In February 2017, Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter announced that she was pregnant, and with twins no less. Taking to Instagram to share the news, she uploaded a symbolic photo: wearing blue satin underwear, a sheer mulberry-coloured bra and a long, light green veil, Beyoncé kneels before a hedge of flowers and a bright blue sky. Cradling her pregnant stomach with both hands, the proud mother-to-be looks directly at the viewer with a brooding gaze.
This mesmerising maternity photograph was taken by Awol Erizku, an Ethiopian–American artist who is best known for staging photographs which disrupt the canon of art history. He has described his motivation: ‘I grew up studying western art, especially European art. That’s what you learn in school. And I always felt like I’d never seen enough, say, eastern art to balance it out, to know what people of my heritage did. To a large extent this history has been expropriated and, in a sense, “whitewashed” in text books.’ In order to intervene, Erizku typically inserts contemporary Black muses – who bring with them their own cultural references – into traditional masterpieces.
Reimagined through Erizku’s diasporic lens, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Lady with an Ermine (c.1489–91) becomes Lady with a Pitbull (2009); where the original white maiden has been replaced by a casually dressed young Black woman who holds – instead of the white ermine – a pit-bull terrier. Similarly, Girl with a Bamboo Earring (2009) is a clever update on Vermeer’s famous portrait, in which the young Dutch girl has been substituted by a striking African-American woman; theatrically lit, Erizku draws attention to her iconic blue-and-gold headscarf, which has been paired with a large gold bamboo earring.
Given the artist’s penchant for revisionist portraits, Erizku’s photograph of Beyoncé raises a question: which historical masterpiece was he mimicking this time? Kneeling down at what looks like a grassy altar, holding her stomach, and pairing light blue underwear with a long gauzy veil, Beyoncé is clearly channelling devotional depictions of the Virgin Mary. During the Italian Renaissance, artists portrayed the Madonna – both with and without her child – wearing blue, with her head covered, and positioned before an idealised landscape. The Conestabile Madonna (c.1502–4), for example, is a small circular painting by Raphael, in which Mary, who has a halo above her head, wears her signature blue hooded cloak and cradles her baby within a green meadow.
Employing the iconography of Christian art, Erizku represents Beyoncé’s status as an expectant mother in sacred terms, which is exactly how his sitter felt about her pregnancy. In the 2013 HBO autobiographical film Life is But a Dream, Beyoncé, who had previously suffered several miscarriages, speaks about the ‘amazing’ honour of carrying her first child Blue Ivy: ‘Being pregnant was very much like falling in love. You are so open. You are so overjoyed. There’s no words that can express having a baby growing inside of you, so of course you want to scream it out and tell everyone… I felt like God was giving me a chance to assist in a miracle.’
A miracle is one of the ways in which Beyoncé’s second pregnancy, with twins Rumi and Sir, is framed in Erizku’s photographic portrait: if you look closely at the colourful flowers behind her head, even these have been carefully arranged in a halo-like shape, adding to the divine atmosphere of the artwork.
However, there is one stark difference between Erizku’s photograph and sacrosanct portraits of the Madonna: physical signs of the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy are typically hidden beneath long flowing robes. In fact, throughout Western art history, portraits of women expecting babies – typically wives painted by their husbands – deliberately conceal their abounding condition beneath loose clothing and distracting folds of fabric, as a means of preventing viewers from conflating pregnancy with sexuality.
In contrast, Beyoncé bares her naked stomach to boast a large baby bump. Taking agency over her body, and the growing life within it, Beyoncé joins a pantheon of contemporary female artists who have portrayed themselves during various stages of pregnancy. When expecting her daughter, American painter Chantal Joffe took herself as her own muse: ‘Being pregnant, it was like, “Wow, how brilliant to paint yourself changing so much.”’ In the expressively painted canvas, Self-Portrait Pregnant II (2004) Joffe, wearing only underwear, stands side on in order to capture the size of her swollen stomach.
As art historian and curator Karen Hearn has pointed out, ‘When female artists become pregnant themselves, very often their work changes radically – it can be a real watershed.’ The experience of pregnancy was no different for Beyoncé, who told British Vogue in December 2020 just how huge the impact had been on her: ‘Something cracked open inside of me right after giving birth to my first daughter. From that point on, I truly understood my power, and motherhood has been my biggest inspiration.’
In several interviews Beyoncé has reflected on the new perspective on life she has gained since becoming pregnant: ‘If someone told me fifteen years ago that my body would go through so many changes and fluctuations, and that I would feel more womanly and secure with my curves, I would not have believed them.’ Posed for Erizku’s maternity portrait, Beyoncé draws attention to her growing body and, flaunting her full figure, makes the link between pregnancy and sexuality explicit.
The heightened sensuality of Beyoncé, who wears very little, in Erizku’s portrait, is suggestive of another prominent figure from art history: Venus. Most famously, in Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece The Birth of Venus (1485–86), the Roman goddess of love and sex stands naked inside a giant scallop shell, surrounded by nymphs and pink roses caught in a breath of wind. Similarly, Beyoncé is framed by flowers, while the placement of her hands on her pregnant stomach echoes Venus’s hands – which both hide, and invite viewers to imagine, her pudenda.
