Love is in the air! With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, Artsper has gathered a few of the most iconic images of the kiss in the history of art. Whether in painting or in sculpture, romantic gestures are an all-time source of inspiration for artists. Hopefully, these dreamy kissing scenes will inspire you too, just in time for your next date…
February 8, 2022
Love (in life, as in art) covers the full range of emotions, from the spiritual to the sleazy, provocative to the profound. But what better conveys true love, than true love’s kiss?
Whether it’s fine art, literature film or movies, there have been some momentous kisses that truly left their mark on history. Who doesn’t recognize the infamous V-J Day sailor’s kiss, the tragedy of Romeo’s “blushing pilgrim” lips meeting Juliet’s or the golden ecstasy of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss painting?
Katsushika Hokusai / Museum of Fine Arts, BostonWithout the Japanese printmaker Hokusai, Impressionism might never have happened. Jason Farago examines the moment when European art started turning Japanese.
In the beginning was the wave. The blue and white tsunami, ascending from the left of the composition like a massive claw, descends pitilessly on Mount Fuji – the most august mountain in Japan, turned in Katsushika Hokusai’s vision into a small and vulnerable hillock. Under the Wave off Kanagawa, one of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, has been an icon of Japan since the print was first struck in 1830–31, yet it forms part of a complex global network of art, commerce, and politics. Its intense blue comes from Hokusai’s pioneering use of Prussian Blue ink – a foreign pigment, imported, probably via China, from England or Germany. The wave, from the beginning, stretched beyond Japan. Soon, it would crash over Europe.
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In the Sculptor’s Studio, Paris (January 1911)As well as pioneering aerial photography, Léon Gimpel, author of this photograph, was the first to have his work published in colour, in 1907 Photograph: Léon Gimpel/Collection Société Française de Photographie, Paris/Léon Gimpel |
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Pablo Picasso at work (1955)Picasso worked in seven different studios through his life – he casts a solitary figure in front of his easel here.• In the Studio: The Artist Photographed from Ingres to Jeff Koons is at Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, until 17 July 2016
Photograph: André Villers, Adagp, Paris 2016/Succession Picasso
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Francis Bacon’s studio (1986)Bacon’s workpace feels as fractious and disturbed as his paintings
Photograph: Charles Matton, Adagp, Paris 2016
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