His eyes were frequently inflamed and he feared going blind.
Most of the time he wore blue glasses. The papers often mentioned them, in a joking sort of way. The papers found him comic, it seems.
He was born in Egypt to Turkish parents (very rich), studied in Paris (at an Egyptian school), and became an Ottoman ambassador: to Athens, to St. Petersburg, to Vienna. A servant to the sultan most of his life.
But from 1865 to 1868, he lived in a palatial Parisian apartment, and for three years, he bought paintings and he gambled, and at the end of those three years, he sold all of his paintings and paid all of his debts. He was thirty-seven years old.
History would declare many of the paintings masterpieces. There were more than a hundred by the likes of Courbet, Ingres, Rousseau, Meissonier, Corot, and Delacroix. But how would history remember him? Not as Khalil Bey, diplomat, a man who helped negotiate the treaty that ended the Crimean War and a liberal reformer of the empire, nor as Khalil Bey, patron, among the first to collect many of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated painters, but as Khalil Bey, the world’s most notorious collector of the world’s most notorious collection of erotic art.
The Odalisque
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
1814
OIL ON CANVAS
35" × 64"
Like so many great beauties, she is something of a freak, painted with extra vertebrae in her back, so many that should she have tried to step out of her frame, she would have bent to the ground, where she could only have slid along the floor, serpentlike, unable to stand.
Also, her left arm is shorter than her right.
When French critics condemned the painting, Ingres, who was temporarily in Rome, swore never to return to Paris, where, inconveniently, his fiancée was a resident. The engagement was broken, and Ingres, on the strength of a written correspondence and the recommendation of his friends, proposed to Madeleine Chapelle, a woman he had never seen, also a resident of Paris, though, conveniently, willing to relocate.
Ingres modeled the Odalisque on Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished Portrait of Madame Récamier, who, dressed as a vestal virgin, reclines casually on a sofa. Vestal virgins had been Rome’s priestesses, responsible for maintaining the city’s eternal fire. They could free slaves by touching them and pardon criminals sentenced to death by looking at them. And they got front-row seats at sporting competitions. Each vestal virgin took a thirty-year vow of celibacy, after which she had the option to marry. Some men believed marrying a vestal virgin would cure them of disease or pardon their sins or grant them eternal life. But after their thirty years, most vestal virgins opted not to marry at all.
At age fifteen, Madame Récamier, the subject of Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished portrait, had been married to a man nearly thirty years her senior, generally believed to have been her biological father. It is rumored he married her not out of some perverse sexual desire, but to ensure she would become his heir. Unfortunately, before his death, he lost the bulk of his once considerable fortune.
In Turkish, odalik means “chambermaid,” and though many think odalisques were the women among whom sultans romped, in reality, they served those who served the sultan. They were slaves who tended the other women of the harem: the concubines, who were under the wives, and the wives, who were under the sultana valide, the sultan’s mother. The sultana valide was often the most powerful person in the seraglio, the living quarters of the harem. Sometimes she was more powerful than the sultan himself, who, after all, was sometimes just a child.
The sultana valide was frequently the largest landowner in the empire; often she would own entire villages. Throughout history the sultanas constructed mosques, hospitals, public baths, eateries for the poor, schools, libraries, fountains, and other monuments, paying not only for the construction of each of these sites but creating endowments to maintain and manage them.
When Ingres painted his Odalisque, it was rumored that the sultana valide, Nakşidil Sultan, was actually Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, Josephine Bonaparte’s cousin, who as a girl had been traveling from Martinique to a convent school in France when her ship was boarded by pirates, who sold her into slavery. But, in fact, this was not the case. It is, however, true that Nakşidil Sultan had a great love of France and did her best to bring the harem into a more modern age, taking the harem women on picnics and boating trips. Before each such excursion, colorful silk tunnels were extended from the doorways of the seraglio to allow the women to board their carriages unseen. The mere sight of these silk tunnels caused some men to faint.