But, in Erizku’s frame, the slim white body of Botticelli’s beauty has been defiantly replaced with Beyoncé’s fuller figure – her kneeling pose accentuates the curve of her thighs. As such, the artist’s muse is closer in appearance to prehistoric fertility figurines, often referred to as ‘Venus figures’, which have been uncovered from countries around the world. Sculpted from a variety of natural materials, these statuettes depict nude women with wide hips, exaggerated busts and rotund stomachs.
Most notably, the Venus of Willendorf (c.28,000–25,000 BCE), carved from oolitic limestone and tinted red with an ochre pigment, emphasises the figure’s voluminous breasts, uncovered pudenda, wide hips and full thighs. Sized at just over eleven centimetres tall, the Venus of Willendorf is typical of fertility figurines which were likely intended to be handheld and, given the emphasis on areas of the body associated with reproduction, are widely believed to have been used as good-luck totems associated with fertility.
Similarly, in Akan culture, a matriarchal society originating in West Africa, fertility figures have historically been used by women wanting to get pregnant. Akuaba figures – instantly recognisable for their flat disc-like heads, bare protruding breasts and necks ringed with creases – represent young women of prime childbearing age. Miniature in size, they are designed so that women can carry them on their backs, treating them as a surrogate child until they conceive.
Once an Akan woman becomes pregnant, she will place the akuaba on a shrine, offering it up to the spirits who responded to her prayers for a child. Kneeling on earthy fertile ground, suggestive of an altar, Beyoncé’s approaching motherhood appears as a source of feminine power to be sought after; she alludes to the ways in which fertility has historically been celebrated by various cultures, and particularly in matrilineal African societies. Embracing womanhood in its most abundant terms, Beyoncé manifests as a modern-day fertility figure.
In a wider series of photographs, shot by Erizku, Beyoncé further evokes the appearance of African goddesses associated with fertility. In several images, she swims gracefully underwater, floats upside down and dives acrobatically. Wearing a yellow dress, which has been tied around her breasts, its layers spread out like tentacles to reveal her bare bump beneath, she channels the water deity Yemoja who, in Nigeria’s Yoruba religion, is the patron saint for expectant mothers and often depicted as a mermaid.
Throughout the underwater images, Beyoncé also channels Oshun, the Yoruba goddess associated with fertility, motherhood, love and beauty, who typically adorns herself in gold ornaments and wears a flowing yellow dress. Performing at the 2017 Grammys – her first appearance since the announcement of her pregnancy with the twins – Beyoncé wore a sparkling, sequined floor-length gold gown and a golden halo, alluding to the ancient spirit through her spectacular symbolic costume.
In contemporary Western culture, motherhood is often marginalised and undervalued; women are told that it shouldn’t determine their worth or identity. However, Beyoncé presents motherhood, denoted through the imagery of deities, as a powerful, life-giving force. In her visual album Black is King the performer refers to herself as Osun, the African goddess of love and water. She equates being a mother with creative power, including the inspiration behind her music.
Beyoncé also challenges notions that maternity – epitomised by the chaste and pure Virgin Mary – is separate from sexuality, visualised in art across the ages by the beautiful goddess Venus. On stage, as in her pregnancy photo shoot, Beyoncé conflates these two embodiments of femininity. By further assimilating imagery from African cultures and religions, which prize fertility highly, she makes an empowering statement: women can be both sexual beings and mothers. She makes a compelling case for the power to be harnessed from the intersection of motherhood, fertility and femininity.
An African-American woman, Beyoncé also hails Black motherhood, pointing to her powerful ancient ancestors, which make up her rich family history. It’s worth noting that Beyoncé, like all daughters in matrilineal societies, has taken her name from her mother Tina Knowles, with whom she has always enjoyed a very close relationship: ‘A lot of people don’t know that Beyoncé is my last name. It’s my maiden name,’ Knowles proudly told Oprah Winfrey in 2013.
Pre-Beyoncé, Erizku had replaced the white sitters of famous paintings with contemporary Black models, revising one artwork at a time. However, with Beyoncé, he has interwoven cultural references, allowing her to bring her multiple sources of inspiration into his portraits in which she embodies motherhood, which acts as her muse. In an interview for Rolling Stone in 2017 Erizku opened up about their creative relationship: ‘She’s a very smart person and she knows what she’s doing. She knows what she wants and she has such a big heart – she’s so open to artist collaborations. Whether it’s Beyoncé or someone I met on the street, my approach to making portraits and making art is that it has to be organic.’
The pregnancy photo shoot was a clever collaboration for both artist and muse, who were allied in their diasporic strategy to create a mixtape of iconography, which exalts motherhood in its fullness. Beyoncé, the most Grammy-winning female artist in history, has claimed that becoming a mother has been one of her ‘greatest achievements’, which Erizku has framed for her. Not only does he capture her humanity, and the physicality of pregnancy, but the artist ensures she looks divine; like an ancient fertility figure she demands devotion for mothers, our creators of life. Adoration certainly came in the form of over eleven million likes when Beyoncé posted the photo of her veiled as a Black Venus on Instagram.