I think I have always wondered how the first kiss came about. A quick Google search produces a very provisional 2500BC as an answer but there’s something terribly factual and unsatisfying about that – I want to understand what happened just moments before. The first kiss must’ve been so confusing and exciting. It’s no wonder the action has been repeated billions of times since, in moments of tenderness, passion, anger, and frenzy. Kisses convey emotion and attachment in a way that transcends the spoken language, and appeals rather to an innate human understanding of love and relationships.
Art has met this in many ways. Marina Abramović and Ulay’s 1977 performance piece Breathing In / Breathing Out involved the two artists blocking their noises with cigarette filters and pressing their mouths together until they both passed out nineteen minutes later. Neither could inhale anything but what the other had already exhaled. Abramović’s performance art is known for testing the limits of the human body, but this work with Ulay particularly highlights the convergence of bodies – the co-ordination of positioning, movement, and something so singular and ritual as breathing. During the performance there were microphones taped to their bodies, and the unified frenzied fight for breath shows the merging of physical function and identity that takes place during a kiss. It is a moment in which individuals are quite literally inseparable – their desires, vulnerabilities, and affections briefly intersect and become one. It leaves one wondering what sort of passion and blind confusion could lead to such an irrational action.
Sculpture captures this in a most interesting way. Most evident is Rodin’s The Kiss / Le Basier. Sculpture at its best possesses an innate ability to capture physical situations like theatre. The Kiss feels so universal in its scope – bodies contorted in want litter our past and Rodin’s work embodies all of this. The couple depicted are Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, who are featured in Dante’s Inferno. Their kiss is the product of their passion when reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere together. Rodin produced three full scale versions in his lifetime. All of this creates an idea that the marble Kiss feels almost as if it exists out of time and space. It feels as if it could exist anywhere – the marble is Grecian in character, the pose. The pose is reminiscent of Breathing In / Breathing Out, but the fusion of the marble mouths gives the piece a static quality, and a sort of poetic permanence. Also notable is Rodin’s approach to sculpting women – rather than portraying them as passive recipients of passion, he depicts them as active participants, ‘full partners in ardour’.
In the realm of painting, Klimt’s The Kiss is the most obvious point of discussion. Toulouse-Lautrec’s work The Bed, The Kiss / Au Lit, Le Basier, however, is more subtle and casual in its portrayal of intimacy – the women in the painting are wrapped in a soft embrace and kissing gently. The tight composition stresses the privacy of the setting, as well as the centrality of the figures to the heart of the painting. Softs reds and yellows flesh out the figures, giving them life and warmth. The brushstrokes are loose and tender, practically kissing the canvas and making the moment all the more intimate. Toulouse-Lautrec could’ve quite easily sensationalised it and been celebrated, but instead focuses on depicting it as-is – an act of everyday, mundane intimacy.
