The Sunlit Pool of the Finished Image

<p>Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde depicts a realistic close-up view of a woman's genitalia: one of the most notorious paintings ever made. This novel seeks to give the painting a voice from under the male gaze following the painting from her production in 1866 up to the present day. This is a journey from revolutionary Paris to Nazi-controlled Budapest to the birth of French psychoanalysis in the 1960s. Throughout the painting describes how it feels to be sexually objectified by her different owners. Using the voices of women who were exploited as models and objects sheds a new light on how we as a society look at images which have been canonized as unimpeachable.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>