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 a passionate embrace, each depiction of a kiss immerses us in a particular period of history, revealing a little more about the mores or vision of an artist. A closer look at these famous representations of kissing in painting reveals that people have been kissing for a long, long time…
Mark ARIAN, painter.
FLESH AND SIGH
I am your flesh,
the chosen flesh of your spirit.
You can never visit me in the daytime
until the pure wash of dreams
has incinerated me
to return me to you in pages of poetry,
in sighs of long waiting.
I’m afraid of my pain
as if your sweetness
could make it die
and deprive me of the mysterious landscape
of memories.
I’m full of rituals
and the logic of memories
that comes later, when she confronts my life
the story of everyday truth,
the dream drowned in water.
I’m as mysterious as the next person,
every move I make is a miracle
and you know it,
but the biggest step
I can take is to come to you
(an endless journey without refreshment,
perhaps a journey that would lead me to death
for I am the song and the long road).
The song dies, it will die
in the bowels of the earth
for I am the measure
of your great human spectacle.
Alda Merini
Illustration by Christian Schloe
“She’s standing on my eyelids
And her hair is in mine,
She has the shape of my hands,
She has the color of my eyes,
She sinks into my shadow
Like a stone on the sky.
Her eyes are always open
And won’t let me sleep.
Her dreams in the light
Make the suns evaporate,
Make me laugh, cry and laugh,
Talking without having anything to say.
Paul Eluard, The Lover
Naiden Stanchev (Bulgaria), “Now and forever”.
“You showed me what love was,
and I saw “My Forever”
in your eyes.”
Sreena KS
Flamenco dancers, Hamish Blakely, 1968, British
Yves Trémorin, The Magnificent Lovers, 1989.
Théodore Lundberg, (1852-1926), “Onda et Roccia” (1897), marble statue.
“And this kiss lasts
more than silence, more than light.”
Pedro Salinas
Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche in Louis Malle’s “Fatale”.
“You always love too much when you really love.
Excess is de rigueur.”
Éric-Emmanuel SCHMITT
Yves Montand and Edith Piaf in the film “Étoile sans lumière”, 1946
“Étoile sans lumière” is a film in which Piaf acts and sings.
The director is Marcel Blistène, who was making his first feature film.
Édith Piaf is of course the main attraction, but the film also features Yves Montand in his film debut.
Piaf and Montand were in the midst of a passionate love affair. Their love transcends the screen.
“Abélard and his pupil Héloïse” painted by E. B. Leighton in 1882.
Heloise and Abelard are two famous lovers of the Middle Ages. Their story is a myth of impossible love.
Héloïse, a 16-year-old girl, and Pierre Abélard, her teacher and a learned mathematician, fall in love. However, Héloïse’s uncle refuses to let his niece marry this man. In order to live out her love, the pregnant Heloise is forced to run away with her beloved. Once in Brittany, the two lovers marry. Out of his mind, the uncle orders his servants to pursue them and castrate Abélard. Héloïse, then aged 18, enters a convent and becomes a nun on Abélard’s orders.
Faithful to Abélard, she never forgot him. Her lover also became a monk. She took charge of the abbey of Paraclet. During the years she ran the abbey, she constantly wrote him letters of burning love. When Abélard died, his coffin was taken to the abbey, at Heloise’s behest. Thus, even after death, they would remain united forever.
In 1817, their bodies were moved to the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Every year, their graves are adorned with thousands of flowers brought by loving couples to commemorate their union.
“A sword wound heals and heals very quickly, as soon as a doctor attends to it, while Love’s wound gets worse the closer she is to her doctor. ”
Chrétien de Troyes
Gustav Vigeland, Norwegian, 1869-1943, “Eros” in Oslo Park.
Nino Orlandi
“Those who are hardest to love are the ones who need it most.
Socrate
Photo by Kurt Hutto
“But the bad thing about sleep isn’t the dream. The bad thing is what they call waking up…. ”
Julio Cortázar.
