Huile en Toile — An Overrated Painting Depicts The Normalcy of Modern Sexism
She stands in the middle of the foreground like a floor lamp, the only light illuminating a darkened room that looks like mold smells.
She is completely naked. Count them. There are 26 fully dressed people — including two other women, a small child who may or may not be the model’s, a dog, the artist himself and one naked man in the apparent throes of a tetanus seizure or a crucifixion without a cross. She is described as “his” unnamed “nude model”. But he is seated painting a provincialist landscape with his back to her. Courbet’s title is just as incongruous as the painting itself: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Life as an Artist. Very well then.
This painting is the pre-selfie, a much more labor-intensive exercise in vanity, it also allows the artist to correct for perceived imperfections, to put himself in the center of society and culture as a philosophical and artistic focal point. In that respect it isn’t terribly different from the perfectly angled butt shot on Instagram that spirals around a tiny waist like a staircase, heavily photoshopped to filter the lighting, contrast, exposure, and grain, to perfect what a woman admires most in herself. It’s potentially egotistical, and not uncommon. But Courbet’s nude is a prop, just like the dagger or the guitar on the ground…