Many scenes from the seraglio would be immortalized by a Turkish painter with Greek origins, Osman Hamdi Bey, who was also an esteemed archaeologist. During the three years of Khalil Bey’s collecting, Osman Hamdi Bey was a student in Paris, and so it is possible that he visited Khalil Bey’s remarkable apartment with one of his teachers, the artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose work Khalil Bey also owned. Osman Hamdi Bey’s most famous painting, The Tortoise Trainer, depicted the eighteenth-century Ottoman practice of affixing candles to tortoises’ backs so that during nighttime parties they could wander the seraglio gardens, lighting them. Long after Osman Hamdi Bey’s death, The Tortoise Trainer would sell for more than three million dollars. Most of Osman Hamdi Bey’s paintings are considered a rebuttal to Western orientalism, as they include scenes of Islamic scholars arguing interpretations of the Koran and women standing up doing their housework, as opposed to lying down in a drug-induced haze.
Though Ingres’s Odalisque lies on her sofa in much the same position as Jacques-Louis David’s Madame Récamier, the Odalisque has been undressed. Her back is to us, though she’s turned her neck so as to look us in the eye, and she is naked except for the gold scarf wound about her head. All around her are sumptuous fabrics: blue satin, fur, peacock feathers gathered into a fan. At her feet is an opium pipe.
This, too, is how history has painted Khalil Bey: rounded and soft, with an opium pipe at his feet.
Sometimes, in the midst of a card game, Khalil Bey would close his eyes to ease their inflammation. The other players often mistook this for some sign and would decrease or increase their bidding accordingly.
Ingres’s Odalisque was commissioned by Caroline Murat, Emperor Napoleon’s sister and queen of Naples and, perhaps not incidentally, a friend to Madame Récamier. Unfortunately, on account of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and Caroline Murat’s husband’s subsequent execution, and her own desperate flight from Naples to Austria in order to avoid the same fate, she never paid for the work.
For a while afterward, Ingres made his living in Rome drawing pencil portraits of tourists, a lucrative practice that filled him with despair.
Sometimes Khalil Bey stood across the room from his Odalisque and stared at her. Sometimes he walked casually past her and then with a sudden leap turned to catch her in a new position, which, of course, he never did. Whenever he looked at the Odalisque, he felt an impulse to turn, like her, and glance over his shoulder. Sometimes he would. Sometimes, instead, he took pleasure in his ownership and ran his finger down the long curving lines of her painted body, imagining that, with his touch, he was the one to create her. Once he pressed the tip of his tongue against the small strokes of her eyelashes.
There is much the Odalisque leaves to the viewer’s imagination. Who is she, what has she been up to, and, most significantly, what is she looking at? Has she cast her eyes over her shoulder to watch the artist in the act of creation? Or is this an invitation to something riskier? Hasn’t myth taught us it is a danger to look? Is she the danger, or is she courting it? Is the Odalisque looking at us, here in the future, or is she looking backward into some moment of her own history?
There is only one story of a slave girl escaping the harem. (Had she waited nine years she would have been released, but probably she had her reasons for not.) She escaped, in the night, as far as the Janissary Court, where, panicking at the guarded gates, she climbed an enormous tree that stood above two small columns on which decapitations were carried out.
The only way in, or out, of the harem was through a door of iron and a door of brass. Inside the harem, the door of iron was guarded by the eunuchs; outside the harem, the door of brass was guarded by the woodcutters. The eunuchs kept the women in; the woodcutters kept all others out. One responsibility of the woodcutters was cutting wood, but they also made up one of the fiercest detachments of the Ottoman army. From her tree, the girl could see the dormitories of the woodcutters; the private stables of the sultan, where his favorite horses were kept; the Gate of the Departed, where the dead exited; and the Gate of Felicity, where the living entered. She could also see the woodcutter guards who when she passed had been asleep on their feet, or so it seemed.
She stayed in her tree for three days. She could see so much from there, without being seen—or so it seemed.
