51�Թ�

The mother-and-baby portrait, drawing on representations of the Madonna and child, is one of the fundamental motifs of the Western art tradition.

Among them is a Buddha-like woman breast-feeding an infant in the manner of a Christian Madonna and Child and posed before the Los Angeles skyline, where East and West meet.

It’s a queering of the Madonna and Child; Opie, a lesbian who was in the leather community, reveals her right arm adorned with tattoos, the word “Pervert” faintly seen and scarred over her chest.

Drawings by the Lebanese American writer and artist Kahlil Gibran feature angelic nudes, and other works recall the Madonna and Child, such as the Bahraini artist Abdullah al-Muharraqi’s 1970 painting “War Generation,” a striking image of a mother bleeding from her eyes as she breastfeeds her baby.

Duccio’s break-the-bank Madonna and Child, painted in Tuscany around 1300, now shares a case with Ingres’s painting of the same subject from 1852.