From the sweet and romantic for some, to the fiery and passionate for others, come and join us in the delicate world of love and tenderness!
Sculptor Richard Macdonald
I’d like to fall in love with you like the first time.
Like the first jazz, you get goose bumps… naively assuming that maybe we’re connected in heaven.
I’d like to live in love with you… with your truth-like characteristics. Your words heal the wound.
No excuses, cuts and whining….
in a book, in love
I’d fall so hard in love I’d fly to pieces so the past would eventually die.
Discover a new world after leaving a sketch.
How poems are written in life,
A planet turns in its orbit.
Exupéry said only one thing:
I’d love to fall in love with you, but where are you?
Where are you?
Vania Yakimov
When people tell me they don’t like poetry, I often get a puzzled reaction, but I respect that.
But I want to ask them: how is it possible not to be interested in love? Not to be touched by words of love?
Because let’s make no mistake: poetry revolves around a fixed idea called love. In the broadest sense, of course.
The love of hearts bound together, the love of freedom, the love of nature – obviously, it’s the first element in this sentence that takes up the most space.
Poetry is the language of lovers. When the heart beats very fast, it expresses itself first with images. Feelings, which are intangible by nature, need metaphors, to be captured in a smell, a flavour, a sound.
The aim of my writing project is to make you feel the thrilling loves that tint the day’s sky with a rainbow of beneficial rehydration for our spirits… a Prayer to Love through Poetry!
Today, I’d like to immerse you in a bath of love with Robert Doisneau’s timeless photograph “Le Baiser de l’hôtel de ville”.
Dance is sublime, moving, the beauty of art that is not a simple translation or abstraction of life; it is life itself.
Sculpture “La Valse” by Camille Claudel (1889)
The feeling of love has fascinated us since the dawn of time, and appears in all its forms in the history of art. Whether we’re talking about a flirtation, a first emotion, an intimate moment or even a passionate embrace, each depiction of a kiss immerses us in a different period of history and reveals a little more about the customs or vision of an artist. A look at six famous representations of kissing in painting reveals that people have been kissing for a long, long time…
Anyone who misses out on the most beautiful story of his life will only be as old as his regrets, and all the sighs in the world won’t be able to lull his soul to sleep.
Last kiss by Massimo Pedrazzi
Vik Muniz, Brazilian artist born in 1961, The Kiss (from picture of junk) 2010. paintings with rubbish, made on the ground.
Image of a sculpture with two figures embracing at the central cemetery in Vienna, Austria.
The statue is part of the grave of the Austrian composer Hugo Wolf
At the bottom right of the gravestone, it says “Edmund Hellmer fecit 1904”. “Fecit” translates as “done” in Latin.
Edmund Ritter von Hellmer (1850, Vienna – 1935, Vienna), was an Austrian sculptor who worked in the styles of historicism and Art Nouveau.
Masked love. Porcelain sculpture by Johnson Tsang.
Moonlit lovers by Syrian sculptor Nizar Ali Badr
Rudolp Belarski (1900-1983) American artist.
The only true thing in the world
but the foolishness of love.
Alfred de Musset
Edouard Gjopalaj, wooden statue “Embracing
“In art, as in love, tenderness gives strength.”
(Oscar Wilde)
“The last kiss”, Raymond Leech (English painter, born 1949).
“Each person who passes through our lives is unique. They always leave a little of themselves behind and take a little of us with them. There are those who will have taken a lot, but there are not those who will have left nothing.
This is the greatest responsibility of our lives and the clearest proof that two spirits do not meet by chance…”
Jorge Luis Borges
Chad Knight
“To love someone is to read them. It’s knowing how to read all the sentences in the other person’s heart, and delivering them by reading them. It means unfolding your heart like a scroll and reading it aloud, as if each of you were a book written in a foreign language.
Christian Bobin .
Ju Baiz
He leaned Marie against his chest and spoke slowly into her ear. Old words, new words, dense words, full of love. Inexhaustible words. Simple words, true words:
– I love you. You are what drives me. You’re all I’ve ever loved.
Andrée Chedid
Angelo en fuga, bronze, 1914, by Rupert Branterl (1889 – 1968)
Verona cemetery – Italy –
(This bronze appears on the family tomb of the poet Lionello Fiumi).
Camille Claudel, Vertumne and Pomona.
