NOTICE: “IT IS THE CONTEXT THAT MAKES ART”. PANEL DISCUSSION AT THE LEOPOLD MUSEUM

05.05.2026

PSYCHOANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVES ON COURBET’S L'ORIGINE DU MONDE. CHRISTINE SCHEUCHER (Ö1) IN CONVERSATION WITH PSYCHOANALYSTS JEANNE WOLFF BERNSTEIN AND AUGUST RUHS.

Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World), depicting a naked female torso, has provoked viewers ever since its creation in 1866. To this day, its candid presentation of intimacy and sexuality raises fundamental questions of desire, subjectivity and social norms.

On Monday, 11 May, Christine Scheucher (Ö1) will host a conversation on this topic with the psychoanalysts Jeanne Wolff Bernstein and August Ruhs at Leopold Museum. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and his wife Sylvia Bataille bought the work L’Origine du Monde in 1955.

The two Lacan specialists Wolff Bernstein and Ruhs will embark on an in-depth exploration of Courbet’s painting. The discussion is set to highlight how Courbet’s radical depiction of intimacy and the body opens up psychological, social and esthetical implications, and to illustrate the type of unconscious structures that come into play when we look at the work. The participants in the discussion will be able to see the work in a new light and to explore the points of intersection between image, desire and psychoanalytical theory.

The event takes place as part of the exhibition Gustave Courbet. Realist and Rebel, the first comprehensive presentation of Courbet’s work in Austria, which is shown until 21 June.

With this extensive retrospective, the Leopold Museum is dedicating the first comprehensive monographic exhibition to the exceptional French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) in Austria. Around 130 exhibits – including 90 paintings and 20 graphic works from all the periods of the artist’s oeuvre, as well as a large number of archival materials – afford an overview of the painterly and graphic work of this pioneer of realism. In his ground-breaking portraits, nudes, landscapes and still lifes, Courbet broke with the idealizing conventions of 19th-century art in a radical manner.

“IT IS THE CONTEXT THAT MAKES ART”
Psychoanalytical Perspectives on Gustave Courbet’s L'Origine du Monde.

Christine Scheucher (Ö1) in conversation with psychoanalysts Jeanne Wolff Bernstein and August Ruhs

Panel discussion (in German)
Venue: Leopold Museum, level -1, auditorium
Date: Mo, 11 May 2026
Start: 7 pm
Admission: from 6.30 pm via the museum’s side entrance
Free admission. Registration required at anmeldung@leopoldmuseum.org

Further information on the Courbet Talk
Information on the Courbet exhibition
Further photographic material on the Courbet Talk upon request

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