Curtains to Carpet for Courbet

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) probably would have wanted to be remembered for his major works of Realism like The Stone Breakers (Les Casseurs de pierres – destroyed in 1945) and A Burial at Omans (Un enterrement à Ornans) or his role in the Paris Commune, but probably not for L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World). In his What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye Will Gompertz makes the point that Courbet:

… wanted to get real, and paint ordinary subjects that the Academy and polite society considered to be vulgar, like the poor. Mind you, if they found the realism of a painting featuring a peasant on a pathway crude, they would have choked on their fine wine had they seen Courbet's treatment of another subject. His painting The Origin of the World (1866) is one of the most notorious works in art history, famed for its blunt, no-holds-barred portrayal of a naked female torso shown only from breast to thigh, with legs wide open, and cropped by Courbet to achieve maximum (porno) graphic effect. It is a sexually frank picture that is not for the squeamish now; back then it was for private eyes only. In fact, it remained that way for over 100 years, until 1988 when it was shown for the first time in a public exhibition.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the picture has a clouded history. Courbet sold it to a Turkish-Egyptian diplomat who would reveal its charms to guests from behind a green curtain. After passing through various other hands, in 1955 it became the property of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his wife, and after her death was accepted into the Musée d’Orsay collection in 1995.

The model for L'Origine du monde has often been thought to be Joanna Hiffernan, an Irishwoman who was the subject of other more conventional portraits by Courbet (eg La belle Irlandaise (Portrait of Jo)) and by James McNeill Whistler (eg Symphony in White, No. I: The White Girl and No II) and was also the latter’s mistress. The identity of the model has been under discussion again after a ‘world exclusive' in Paris Match on 7 February (left) which revealed the claim by Jean-Jacques Fernier, an expert on Courbet and author of the catalogue raisonné , that an unsigned painting of a woman's head (below) had been part of an original larger canvas. Laboratory tests showed that the pigment, brush strokes and canvas appeared to match in both paintings.

But the Musée d'Orsay said the test results showed only that the two paintings used the same pigment, canvas and paint brushes, all common at the time. In Le Monde the art critic Philippe Dagen had doubts as to the pictures’ similarity in style in terms of the light, the touch, the skin texture, and the colour range. Even more unhelpfully, the French Culture Ministry ruled out the conduct of cross-tests. A week after its original scoop, Paris Match returned to the fray, but, apart from disparaging the sceptics, could only offer in support of its case a claim that Fernier had seen L’Origine before its being handed to the Musée d’Orsay and that the painted canvas extended over the edges of the stretcher (le tableau se prolongeait sur ses bords).

The Irish Times seems to have taken an interest in L’Origine because of Hiffernan’s roots. Frank McNally in An Irishman’s Diary commented:

When I last wrote about Gustave Courbet’s notorious painting, The Origin of the World, suggesting it was a depiction of his Irish-born muse, Joanna Hiffernan, a reader e-mailed me pointing to a flaw in the theory. Famously beautiful, Hiffernan was also famously red-haired, her gloriously Hibernian tresses much admired in 1860s Paris. By contrast, as my correspondent put it delicately, the woman in the painting appeared to be a “brunette”. And since, as he added less delicately, “the collars and cuffs usually match”, it followed that the sitter (she’s more of a lier, in fact) could not have been Hiffernan. … And yes, I too had noticed the discrepancy to which the reader referred: especially since my column had been accompanied by a full portrait of Hiffernan, painted by another admirer, James McNeill Whistler. But I had opted for light brush strokes in dealing with the subject. Until, challenged, I suggested that Courbet might had have tactical reasons for changing the hair colour. For one thing, Hiffernan was then Whistler’s lover. In any case, Courbet might have felt the need to protect the model’s anonymity. And whereas brunettes are always commonplace among the Parisian muse community, giving his nude red hair might have reduced the list of suspects to one. That column was written only last August, after I visited the Musée d’Orsay, where the picture resides. Now I learn that, even then, tests were already under way elsewhere on a suspected but previously undocumented Courbet, …

In August 2007 Mark Hutchinson reviewed L’Origine du Monde Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet by Thierry Savatier and remarked that:

… the chapter reviewing the possible models for the painting is nuanced and persuasive. (The author finds none of the flesh-and-blood candidates, least of all Whistler’s mistress Jo, very plausible, and thinks that Courbet, who had a large collection of nude photographs, probably worked from a “stereograph” by Auguste Belloc, who employed some of the same models as Courbet.)

