"L’Origine: The Secret Life of the World’s Most Erotic Masterpiece" by Lilianne Milgrom
Previously published May 19, 2021 on art, book reviews, censorship, sexuality, social studies
L’Origine: The Secret Life of the World’s Most Erotic Masterpiece by Lilianne Milgrom ; Paperback, 288 pages; Published July 28th 2020 by Little French Girl Press; ISBN: 1734867000 (ISBN13: 9781734867008)
...Years of clinical practice in Paris’s mental wards, as well as observations elicited from his private practice, had convinced Lacan that all human desire and unconscious yearnings arose from lack—the term he had cleverly coined to define that which is missing, unseeable, unpossessable…
Given the novel’s lengthy subject, a famous erotic painting, perhaps the most famous of them all, I was instantly on board for a good read and then follow through with what I hoped on my part would be an interesting review. Most likely both you and I, dear reader, will be disappointed on both counts. I am not exactly sure where history and fiction meet in this story, but it generated no fireworks within me, or without. Gustave Courbet’s painting alone does more for me than any words might attempt. The horror. My flight.
...His first reflex upon seeing the realistically painted chatte had been to recoil inwardly, an involuntary instinct he immediately identified as the subconscious flight response to the primal fear of castration. Like a Venus flytrap, a woman’s sex was irresistible, yet laced with real and implicated dangers...
Not that the author did not make a gallant try. She did. And she offers a perspective about the painting that only a woman can provide. Plus she was there in the Musée d'Orsay as a copyist, a painter too. For that I am grateful. But she left me nothing to really talk about. No jeopardy for me, only for her novel’s additional subjects. And no emotional connection to any of her characters. There were literally no phrases or sentences, paragraphs even, that I could pilfer for this review in order to titillate the reader for what could be in store if chosen to purchase or take this book from off the shelf. Nothing. There were some clinical observations, some scientific and philosophical, but nothing stimulating at all in the department of eroticism, except in the beginning
...As his innocent subjects struggled to process the startling image, he searched their faces with his piercing eyes, ferreting out any unconscious fears or desires unmasked in that uncensored moment, assessing if the hungry eye, in constant need of nourishment, was momentarily satisfied…
Milgrom was looking for anything she might add as insight to the story behind the hidden painting. And ever since the completion of L’Origine du Monde in 1866, protecting it was paramount to its many caretakers and owners. Keeping the wrong eyes off this masterpiece was the order of the day. That, and assessing each hungry eye.
...Sartre had smiled enigmatically. “Come now, Beaver,” he said, calling her by her nickname. “You know what I think about that. We shouldn’t be defined by how other people look at us—we are what we choose to be…’’
My wife’s nickname is also Beaver. I informed her of my discovery that Simone de Beauvoir’s Beaver came first. Nonetheless, though different, a beaver emerges as muse to both Sartre and Courbet, as well as in my own work. How fitting.
...she was more interested in what had possessed him to paint such a thing in the first place…
That question was never answered by Milgrom, so why bring it up? She obviously wanted to paint her own copy of it. Lilianne Milgrom’s novel begins and ends with herself as subject and Courbet’s painting as object. It is my opinion she should have never veered from that harrowing gaze and for our sake, and her own, looked into that void even harder. Milgrom had her own personal story she could have extended or elaborated on. Perhaps the result of my being a disappointed accomplice to Milgrom’s work, I would have been better served by being swallowed whole in my collaborative wish for a total immersion, let’s call it drowning, into Courbet’s hungry painting. And what a way to die.
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