The Kiss (1868); oil on canvas, 92 x 92 cm; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, Carolus-Duran (1837-1917).
“A great love is not enough to detach the one we love if we do not at the same time know how to fill the whole of the other’s life with a constantly renewed richness… “Climat, 1928, André Maurois
“After Odile’s departure, my life was very unhappy. The house seemed so sad that I found it hard to stay… I was agitated by vague remorse, yet I had nothing specific to reproach myself for. I had married Odile, whom I loved, when my family would have wished for me more brilliant marriages; I had been faithful to her until the evening with Misa, and my brief betrayal had been caused by hers…. I was beginning to glimpse a very new truth for me about the relationship that should exist between men and women. I saw women as unstable beings, always in search of a strong direction to fix their wandering thoughts and desires; perhaps this need created a duty for men to be that infallible compass, that fixed point. A great love is not enough to detach the one you love if you don’t know how to fill the other’s whole life with an ever-renewed richness…Women naturally attach themselves to men whose life is a movement, who draw them into this movement, who give them a task, who demand a lot from them….Instead of understanding his tastes, I had condemned them; I had wanted to impose mine on him…”
Alex Alemany is a Spanish painter known for his hyperrealist and surrealist works, which often explore themes of identity, time and the human condition. Born in Gandia, Valencia, in 1943, Alemany studied Fine Arts at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos de Valencia. Early in his career, he was recognized for his technical mastery and his unique blend of realism and surrealism.
Alemany’s paintings are characterized by their meticulous attention to detail, rich color palettes and complex compositions. He often uses classical techniques to create contemporary scenes that blur the boundaries between reality and imagination.
“El Baile”, by contemporary French painter Johanna Perdu
Painting by Ju Baiz
He leaned Marie against his chest and spoke into her ear, slowly. Worn 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
“Depuis longtemps”, (2002) by French artist Gérard Schlosser (1931-2022), acrylic on canvas,147 x 115 cm
His scenes were often painted on sandblasted canvas.
Gérard Schlosser studied goldsmithing at the Ecole des Arts de Paris from 1948 to 1951 and, after a short period at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, decided to devote himself to painting, becoming one of the artists of the Art Mouvement narratif.
Opting for figuration from the outset, he turned to the representation of “fragments”, achieving extraordinary intensity and presence in characters reflected solely by body parts: a leg, a shoulder, a neck, a chest, a hand…
Working from photographs he had taken himself, and with an acute sense of detail and a highly personal way of assembling fragments of images, he extracted sections from different photos and recreated intimate moments of everyday life, insinuating stories unfolding outside the frame. Gérard Schlosser did not want to be considered a “realist painter”, but was certainly a painter of reality.
The titles of his works are revealing, becoming a written component of the painting, a mental extension of the work that allows the viewer to go beyond the image towards an assumed elsewhere.
Mural by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra
“Aragon and Elsa Triolet” (1963), photo by Robert Doisneau.
It’s an understatement to say that I love you.
Like a torn cloth
We live together apart
In my arms I hold you absent
And the wound to last
Must we feel it so deep
When the sky is the limit
It’s so little to say that I love you
This existence is a farewell
And we both only have eyes
For the fading light
Putting on seven-league boots
Telling each other there’s no hurry
This is what it’s like to be old
It’s so little to say I love you
It’s as if I never
I ever said I loved you
If I feared that I would be surprised
The night on my throat
Her gloved fingers of sovereign
When never again is May
It’s such an understatement to say I love you
When things are no more
A memory of their thrill
An echo of dead music
Remains the pain of sound
The more it fades, the louder it becomes
It’s not many words for the song
It’s so little to say I love you
Et je n’aurai dit que je t’aime
Louis Aragon, Le fou d’Elsa
The Lovers of Verona, Pascal Campion
Painting by Arthur Sarnoff
Ekaterina Yastrebova, Russian painter
“Two lovers on bicycles don’t cross the city, they pierce it like a cloud, on windy pedals.”
