is known about Vial, who was a scientist by profession and a collector of Japanese art, but the little that Savatier has been able to glean about his life is full of curious details. For one thing, he seems to have been interested in precisely the kind of speculative science that engaged Duchamp’s brothers and their friends in the “Section d’Or” at Puteaux. For another, three of Vial’s publications (which have titles like Le positif + le négatif – duo d’amour en un acte and La Machine humaine) are listed in the general catalogue of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, where Duchamp, as we know, did a great deal of reading. Equally intriguing, the address given on a card Vial sent to Ernst Mach in 1911 reveals him to have been living only a short walk from Duchamp’s studio in Neuilly at that time. If I were a Duchamp scholar, I would want to know more about M Vial.
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