In fact, the woodcutters had watched her from the beginning. They did not wish to admit, one to the other, that they had seen her; they all knew what the consequence would be. What they wished for was to each slip looks up into the tree, to glance repeatedly at the forbidden harem girl.
But eventually hunger overtook the girl, or maybe fear, and she jumped, or maybe fell, striking her head on one of the marble columns on her way down. And so she died. One of the woodcutters covered her face, and another smuggled her out, though not through the Gate of the Departed, where he would be seen and all discovered. As a result, the girl is said to have never truly left the harem; it is said that she is there still.
The Turkish Bath
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
1862
OIL ON CANVAS ON WOOD PANEL
43" × 43"
Ingres first painted The Turkish Bath in 1859 as a rectangle but a year later revised it to a circle. This was, it is said, to cut out the body of the woman in the bottom right-hand quadrant, who was “too clearly in ecstasy.” Even without her, The Turkish Bath was considered so indecent that it wasn’t shown in public until 1905, more than forty years after it was painted. It was then that Picasso became a fan. Degas championed it as well, though the writer Paul Claudel called it a “cake full of maggots” and the Louvre turned it down twice, until the Germans expressed interest.
In the Bath, women are layered on women, naked and lounging, arms over their heads, hands on each other’s breasts, limbs splayed out, their faces expressing desire, languor, and, in at least one case, an irritated boredom.
The painting is generally considered an arabesque, in which the repetition of a geometric form suggests the infinite repetition of that form. In Islamic art, that repetition is meant to remind us of the infinite extension of God. In The Turkish Bath, it suggests an infinity of women and a peephole through which to view them.
Harem women would often sit at latticed windows and look out; there they could see without being seen.
Critics like to call Ingres’s lines serpentine. In one study for The Turkish Bath there is a woman with three arms. It is not such a difficult mistake to imagine when you view the painting, woman blurring into woman as they sit, entwined, blank-minded and blissed out, after the steam of the bath.
When he learned the roman alphabet, there was no letter Khalil Bey loved more than the letter S.
The heated portion of the bath is known as the tepidarium. There women could rest and drink coffee or eat sherbet. Talk. Sing. Listen. Sleep. This most likely is what The Turkish Bath depicts.
In the 1850s, an Englishman opened what he called a Turkish bath attached to his house and began claiming the bath could cure toothache, rheumatism, gout, and syphilis.
It was rumored Khalil Bey moved to Paris to undergo treatment for syphilis, which he was said to have caught in St. Petersburg. At the time, some men considered syphilis a rite that marked their passage from boyhood to manhood; some men boasted of it.
Khalil Bey kept his condition to himself, as he kept much of himself to himself, though this particular discretion was not to the advantage of his lovers. It was rumored he caught the disease because his bad eyesight prevented him from noticing the symptoms in a past lover. Perhaps, but probably not, given his eye for the female form.
Syphilis wasn’t actually called syphilis until the sixteenth century, when an Italian physician, Girolamo Fracastoro, wrote an epic poem about a shepherd boy named Syphilus who defied the sun god Apollo, then became ill. Before Fracastoro’s poem, syphilis was often called “the French disease,” though the French called it “the Italian disease,” the Dutch called it “the Spanish disease,” the Russians called it “the Polish disease,” and Tahitians called it “the British disease.” Turks called it “the Christian disease.”
Turkish baths were modeled on Roman baths. During the Middle Ages, European men and women stayed in their baths so long they sometimes ate whole meals on tables that floated in front of them. In Islam, if water is not available for ritual cleansing, dust or dirt can be used instead. In the Turkish bath, one starts first in a warm room, then moves to a hot room, then lounges, post-cleansing, in a cool room, where entertainment and food are often provided. In the women’s bath, girls were sometimes discreetly displayed and their marriages negotiated. The women of the harem often spent large portions of their day in the bath, talking and napping and eating. But they never sat in tubs of water, what we might think of as a bath, as still water was believed to be unclean, a repository for evil spirits.
Besides, the harem had a history of drownings.
