Vox Populi
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Chana Bloch: Beaux Arts
They knew something about pleasure, too,
those painters—how well they understood
it may be compounded
of the simplest elements, the merest trace
of water or light.
Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, for instance.
The bedclothes are thrust aside
and a woman’s fleshy thighs
sprawl across the canvas toward you
as you approach.
Courbet studies his nude with the diligence
of a lover. And lets you see
in the reddish fur
at the body’s threshold
a hint of wet
like the dab of white in the iris
that lights the eye.
~~~
Note: L’Origine du monde (“The Origin of the World”) is a picture painted in oil on canvas by the French painter Gustave Courbet in 1866. It is a close-up view of the vulva and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed with legs spread.
This platform will not allow an image which resembles pornography to be posted here. To view a reproduction and discussion of the painting, click here. Here is the putative upper section of L’Origine du monde:
~~~
~~~
Poem from Swimming in the Rain: Selected Poems 1980-2015 (Autumn House Press, 2016)
Chana Bloch (1940-2017) was a poet, translator, scholar, and teacher. During her lifetime she authored six books of poems and six books of translations of Hebrew poetry both ancient and contemporary.
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Always love a celebration of the body.
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yes!
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I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking and looking at how visual imagery and the poet’s words mesh or whatever else they do– How so much of what we versify is based on the eye. So with Chana Bloch’s beautiful peek at the erotic origins of life via Courbet. As to the painting, just seeing the face I can imagine it as an image of sexual arousal, or the outer sign of an ecstatic vision, or, as one art critic said of it: a death mask (I doubt that theory, but there it is). Some people have called an orgasm “the little death.”
For such a straightforward container as Bloch gives us here with her poetic frame, she touches on mystery at many levels. Too bad she is gone from this plane of life, so we can no longer hear her speculations on her work. (or our comments on her work)
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Thanks for this, Jim.
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This poems is so perfect for one of the masterpieces of our time, a painting so honest, so loving, and so right. But it was painted for a more salubrious purpose: “Gustave Courbet painted L’Origine du monde in 1866, commissioned by Turkish-Egyptian diplomat Khalil Bey for a private erotic collection. It was hidden for over a century, including some time in psychiatrist Jacques Lacan’s home, before joining the Musée d’Orsay in 1995.”
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Wow. I didn’t know this, Rose Mary. Thank you.
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Rose Mary, in following up on your comment, I came across a summary of a book by Stephanie Swales that discusses Lacan’s views on sexual perversion. He was quite a character, wasn’t he?
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Over the years I have come to believe that most psychiatrists study the subject because they struggle with their own problems, and then specialize in the one they find doesn’t rest comfortably in societies norms of their time. See Freud et al. As long as they can legitimize whatever bothers them (and often they are quite right to do so), they feel better about themselves. Pedophiles maintain that they love children and just want the best for them.
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A daring poem by Chana Bloch!
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It really is a daring poem, but only if the reader is aware of Courbet’s painting!
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A clarification: it was during his lecture at the museum he sent us to “Egypt,” Boston has the best! A whole tomb space with sandstone carvings on every surface all the way to the ceiling. I saw him in there, afterward, Antonio—he took my hands in his, what a show and trip to see art! And to think it should end at the “origin of the world!” The universe began the day you were born.
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So great! We took the Peter Pan bus from Boston to Manhattan roaring through the early Spring barrens of New England to go see the Courbet show. We were already saturated in the extravaganza of Spanish painting at the MFA, Boston, and American debut of Antonio Lopez Garcia—perhaps still the greatest living artist? But L’ Origine du Monde became the apex of our determination, and it didn’t disappoint. Not even after “going to Egypt,” as Antonio told us to do to see the “real art!”( His words!) Chana has written a perfect poem and it covers and fills a perfect moment of Art.
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What a wonderful odyssey, Sean!
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I was going to say the same, Sean!
And what a delightful witty & smart and “hot” and informed poem, Chana!
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