Didier Tronchet
Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, “Amoureux des quais de la Seine”, Paris, 1960…
A little corner of an umbrella against a corner of paradise, and so it was said.
Schneider Romy and Alain Delon in Jacques Deray’s “La Piscine”, 1969.
“The Brambles”
This sleeping face that your eyes splash
Of that deep blue where the night
I gather
What it takes of paths from your lips
To my mouth
To be able to stop in the morning
To hang on the edge
Of passing time
Like two great birds
Weighed down by the rain
Dry their pillow feathers
Their pillow feathers…”
Céline Coulon
Painting by Nicolas Roggeman
I can’t wait to hold the joy of yours in my hands. Sometimes I imagine it would be good to drown on the surface of a pond where no boat would venture. Then to rise again in the current of a real torrent, where your colors would bubble.
René Char, Guirlande Terrestre (1952)
Antonio Sgarbossa, Italian painter
“I’ll wear you out, I’ll wear myself out, I won’t leave you, we won’t rest. Two human beings should be able to live clinging to each other without breathing. It’s called love.”
Françoise Sagan
Bronze sculpture by Miles Johnston
Painting by Jorge Mascarenhas
“Hug me, kiss me, kiss me long, kiss me, later it will be too late. Our life is now”
Jacques Prévert
Jack Vettriano, The proposal (2017)
Celestial Lovers by Celin Diaz
“You are my sun, my moon and all my stars. “E. E. Cummings
“The Eternal Idol”, sculpture in patinated chalk, (1916), Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Paris, Musée Rodin – Gift of Auguste Rodin.
Moved by admiration for Michelangelo’s work, and previously rejected at the annual Salon exhibition in Paris, Rodin travels to Italy, where he is able to study the Sistine Chapel in particular. Impressed by the sculpture of the great Renaissance master, he tried to fuse such monumental work with a more propulsive, vibrant realism, giving his work greater vitality and dynamism. His output of marbles, bronze and chalk is copious, among monumental works, busts and portraits. Finally, in 1879, he received an honorary mention at the Salon for his work San Giovanni Baptist.
With “L’idole de l’éternel” we witness a simple act of love more intimate than the term, the naked bodies themselves speak of their emotions, facing each other they make us perceive this almost celebratory moment, the softness of the position of the lovers in question whispers to us all that is due “sacrifice”. The eternal idol, unlike “Eternal Spring”, where “unconfrontational” and bloody passion overwhelms the couple, making them blossom in all their most intimate parts and in almost dazzling gestures, is the representation of a less propulsive hero: the gentleness of her gaze, and the grace of the female torso act to welcome her face as it leans gently and sensually against her body, in an act of devotion and dedication. Whether there’s more impulse in the pathos and vehemence in the passionate gestures, or more innocence and composure in the supreme moment of eros, Rodin, what a fine master, can show us, without false odors, all the nature that leads to sexual pleasure. We know that Rodin himself asked his models, before posing for him, to approach their bodies, to caress them, to have a more natural trust with him, at the height of artistic creation.
A keen connoisseur of the soul’s motivations, Rodin once said: “Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind that searches in nature and discovers the spirit with which nature itself is animated”.
Sculpture by Antonio Canova
“If nothing can save us from death…let love at least save our lives.”
Pablo Neruda
Monika Lunak, painter
If I speak to you, it’s to hear you better
If I hear you, I’m sure I understand you
If you smile, the better to invade me
If you smile, I see the whole world
If I embrace you it’s to continue me
If we live all will be pleasure
If I leave you we’ll remember
When we leave you we’ll find each other again.
Paul Eluard, Certitudes
Painting by Ron Hicks
“Couples shouldn’t be dreamed of, but passion shouldn’t be dreamed of either. Live it, yes, when it’s there, but don’t ask it to last, don’t ask it to suffice, don’t ask it to fill or guide an existence.
That’s just a delusion of the ego.
The real question is whether we should stop loving when we stop being in love (in which case we can only go from passion to passion, with long deserts of trouble in between), or whether we should love differently and better.