I think of the warmth that the word weaves around its core, the dream we call us.
Tristan Tzara, L’Homme approximatif
Photo :Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1985)/LIFE – The Kiss V-J Day in Times Square – New York – 1945.
The world is thirsty for love: you will come and appease it” wrote Arthur Rimbaud, who composed “Révé pour l’hiver”, an excerpt from Poésies, on 7 October 1870.
In winter, we’ll go in a little pink carriage
With blue cushions.
We’ll be fine. A nest of crazy kisses lies
In every soft corner.
You will close your eyes, so as not to see, through the ice,
Grimacing evening shadows,
These snarling monstrosities, a rabble
Of black demons and black wolves.
Then you will feel your cheek scratched…
A little kiss, like a mad spider,
Will crawl around your neck…
And you’ll say to me, “Look,” bowing your head,
– And we’ll take our time finding this beast
– Who travels a lot…
Auguste Rodin’s “The Kiss”.
“I kiss your hands my friend, you who give me such high and ardent pleasures, near you my soul exists with strength and, in its fury of love, your respect is always above it. The respect I have for your character, for you my Camille, is a cause of my violent passion. Don’t treat me mercilessly, I ask so little of you.
Rodin, letter to Camille Claudel.
PS: You don’t need to tell me, under the influence of the film “Camille”, that Rodin was ignoble to her.
They separated in 1892, but 21 years later, in 1913, at the request of the Claudel family and at the instigation of her brother Paul, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital with no possibility of visits. Distraught, Rodin tried to improve Camille Claudel’s situation, but to no avail. In 1914, he dedicated a room to Camille’s work in the Hôtel Biron. He was unable to do more, and Rodin died in 1917.
In thirty years of hospitalisation, Paul Claudel only visited his sister twelve times. When she died in 1943, he did not travel. Camille was buried in the presence of hospital staff only. A few years later, her remains were transferred to a mass grave, as neither Paul nor the members of the Claudel family had offered a burial plot. The most disgusting of all was his brother, Paul!
Chagall 1914 – The Blue Lovers
Jacques Monory – Kiss N°19, 2001
Qui Trop Embrasse….. by Ettore Tito
“From the limited edition deluxe album “Quatre Proverbes” published in 1927.”
Loui Jover – Envie
Roy Lichtenstein, “Kiss V” (1964)
Tears, a kiss, an embrace. A heartbreaking separation or a warm reunion? This silkscreen by Roy Lichtenstein shows the power and emotion of the union of two people. Characterised by a pop, colourful universe, the comic-book-style work is inspired by the graphic codes of the comic strip.
Gustav Klimt, “The Kiss” (1907-1908)
In his golden period, Gustav Klimt painted one of the most famous love scenes in the history of art. Against a backdrop of eroticism, this kiss brings together a woman and a man who seem to be abandoning themselves to each other. With its obvious asymmetry, this body-to-body encounter immersed in gold resembles an almost sacred icon. No one would dare disturb these two…
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Stolen Moment, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, Switzerland, Georges Ortiz Collection
Photo by Liran Shapira, “The power of love!”
There is no greater story!
There is nothing greater.
From the bowels of the earth
From every continent
Between the sky and the sea, and all the oceans
From the fire that animates
The flames of volcanoes
In the tears of a smile
In the tears of a smile
In the same desire
Of a mother and her child.
There is no greater power
Nor more powerful men
In all of History
Since the dawn of time
Nor the works in the Art Museums!
Nor feathers, nor painters
No matter how great their genius
No matter how beautiful their talent!
Can one really describe
And touch this Horizon
Define that feeling ,
Find the equation
That unites all beings
Of fusion and passion.
Beyond even Life
Of the Universe and more.
There is nothing higher,
at least down here!
Neither brilliant, nor stronger
Nor diamond, silver or gold.
There are no words
To conjugate the verb…To love
Neither time nor space
Can erase the trace…
Imprints of humanity
And this power of love…
Here and now.
And two hands forever .
Alberto Leite
Detail of the well-known sculpture “Venus and Adonis” by Canova.
Venus asks Adonis for kisses
… If you grant me this courtesy,
I’ll reveal a thousand sweet secrets;
if you sit here, where no snake hisses,
next to me, I will cover you with kisses!
