Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World, ca. 1867, Musee d'Orsay, Paris   Khalil Bey, a 19th-century Turkish diplomat . . . proved that the taste for exotic Orientalist art wasn't limited to white Europeans. . . [T]he most outrageous painting in his collection, and one of the most notoriously graphic portraits of all time, is Courbet's The Origin of the World, a full-frontal legs-spread record of a woman's torso from her breasts to her thighs. Courbet, who had a brilliantly and bluntly Realist style, was possibly the only artist alive who would, or could, have painted this unblinking portrait. Art Cyclopedia. (More recently, Marc Quinn tried, but with little success.)