People more shocked by art than by warfare

On 29 May 2014 (a week before the gigantic D-Day commemorations in Normandy), the Luxembourg artist Deborah de Robertis created a sensational but profoundly poetic happening in the Parisian Musée d’Orsay by calmly sitting down on the ground beneath the celebrated painting of Gustave Courbet [1819-1877] entitled L’Origine du Monde, drawing up her skirt, spreading her legs apart, and showing startled but generally appreciative onlookers a hairy real-world specimen of the anatomical place where human life originates and emerges.

I am the Origin.

I am all Women.

You have never seen me.

I want you to recognize me.

Virgin like Water.

Creator of Sperm.

Unforgettable female

I'll never forget that splendid woman. It's true that her facial features have become a little blurry in my aging memory. But not the rest of her being. If her fabulous image were to reappear magically in front of me today, I would mistake her for no other female creature I've ever known. Her beauty has remained forever the source of all my passions, the origin of my world of desire.

                                     — photo afp.com/Pascal Guyot

An expert in females at the Paris Match weekly, Jean-Jacques Fernier, has alleged that I never knew that woman as a whole. So he insisted upon revealing intimate features of her body that I had supposedly neglected. For example, he showed me a face. And that face had an expression.

But it had nothing in common with the sensual expression that had remained in my mind for so long. Maybe the specialist thought he was going to reveal a secret: the naked truth behind the vision. On the contrary, I had the impression that he showed me nothing more than a dull image of pink flesh, parted lips and a mass of dark hair.