In the seventeenth century, Sultan Ibrahim is said to have had his entire harem, 280 women, sewn into weighted sacks and cast into the Bosporus. A passing ship found one concubine, who claimed to have swum free when her sack came untied. A sailor was quickly sent diving to the Bosporus’s bottom, where he supposedly found hundreds of sacks standing upright, some with head and hair floating free, like strange underwater blossoms.
They were the most beautiful women he had ever seen. He could not stop himself. He took the closest by the hair, pulled her to him, and pressed his lips fervently to hers. The sirens almost took me, he would say later, trying to make a joke of it.
Prior to becoming sultan, Ibrahim had been kept in quarters known as “the Cage” for twenty-two years, ostensibly to protect him from assassination, but more likely to prevent his plotting the assassination of his brother, the then sultan. It is assumed that this incarceration drove him insane, and that much of his behavior is explained by his insanity.
Eventually Ibrahim’s own army had him killed. Ibrahim’s six-year-old son, Mehmed IV became sultan.
It is strange, though, that the story of Ibrahim drowning his harem came out only after his assassination. It is possible the story was created to undermine the surprising posthumous popularity of the supposed madman.
The Ottomans understood well the value of rumors.
Khalil Bey, too, understood that his reputation mattered more than his reality. Still, he made a point of never lying. The key to diplomacy is being known for telling the truth.
In the end, the concubine allegedly rescued from the bottom of the Bosporus was taken to Paris, where she became quite a sensation.
Ingres was eighty-two when he finished The Turkish Bath.
It is a history of Ingres’s imagination. An original built of echoes. He didn’t use a single live model to paint it. It is a painting of other paintings. Ingres’s wife, Madeleine Chapelle, dead ten years by then, is at the front with her arms over her head. The guitar player with her back turned is a near copy of Ingres’s painting The Bather of Valpinçon. The Odalisque is there in the bath, not aged a day despite the passage of more than forty years. The face of one woman in particular is repeated over and over, but in different attitudes—angry, bored, ecstatic, desperate, satisfied, mischievous. The infinite nature of a single woman ripples across the room.
In the harem, women were prisoners, and yet so many of them cried the day they were freed. In 1909, when the empire was in its final dissolve and the sultan had gone into exile, messages were sent to villages all across the Anatolian plains and up into the mountains. Any family who had lost or sold a girl to the seraglio could reclaim her. On the appointed day, the women of the harem lined the assembly hall, and the men of their families, some unseen for decades, some unknown entirely, were admitted. At a signal, the collection of harem women lifted their veils, and a collective gasp went up from the collection of village men. Was it surprise at their beauty? Surprise at their lack of it? Who can say what they saw?
Fathers struggled to recognize their daughters grown old, brothers learned that their sisters had died in the intervening years, cousins who had never met went home together. Other men left as they came, without even news of their lost girls. And then there were the women who stood waiting, unclaimed. Local homes had to be found for them, and at times in the years after, they could be seen in the city, their well-trained grace still evident beneath the draped folds of their faded finery.
Khalil Bey left home at the age of nine, and one could say he never truly returned. The empire had many such sons, but few with his influence. Periodically the sultan would fire him for some offense, but always he took him back.
Sleep
GUSTAVE COURBET
1866
OIL ON CANVAS
53⅛" × 78¾"
Imagine that apartment, the paintings hung ten to a wall. A single painting could leave Khalil Bey speechless; imagine the effect of a hundred. He was overcome five times a day, though he did his best not to show it.
He was in love with so many things. Sometimes he did not go home for days and then for days more he would not leave home. The buildings, the bohemians, the corrupt politicians and the noble ones, the cultured women and the whores, he loved them all. He could not seem to see reality without transforming it into something both melancholy and joyous.
“When you wear glasses you are accustomed to seeing everything through a frame,” he joked. “The world is nothing more than a museum to me.”
During his three years in Paris, Khalil Bey’s primary mistress was Jeanne de Tourbey, a Frenchwoman who had previously been mistress to Prince Napoleon, the emperor’s cousin, who, at the time, had put her on an improving regimen, hiring a tutor to introduce her to writers and musicians and artists, all of whom she later introduced to Khalil Bey. Among those cultural aristocrats was the controversial but popular painter Gustave Courbet.
When Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans, which depicted an ordinary village funeral in the scale of a historic battle, was exhibited in Frankfurt in 1852, it generated so many arguments as to its quality that cafés posted signs banning discussion of Courbet or his paintings.
Courbet’s The Stone Breakers shocked audiences because one man had a broken shoe and the other patched trousers.
Courbet’s The Bathers was criticized not only for the size of the nude bather’s buttocks but the dirtiness of her feet. One critic offered five hundred francs to anyone who could “throw her down,” and Napoleon III was rumored to have swatted her backside with his riding crop. This last rumor was perpetuated most of all by Courbet himself, who reacted to the story first with fury and then with delight, as if he had been spanked and had then found, after his anger, that he liked it.
Until Courbet, nudes were unrecognizable: their skin glossed, their faces smoothed. But when, in a commission for Khalil Bey, Courbet painted two women, life size, in bed, more naked than nude, one was clearly Jo Hiffernan, the longtime lover of James Whistler, who was himself a protégé and friend of Courbet’s.
Whistler was outraged, though he staked his anger on artistic grounds. “Courbet and his influence was disgusting!” he wrote sometime later. “The regret I feel and the rage, hate, even. . . . It’s not poor Courbet whom I find repugnant, any more than his work . . . it’s that damned realism. . . . Ah! How I wish I had been a pupil of Ingres.”
Ingres: the idealist. Courbet: the realist. And which was Khalil Bey?
“Beauty is real,” he liked to say. Or sometimes, “What’s real is beauty.” The whole world, to Khalil Bey, seemed an exaggeration beyond belief.
Yet as a gambler, he was known for meeting great wins with the same cool face with which he met great losses.
When Khalil Bey first visited Courbet’s studio, in the company of Jeanne de Tourbey, he tried to purchase Venus Pursuing Psyche in Her Jealousy, a painting of the goddess looming over the sleeping mortal, her jealousy provoked by the mortal’s beauty. But the painting had been promised to another, who unscrupulously offered to sell it to Khalil Bey for a profit; Khalil Bey, recognizing that the money would not go to Courbet, refused. This pleased Courbet, who offered to paint a second work, a sequel. This became Sleep.
The women in Sleep have their eyes closed but they do not look as if they are sleeping. One has her leg hooked over the other, whose lips are pursed just above her companion’s breast, as if she is blowing gently upon it, or about to bestow a kiss.
They are naked now, just as they were then.
How did Khalil Bey see Sleep? Were the female lovers nothing more than a catalyst for his erotic imagination? Couldn’t such a thing have been bought more cheaply? It was rumored he, too, had an affair with Jo Hiffernan, Whistler’s and then Courbet’s model. Perhaps this added to poor Whistler’s jealousy.
“I am memorizing beauty,” Khalil Bey would often say when he was alone with a woman and staring at her. It was a line, but also true.
He liked especially to stand with the real Jo beside him and the Sleepers in front of him, so he could turn from one to the other. Ever the diplomat, he offered once to try to mend Jo’s break with Whistler, with whom she had a little boy, but she declined.
Ottomans, by the way, believed all children to be legitimate, regardless of the married or unmarried state of their parents.
Several of Whistler’s most famous paintings are of Jo. But there is one, Harmony in Blue and Silver, in which a small full-length figure, a man with his back to the viewer, faces out to sea, nearly fading into the sandy shore, which dwarfs him. It is Courbet.
Over the years, Courbet painted four portraits of Jo. One he kept in his possession his entire life, including during his exile in Switzerland after he was imprisoned for the politics he had once been celebrated for. The same Courbet, who once said, “My love does not go so far as a trip with a woman. Knowing that there are women everywhere in the world, I see no point in dragging one with me.” The same Courbet who wrote one former mistress demanding that she return two portraits he had painted of her. “Or,” he wrote, “destroy them yourself before a witness and then I will pay [you] for the use that I had of your body for a year.” (She had offended Courbet by bringing her new lover along to the train station to see Courbet off—after Courbet refused to bring her on his trip.)
