Paris - Women have no business taking off their clothes in an exhibition full of paintings of naked women.
The Musée d'Orsay in Paris, home of some of the world's most celebrated nudes, is suing a performance artist for “indecent exposure” after she lay down naked in front of Edouard Manet's reclining nude, Olympia, at the weekend.
Deborah de Robertis, 31, has form. In 2014, she exposed her genitals in front of Gustave Courbet's The Origins of the World, a painting which shows a woman's genitals.
The artist, from Luxembourg, was arrested and held in custody after taking off her clothes on the last day of an exhibition about art and prostitution.
Her lawyer, Tewfik Bouzenoune, complained that it was a “very bad sign for an artist to be arrested in the course of her work. “She was wearing a portable camera to film the public's reaction. It was an artistic performance,” Mr Bouzenoune said.
De Robertis says that her art consists of making people think about art - and especially about men's motives for portraying naked women.
On Saturday, she took off her clothes and lay on the floor of the museum, imitating the pose of the courtesan in Manet's celebrated 1865 canvas.
De Robertis gave her performance on the last day of a successful exhibition called “Splendour and Misery: Images of Prostitution 1850-1910”. The show brought together scores of paintings, but also early photographs, showing female prostitutes wearing few or no clothes.
The sight of a real naked woman was, however, too much for the museum authorities. “Security guards responded well, they closed the room and asked her to get dressed,” a spokeswoman for the museum said. “As she refused, the police were called and removed her.”
The museum has made a formal complaint against De Robertis for indecent exposure.
Mr Bouzenoune said such “official prudishness” was “very worrying”. He pointed out that legal proceedings had also been pursued against the South African artist, Steve Cohen, who danced naked near the Eiffel Tower in 2014 with a live cockerel attached to his penis.
Cohen was convicted of indecent exposure but given no punishment.
The Independent
* Use IOL’s Facebook and Twitter pages to comment on our stories. See links below.