Courbet’s famous work The Origin of the World is on display in Vienna

Vienna. One of Gustave Courbet’s most controversial nudes, The origin of the worldwhich shows in close-up the vulva of a woman lying on a bed, will be the centerpiece of a retrospective of the 19th-century French painter that opens today in Vienna. The Orsay Museum in Paris, where it is normally exhibited, has loaned this 1866 canvas to the Leopold Museum in Vienna for the retrospective that will close on June 27.

According to Hans-Peter Wipplinger, artistic director of the Leopold Museum, this is the fourth time the work has been loaned abroad.

The painting was originally purchased by the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Sherif Pasha before being acquired by various private collectors.

“Courbet deliberately created the painting for the private sphere; in the 19th century, a public presentation would have been unthinkable,” the exhibition notes read.

The painting was shown in public for the first time in 1955. It is the centerpiece of the retrospective, along with the canvas The sleepers (also known as The dream), an 1819 painting of two naked women sleeping together.

The exhibition of Courbet (1819-1877), an artist who challenged the conventions of his time, includes 128 works, including paintings, sculptures and drawings.