In an early version of Venus Pursuing Psyche in Her Jealousy, the painting Khalil Bey first tried to buy, Courbet sketched himself asleep, in the position where Psyche now lies. The goddess was intended to loom over him. In another painting, The Wounded Man, Courbet painted himself reclining, with his eyes closed, a red stain on his chest where he has been stabbed. In an earlier version, Courbet lay in bed next to a woman. She was replaced by his wound. The truth was, Courbet had trouble painting men and women together.
According to the French papers, when Khalil Bey wanted to seduce a woman, he would buy her a tea set. Supposedly he had a man on hire to supply him with tea sets. But when someone owned the paintings Khalil Bey did, when someone had an apartment such as his, why use anything aside from that apartment and those paintings to seduce women?
Khalil Bey collected other things as well. He had a Russian bear shot by Emperor Alexander, a gift from the emperor himself. Coins, inlaid chests, chessboards. He had fur coats made out of nearly every animal he could name. And books. But it was the paintings that drew the most attention. Politicians came to see his collection, artists, writers, women, gamblers—anybody Khalil Bey wanted to see would come for his collection. Whoever he wanted to meet, for whatever reason, he could. It was not only women he could seduce.
The Origin of the World
GUSTAVE COURBET
1866
OIL ON CANVAS
18⅛" × 21⅝"
Khalil Bey commissioned one more work from Courbet. A painting in which, a critic jokingly suggested, Courbet forgot to paint the arms, legs, and head of the model. Khalil Bey kept her in his dressing room behind a green veil.
It was said he was building a secret museum of sexuality.
She is life size, though that is not so big when you think about it.
Courbet sometimes brought visitors to see The Origin, but often he came alone, to learn from what he himself had done. “You don’t visit me anymore,” Khalil Bey joked. “You only visit her.” Jo, too, came often. She had been the model once again, though this time not so recognizable.
Her body is an echo of one of Courbet’s grottos. Something to be entered, explored, admired. She is her own arabesque: the curve of the sheets pushed above her breasts, the curve of her breasts, the curve of her belly, the curve of her buttocks and her thighs, the imagined curve of her interior.
Jo would stare the longest. Her body as she had never seen it. The viewer’s eye drawn up along her thighs and straight inside her. Courbet had shown her a hidden part of herself; she would always defend him.
Later someone would find a painting of a head and claim it was The Origin’s—lopped off to protect Jo’s identity. A far bigger violation than painting her without a head in the first place. Courbet would never have done it. Nor would Khalil Bey.
It is often believed that Muslims are not allowed to depict human forms in art, but that is not exactly right. Muslims are not allowed to worship human forms in art. Most of the sultans had their portraits painted. Turkish artists are known for having drawn the sultans as they were—old and tired and thin; strong and willful and handsome; sometimes too fat for their horses, which were shown to sag under their weight.
When Bellini came to paint the portrait of Mehmed II, it is said that the artist referenced The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, causing the sultan to complain that the painting contained anatomical inaccuracies: the neck of the decapitated was elongated when it should have been contracted. When the artist protested, the sultan is said to have had a slave brought forth and beheaded, and so was proved correct.
Then again, a similar story was told about a Greek painter, Pairhasios, and yet another similar story was told about Michelangelo.
In the end, Bellini’s portrait of Mehmed II, known as Mehmed the Conqueror, for his 1453 conquest of Constantinople, was sold off in a bazaar by the sultan’s son and heir, who did not approve of Western art.
Most of Khalil Bey’s paintings were landscapes. But that is not how they are remembered.
Whose world is it that has found its origin in The Origin of the World? Courbet liked to say he wrote his autobiography in self-portraits. Others put it less kindly: “Courbet waving. Courbet walking. Courbet at a standstill. Courbet reclining. Courbet sitting. Courbet dead.” Perhaps The Origin of the World is yet another self-portrait. There at the vanishing point, beyond where our invasive eye can travel, is Courbet conceived.
