Bourgeois Bust- Jeff and Ilona

Jeff Koons originally made this work for his now notorious Made in Heaven exhibition, in which he explored concepts of love by referencing his own marriage to Italian porn star Ilona Staller. He explains, “With Bourgeois Bust, I wanted . . . to be able to bring Ilona’s body and my body down together in a point so that it’s a heart—a symbol of love—and take the flesh and cut through it to form it that way without any sense of violence.” Here the couple appears within a traditional Baroquestyle portrait bust like those of 18th-century sculptor Antonio Canova (whose work you can see in the museum’s galleries of European painting and sculpture). Bourgeois Bust sets in tension the elegance of neoclassical sculpture and the irreverence of deploying its idealized terms in the postmodern era.