Throughout the History of Art, there are examples of loving couples in passionate embraces. From ancient Indian temples, Greek vases, Japanese prints, Renaissance paintings and sculpture, through the golden age of Dutch painting, the 18th and 19th centuries and beyond into modern times, the act of kissing has fascinated artists. Some depict classical stories such as Cupid and Psyche, others pick literary references from Arthurian legends to Dante’s doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, and others choose more personal subjects from their circle of friends. Here, Artlyst presents its top 10 most memorable kisses in art.
10. Brancusi The Kiss 1907-10
Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi created his proto-cubist plaster sculpture The Kiss in 1907-10. It was exhibited at the 1913 Armoury Show. He created many versions, further simplifying geometric forms and sparse objects in each version, moving it further towards abstraction.
9. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec In Bed: The Kiss 1892
Post-Impressionist painter, illustrator, printmaker and draughtsman Lautrec was known for his paintings of Paris nightlife in the late 1880s as well as of Parisian prostitutes. Here he captures two prostitutes from a brothel in a sensual embrace, capturing a tender moment between the pair.
8. Rene Magritte Les Amants 1928
Belgian Surrealist artist Rene Magritte here paints an unsettling image of a passionate embrace, invoking a close-up of a cinematic kiss, but shrouds the faces in cloth, concealing the figures’ identities.
7. Banksy Kissing Coppers
Banksy’s life-size black and white graffiti work of two policemen kissing sold for $575,000 at a Miami auction house in 2014. It was spray-painted initially onto the side of the Prince Albert Pub in Trafalgar Street near Brighton city centre in 2004 and became one of Banksy’s most famous street works.
6. Jeff Koons Bourgeois Bust Jeff and Illona 1991
‘Bourgeois Bust’ was originally created for the ‘Made in Heaven’ exhibition, in which Jeff Koons explored the concept of love in relation to his own marriage to porn star Ilona Staller. Represented as a marble portrait bust, the couple are depicted within a traditional Baroque style that drew its inspiration from antique classical sculpture. With her plaited hair and string of pearls, Staller appears like Venus, the Greek goddess of love. Declaring sensationally “We’ve become God”, their spiritual and physical union seemingly elevates the pair to a higher realm of idealised existence and ecstasy. It’s a couple about to kiss and we couldn’t resist including it.
5. Nan Goldin Gotscho Kissing Gilles, Paris 1993
Part of a seminal photo series by American photographer Nan Goldin between 1992 and 1993, of two of her friends, the French gay couple Gilles and Gotscho. The images celebrate the intimacy and daily life of the couple as they prepare themselves for Gilles’ death from AIDS.
4. Tino Sehgal Kiss 2007
Kiss 2007 was first exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, It is one of Turner Prize nominee Sehgal’s constructed situations in which two dancers kiss and touch, eventually resembling embracing couples from historical works of art including Rodin’s The Kiss and Klimt’s The Kiss and various Courbet paintings from 1860s one after the other.
3. Edvard Munch The Kiss 1897
Munch’s 1897 oil on canvas painting The Kiss is part of his Frieze of Life series which depicts the stages of a relationship between men and women. He had been experimenting with the motif of a couple kissing, their faces fusing as one in a symbolic representation of their unity since 1888/89.
2. Gustav Klimt The Kiss (Lovers) 1907-8
The Kiss is Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt’ highpoint of his ‘Golden Period’ when he painted a number of works in a similar gilded style. A perfect square, the painting depicts a couple embracing, their bodies entwined in elaborate robes decorated in an Art Nouveau style and is the epitome of the Viennese Jugendstil.
1. Auguste Rodin The Kiss (Le Baiser) 1889
This marble statue of an embracing couple was originally conceived for Rodin’s monumental bronze portal, The Gates of Hell. The Tate has one of three full-scale versions of the sculpture made in Rodin’s lifetime. Its blend of eroticism and idealism makes it one of the great images of sexual love. It is one of the many depictions throughout the history of art of Dante’s adulterous lovers, Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, who Francesca’s outraged husband slew.