Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World (1866), a painting of the “lower groin” (bas-ventre) of a woman, as the writer Edmond de Goncourt sheepishly described it in June 1889, is as beautiful as shameless Courbet's model is portrayed solely by her vulva, with her thighs parted to reveal her vaginal lips, offset by black pubic hair, a white sheet, and the pink skin of the underside of her breasts. As the title confirms, Courbet pays homage to the origin of life and the world as we know it, but in the process he also stages a call to arms for a radically new realism.
[...] the painting goes beyond the autobiographical and can best be seen as a manifesto offering an allegory of sexual pleasure. [...]
The origin of the world goes even further in this honest vision of the real. The viewer becomes part of the living painting, so close that the perspective is almost gynecological. Many artists before Courbet had staged intimate encounters with the viewer, either by depicting the nude in nature in such a way that its naked form could be better appreciated, despite its supposed virtue and innocence, or by showing it as the very embodiment of vice, boldly staring from a vanity with her bare and flushed buttocks. Courbet's radical move was to portray the pudenda without any mythological, historical, or moral narrative, even in a state of arousal.
[...] In The Origin of the World, not only is the model an anonymous torso, but the female sex is naked, exposed, and framed, looking downward from a height. Therefore, Courbet seems to place the viewer in the position of the master: from a Freudian perspective, this is a close-up that could be read as privileging male sexual desire and fear.
Reenact what Freud described as a seminal moment in the development of every boy, when the child looks under his mother’s skirt and realizes that her genitals are quite different from his own. However, although it is tempting to view Courbet's painting through the lens of Freud’s idea of castration anxiety, doing so would exclude the erotic and revolutionary potential of the work. If we see it as a glorious celebration of woman, open to both the male and female gaze, or even as an image of autoeroticism, we can better explain its cultural impact.
—Alyce Mahon, "The Art Newspaper" 2014