André Comte Sponville, L’amour, la solitude
Anouk Aimée & Marcello Mastroianni, “La dolce vita” (Federico Fellini, 1960).
My other
My fellow man
In this flesh
That makes us
In this heart
That struggles
In this blood
That rides like a cavalcade
In this plot
Of time
In this death
That threatens us
In this brotherhood
Of our fleeting lives
My fellow man
My other
Where you are
I am
Andrée Chedid
Maria Casarès & Gérard Philipe, “Les Epiphanies” 1947
(Play by Henri Pichette- Théâtre des Noctambules).
Life is full of those miracles that people who love can always hope for.”
Marcel Proust
Cover illustration by contemporary French illustrator Malika Favre(b. 1982) for “This Impossible Light” by Lily Myers published by Penguin Books in 2017 .
From the author of “The Shrinking Woman” comes this verse novel about body image, eating disorders, self-esteem, mothers and daughters, and the psychological scars we inherit from our parents.
“Call Me”, photo by Keith Bernstein (British)
Tamara de Lempicka, Polish (1898 – 1980), Adam and Eve (1932)
Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Love is space and time made sensitive to the heart.”
Marcel Proust, The Prisoner
“From here to eternity”, film by Fred Zinnemann, 1953
Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr
Art Deco illustration, “Arts Décoratifs, Le Baiser, Chat Cubisme”, Fantasio 1925, by René Reb illustrator (1883-1959)
Historia de un amor, painting by Fabian Perez
The Abyss – “Paolo and Francesca”, marble, (1909) by Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica, (1869-1959), Pietro Canonica Museum, Villa Borghese, ( Rome )
This Italian sculptor was also a painter and opera composer.
A guardian of Italian artistic tradition, he renovated the Villa Borghese and, in exchange for a promise to donate his works to the city, was allowed to use the villa and set up his studio there.
Very famous in his day, he established himself throughout the European aristocracy, notably for commemorative and then religious works.
The work presented here captures our attention, inviting us to want to know more.
The theme of this group relates the tragic loves of two lovers named Paolo and Francesca, protagonists of Dante’s “Inferno” in “The Divine Comedy” (completed in 1321).
The unhappy lovers are trapped in an eternal wave of punishment in hell for having committed the sin of the flesh when they were not destined for each other.
This sculpture perfectly conveys the emotion of the eyes’ ferocity before the horror of the couple’s condition and the despair that makes them cling to each other.
Of particular note is the treatment of the fabric that envelops them, highly detailed and finely crafted.
While the work is akin to Classicism, the expression of the faces and bodies very quickly takes us towards the Naturalism and Realism in vogue at the time.
Pietro Canonica’s sculpture is remarkably moving and disturbing, combining strength and drama in an exemplary narrative.
Painting by Roberto Ferri
To be able to hug someone as if they were the whole world.
Orhan Pamuk
The Kiss (2017) by internationally renowned Irish sculptor Rowan Gillespie, born in Dublin in 1953.
Bronze commissioned by Burke Kennedy Doyle Architects for Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin
Clark Gable and Joan Crawford in “Love on the run”, directed by W.S. Van Dyke in 1936
Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca”, directed by Michael Curtiz, 1942.
Painting by Jarek Puczel
To love is to have a light in your heart. Life can distract from a thought; a cloud can steal the star; this does not prevent the star and the thought from being fixed, one in the depths of the sky, the other in the depths of the soul.
Ocean by Victor Hugo.
Graffiti by French street art artist Miss.Tic
Love is the sob of a sea of tenderness, the tear of a sky of memories and the smile of the field of the soul.
Khalil Gibran
“Roman holidays” with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, directed by William Wyler, 1953.
Le sentiment le plus noble, l’amour, est illustré dans cet article accompagné de peintures, photographies et sculptures exceptionnelles. Le cœur est et reste toujours jeune, l’amour est ce qui nous rend meilleur, humain, merveilleux.
Merci beaucoup Véro❤️❤️❤️
exactement Hermina
Sublime merveilleux
thanks