After Courbet – L’Origine du Monde

While in Paris in 2008 I became interested in this famous painting by Gustave Courbet: its uniqueness, its sexism and its beauty. I purchased 200 postcards of the painting and drew on the back of each one while pondering the question of the iconography of the vulva in feminist art of the past 40 years, the life of the nineteenth century mistress/model, and the representation (or lack of representation) of pubic hair in European art.