Kapoor is putting the vagina in Versailles

Anish Kapoor is putting the vagina in Versailles. Why on earth are the French so shocked? What has
happened to the nation that gave us Courbet’s explicit painting The Origin of the World, among
other masterpieces of French sauce?

Some say Versailles should not even be showing contemporary art – and its previous programme
featuring the likes of Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami has gone out of its way to tease
conservative sensibilities, as if trying to drive the entire French cultural right to
an early grave. But it’s sometimes fun to place the new against the old and in the case
of Kapoor there is a real creative conversation going on between past and present –
let’s call it a vagina dialogue.
Anish Kapoor’s Versailles 'vagina' causes controversy in France
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For it’s not as if Versailles has not seen its fair share of sex. French Revolutionary
pamphlets portraying Marie Antoinette’s supposed bedroom antics were propagandist
pornography. Louis XIV, the Sun King, who had Versailles built in the 17th century,
had many mistresses, as was considered de rigeur for French kings. And in the 18th
century, French high society became intensely amorous, a culture of desire that is
gloriously immortalised in the art of Watteau and Fragonard.

The French Enlightenment, with its powerful women running intellectual salons, took
a keen interest in the vagina. The soft, yielding worlds painted by Watteau and
Fragonard are suggestively vaginal. That’s what Fragonard’s painting The Swing is
about – the wonderful joke of the painting is that while the man tries to sneak
a look up the swinging woman’s skirts, Fragonard’s receding, melting, luxuriant
garden landscape gives the painting’s beholder a sensory evocation of all he
longs to see.

So Anish Kapoor is not the first artist to bring vaginas to the former home of
the French royal court. But he is perhaps the most explicit. At a recent exhibition
of new work in London he unveiled pink marble vaginas and gold wall-mounted vaginas
. These sculptures brilliantly make cold materials seem soft and warm, and magnificently
open up vistas of soft sensuality. Kapoor seems much more interested in vaginas than
he is in penises, which is rare and commendable in a modern male artist – and goes
along with his desire to turn the inside out, to imagine the body from within and
open our imaginations to the mystery of being.

Kapoor is an artist who defies the classical rules of symmetry and order that

prevail at Versailles: an artist of carnal mayhem and rollicking cosmic comedy.
He is also an artist with a love of life. Lighten up, this is the joyous
Rococo reborn.