“To paint a landscape you have to truly know it,” Courbet once said. It is no wonder Whistler was so angry.
The police arrived at one Courbet exhibition having heard that The Origin of the World would be there. They hoped to arrest Courbet on charges of obscenity, but the rumor was false. It was a painting much talked of and little seen.
When Khalil Bey auctioned his collection, Sleep and The Origin of the World sold privately to different buyers, and The Origin of the World disappeared. It surfaced briefly in 1899, then again in 1913, when a grainy photograph appeared.
Only now do we know that in 1945 The Origin was stolen by the Nazis from the Hungarian who owned it, then stolen again by the Russians and sold back to the Hungarian, who transported it to Switzerland. The Origin was kept in a double frame, covered by a painting called The Castle in the Snow.
Behind every picture there is another picture. Behind every story another story.
One Courbet work long known as The Preparation of the Dead Girl turned out to have originally been titled The Preparation of the Bride. It is an unfinished portrait of a stiff and unmoving girl having her toilette prepared by a host of helpers. It is not known how or where the painting’s title got changed, though the why is perhaps obvious.
Courbet is known now for having painted things that already looked like paint. Such as snow. And flesh.
It was not until 1963 that The Origin was revealed to be in the possession of famed psychoanalyst and Freudian Jacques Lacan. Like the Hungarian, like Khalil Bey, Lacan kept the Origin hidden, this time behind a clever hilly landscape that followed the curves of Jo Hiffernan’s naked and headless body, a landscape painted by Lacan’s brother-in-law, the famed surrealist André Masson. Masson is known for, among other things, imposing strict and arbitrary conditions upon the creation of his art, like refusing to eat or sleep until a drawing was finished. It is said that after escaping the Nazis, who called his work “degenerate,” Masson arrived in New York only to have his portfolio of drawings shredded by customs agents who called his work “pornographic.”
The Origin of the World was not exhibited publicly until 1988, more than one hundred years after it was painted. It hangs now in the Musée d’Orsay, where patrons are often embarrassed to linger too long in front of it. Or they force themselves to stare, perhaps imagining their own faces where Jo’s would be.
“She is a metaphor,” Khalil Bey liked to say.
“For what?” his guests would inevitably ask.
Khalil Bey would never answer.
At least one critic insisted that The Origin was a portrait of a woman in orgasm. Another called her obese.
When first put on display at the Musée d’Orsay, The Origin of the World was placed behind armored glass. Now its postcard sales are second only to Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette.
In 1792, Sultan Selim III had begun a series of reforms, known as the “new order,” meant to modernize the ailing empire. Young Ottomans were taught French, and embassies were established in all the major cities of Europe. Thirty years later, Khalil Bey was born, learned French, became a European ambassador. The empire may have been on its last legs, but of it was born the republic.
“We cannot fear change,” Khalil Bey would say in his negotiations. “We must manage it.”
In the days and years after he sold his collection, which paid his debts, Khalil Bey thought sometimes of Süleyman the Magnificent, whose heart was buried on the battlefields of Hungary, though his body was buried in the grand mosque built in his name in Istanbul. Khalil Bey’s paintings, it turned out, were nothing but a body. Their heart was buried in him.
With his eyes closed, Khalil Bey could still see his paintings.
After he left Paris, apparently cured of his syphilis, Khalil Bey was again a servant to the sultan, a foreign minister at home and abroad. He lived both for Egypt and the empire, one contained inside the other, much as he lived both for pleasure and for work. And when his vision first dimmed, then narrowed, he filled in any absences with his memory.
In myth, blindness can be a reward, a gift of prophecy and wisdom, or a punishment, just as death can be a reward or a punishment. An entrance into the infinite. Or an end.
When Khalil Bey died in 1877, at only forty-six, he was indeed finally blind, though he was also, in that moment, happily married and, in many ways, a contented man.