I suspect that Paris Match and Fernier are better off sticking with scientific tests rather than McNally’s novel area of connoisseurship, and that this may be a good point to contemplate Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. III (1865-7), with Hiffernan and Milly Jones, the wife of an actor friend of Whistler’s, on her left.

The way that the Paris Match story was covered (mot juste in the circumstances) by the media is probably a study in itself.  Online in the UK, the Daily Telegraph showed just the top half of the Match’s spread, while the Daily Mail mentioned it briefly, and without a picture, at the end of a well-illustrated story about the wholesome Isleworth Mona Lisa. The Times carpeted the problem in its print edition with graphics (left) reminiscent of its Wapping neighbour, the Sun. Whereas in France? Well this was the news on France 2 at 13:00 hours!

‘Borgen’ and British politics

White Doors or Open Doors (Strandgade 30), 1905

Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916)

 ... awaiting Kasper and Katrine

Until early 2011, when the British thought at all about Denmark, it was probably in association with Hamlet (Prince of), Carlsberg, Lurpak, Bang and Olufsen, Kierkegaard, Hammershøi (left) or other things according to taste, but not television dramas. Then BBC4 started showing the first series of DR’s (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) The Killing (Forbrydelsen – The Crime) which developed a cult following stimulated by opinion-forming chattering-class comment in the media. Its attraction was probably as much the fashionable Scandinavian noir setting as the central character, a jumper-wearing woman cop, Sarah Lund (Sophie Grabøl). After all, Cagney & Lacey started over 30 years ago and Helen Mirren began playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect in 1991. But The Killing certainly caught on, the third and probably final series ending its BBC4 run in December 2012 with an audience of over a million. David Cameron, we have been told, is a devotee of the series in box sets. As he told the House magazine in January during a rather sycophantic interview:

THE HOUSE: What was your favourite Christmas present from Sam?  

PM: She did give me the Killing III, that was our luxury at Christmas. So that’s it, we’ve done it. We had a decent time at home. We did a bit of back-to-back [viewing of episodes]. We cheated, she gave it to me before Christmas, so we opened it early.

Encouraged by the success of The Killing, BBC4 started showing the first series of DR’s Borgen in January 2012. This political drama (to paraphrase The Archers, an everyday story of coalition folk or contemporary drama in a political setting) mostly takes place in Copenhagen's Christiansborg Palace  which houses the Danish Parliament and Prime Minister's Office and is known to Danes as “Borgen”, (castle). The central character again is female, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen (Sidse Babett Knudsen), Denmark’s first woman Prime Minister and leader of the governing coalition. Among a large cast, the other main parts are Nyborg’s spin doctor, Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbæk), and his girlfriend Katrine Fønsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), a TV news journalist. Although not achieving quite the ratings popularity of The Killing, Borgen has probably been even more of a hit with the UK commentariat – at least up until the recent end of the second series (2 Feb 2013). One of the few sceptical voices has been that of Rachel Cooke in the New Statesman. A third, and again probably final, series is currently being shown in Denmark and no doubt will appear on BBC4 in due course.