I will not weary your lips by filling them :
will make them more eager to access,
I’ll make them blush and turn pale
in ever new ways; ten kisses
will be a kiss, a kiss twenty….
(Shakespeare – Venus and Adonis – London 1593)
—
These strong, sensual words are spoken by Venus, the goddess of beauty, to the handsome god Adonis in the work of the English bard.
Les amoureux sous un arbre en fleurs, (1908), by Georges Picard (1857-1943), a French painter and illustrator.
Three matches, lit one by one
the first to see your whole face
face
the second to see your eyes
and the last to see your mouth
And the whole darkness to remember
remember all this as I hold you
in my arms.
Jacques Prévert born 4 February 1900
Canvas representing love. “Spring” by Pierre Auguste Cot.
Comedy in three kisses (Arthur Rimbaud)
She was quite undressed,
And tall indiscreet trees
Leaned their leaves against the windows
Malignantly, very close, very close.
Sitting on my big chair,
half-naked, she joined her hands,
On the floor, shivering with ease
Her tiny feet, so thin, so thin.
I looked, the colour of wax
a little ray of light
Papillionner, like a smile
On her beautiful breast, a rosebush fly.
I kissed her fine ankles
She laughed a long tri-mal laugh
In clear trills,
A crystal laugh.
The little feet under the shirt
Ran away: “Do you want to finish! “
The first audacity allowed,
Laughter pretended to punish!
Poor things throbbed under my lip,
I gently kissed her eyes:
She threw back her mawkish head
Backwards: “Oh, that’s even better! “
“Sir, I have two words to say to you…”
I threw the rest at her breast
In a kiss that made her laugh
A good, hearty laugh…
She was quite undressed
And tall, indiscreet trees
Leaned their leaves against the windows
Slyly, very near, very near.
“Il Bacio” (The Kiss), Leso Sculptures, Verona
Camille Claudel, Abandonment
“To love is, through the body, to meet the soul,
to meet the soul; it is also
through the paths of the soul
to discover the body.
To love is to mingle the soul with the body,
the body with the soul, it is still
from the tips of our fingers to the depths of our being,
touching, feeling and recognising
with the flesh, with the spirit
without guessing which is taken
and which is taken, without being able to say
who wakes up and who goes to sleep
which begins, where the other ends,
which is alive, which is dead”.
Liliane Wouters (Belgian poet, 1930-2016)
Fly me to the moon
“The Kiss”, bronze, Antonio Pujia (Argentinian sculptor)
We must love each other on earth
We must love each other alive
Don’t believe in the cemetery
Love us before
Love us on earth
Love us alive
Your dust and my dust
Will be the wind’s playthings
Paul Fort
“Roméo and Juliette » Frank Bernard Dicksee- 1884
When marble catches fire! Psyche revived by Love’s kiss, Antonio Canova, 1793.
This sculpture is Canova’s best-known work, featuring two mythological characters quoted by Ovid in the Metamorphoses.
Psyche is lifeless because, despite Venus’s prohibition, she has inhaled the scent of a bottle from the Underworld. Close to death, she is brought back to life by Cupid, who gives her a kiss. Canova represents the pivotal moment between life and death.
Victor Vasarely, Love, 1942 , gouache 32.5 x 30.25 cm
Maurice Bouval, French Art Nouveau sculptor
“Let’s leave in a kiss for an unknown world”.
Alfred de Musset
Photo by Edouard Boubat
It’s a beautiful way to lose yourself, to lose yourself in each other’s arms.
– Alessandro Baricco, Ocean Sea –
On the edge of the ocean, at the Almayer guesthouse, “set on the world’s ultimate ledge”, seven characters with strange and romantic destinies meet, seven castaways of life who are trying to pick up the pieces of their existence. But their stay is disrupted by the memory of a hallucinating shipwreck from a century ago and the bloody drift of a raft. And always the sea, capricious and fascinating…
With breathtaking mastery, Alessandro Baricco offers us at once a novel of suspense, a book of adventure, a philosophical meditation and a prose poem.
Antonio Canova, Venetian painter and sculptor 1757-1822. Amore e psiche
Bravo for your interesting article and all the beautiful images. It makes me wonder when the first kiss took place ? Ten thousand years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, a million years ago? We will never know but we will undoubtedly continue!
So tender
love and just a kiss