Vermeer’s Milkmaid has carried erotic symbolism since it was painted. The Metropolitan Museum of Art documents that the milkmaid theme was understood as sexually coded in Netherlandish art for two centuries before Vermeer — the jug, the pour, the domestic space all legible to their original audience.
Behan’s collage holds the same room, the same window, the same table, with the same palette of warm muted colors in a soft blur. The milkmaid is replaced with two male figures and the bread is replaced with a foot long coney dog.
The symbolism the Met describes — the jug, the pouring, the food as sexual symbol — is all still operating. Behan has taken the subtext and turned it to context from a queer perspective. Gay men were in the Netherlands also.
On the surface it’s visual humor. Underneath it’s a serious art historical argument — that the erotic coding in Western painting has always been there, has always been heterosexually assumed, and that substituting a queer reading doesn’t distort the painting’s meaning so much as reveal that the meaning was always available to queer folk as well. As it should.
Vermeer would smile.
Source
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The Milkmaid — The Milkmaid Theme.” metmuseum.org.