But where there’s politics, there’s politics. On 30 January, The Times (£) second section, Times 2, appeared with Alastair Campbell and Sidse Babett Knudsen on its cover (left), with a report by Campbell, Has Borgen got a new spin doctor? Nej!, of his visit to Copenhagen to meet Babbett and Asbæk. He took a particular shine to the latter:

Pilou Asbæk has certainly learnt a thing or two about spin doctoring. He bows on meeting, and within a minute has said he is “honoured” and “thrilled”, that he only agreed to the interview because it was with me, enjoyed researching my “amazing” life, and asks if I mind that he sees me and a US Republican — Karl Rove — as the top exponents of what he calls our “art”. You may be surprised to know I took an instant liking to him.

And later:

Pilou admits that one of the by- products — lessons — of the series is that he has started to speak differently. “Always talk in headlines — then people remember you,” he suggests. The conversation is peppered with his perfectly formed soundbites. “You cannot create chemistry. It is a gift between actors.” … And then, reaching what I suggest to him is Mensa level spin capacity: “I am answering that question by not answering it.” Happily he has learnt to respect the art of communication and see through the clouds of media cynicism. “People see Kasper as a dark lord and I don’t accept it. Guys who do that kind of job are mothers and wives, husbands and fathers . . .”  

“Tell me about it . . .”

Campbell had explained earlier that:

Everyone seems to watch it [Borgen], including the real Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a personal friend who I saw for dinner the night before meeting Sidse and Pilou.

Thorning-Schmidt is, of course, Neil Kinnock’s daughter-in-law, and readers of Campbell’s diaries will be aware of the closeness of his family and the Kinnocks.

Sidse and Pilou must be busy people. On 4 February, the Scotsman’s Rory Reynolds reported, Borgen’s Filmhouse finale wows Edinburgh:

… the phenomenal success of Borgen reached the streets of Scotland yesterday, … Hundreds of devotees -– including Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, along with other MSPs – gathered at the Filmhouse for the special screening of the final two episodes.  

… Sidse Babett Knudsen, who plays fictional Danish prime minister Birgitte Nyborg, travelled to Edinburgh yesterday … And arch spin doctor Kasper Juul – a shadowy figure modelled on Alastair Campbell – could not have fixed it better himself when Knudsen arrived to meet fans dressed head-to-toe in red and black tartan.  

… “Why do we like it?” Ms Sturgeon asked the audience. “Maybe it gives us a glimpse of the country we could be.” She said she found herself in an unusual role for a politician. “I was interviewing her for Scottish television. The only thing I managed to get her to reveal is that there is to be a Scottish love interest in the next series.” Nyborg will fall for architect Jeremy Welsh in the next series, played by Monarch of the Glen star Alastair Mackenzie.  

Mrs Sturgeon said Borgen was often realistic. “It’s a drama but with an authentic twist. As a politician I can relate to it.”  

… Fans were interested in Knudsen’s views on Holyrood and the referendum next year. They also sought her take on her considerably popularity among politicians here, such as Alison Johnstone, the Green MSP, who was also spotted in the audience. However, she managed to both charm her audience and avoid the question on several occasions, except to say that she was “a little bit stunned” at the admiration.

Any apparent alignment of Borgen with Labour (pace the Staggers) and Scottish Nationalist politics, was not given substance by Adam Price, a Dane of English descent, who is producer and co-writer of the series.  In a recent Guardian interview he emphasised the feminist aspect of the series, which is universal, and not politics. But perhaps it’s not surprising that the House interview went:

THE HOUSE: Are you into Borgen?  

PM: No! God, no. It’s just whether Morgen Shmorgen is Health Minister or is Education Minister..it’s too much like work.

Nor that in The Times (£) on 6 February Alice Thomson should be telling us:

Few of the Cabinet watch Borgen, the TV drama about a fictional Danish prime minister. Samantha Cameron has banned it from Downing Street — it’s just too close for comfort with its plot revolving around a divorce and an unhappy daughter.

The date of the Scottish Referendum is not yet finalised, but will be in the autumn of 2014, so not so long after the showing of Borgen III, another glimpse of the country Scotland could be – unless the BBC decide to bring it forward.