Kissing is one of the most intimate human acts. It can be loving, erotic, or thrilling—and sometimes all three. Art history is littered with romantic smooches, such as Gustav Klimt’s iconic, gold-drenched 1907 painting The Kiss. Some artists have turned kissing into a surreal act, including René Magritte, whose 1928 painting The Lovers shows two heads eerily covered in cloth as they kiss. Other works mine the moment of affection for high drama, such as Auguste Rodin’s 1882 marble sculpture The Kiss, which depicts two doomed lovers from Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
But for contemporary artists, kisses are often reframed acts of protest, challenging cultural stigmas, gender norms, and bigotry. Photographers such as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans photographed young and queer couples in passionate embraces, defying rigid social rules with love and freedom. In a similar act of resistance this autumn, sculptor and collage artist Tschabalala Self will present a 12-foot-high sculpture of two Black figures kissing outside New York’s New Museum. The work is intended as a highly visible “insignia of love” for the surrounding streets. Here, Artsy shares eight artworks that break down taboos and stereotypes through radical depictions of tender connection.
Joan Semmel
Hold, 1972
American painter Joan Semmel has dedicated her career to depicting sexual freedom, challenging stigmas around pleasure. Many of her early pieces, in which bodies are flooded with vibrant strokes of colored paint, were drawn from New York sex parties and swingers’ clubs, portraying group pleasure as liberating, rather than seedy.
Her 1972 painting Hold shows two nude figures in a loving yet clumsy embrace, their limbs tangled together and faces pressed in a kiss. Each clutches the back of the other’s head. The top body is drenched in a hot pinkish-red, contrasting with the simple green and orange elsewhere in the painting. Semmel breaks down the vanity often attached to images of sexuality, composing her images as though viewers are also part of the action. Here, the kiss is fumbling and everyday, the lovers lost in a moment of pleasure that defies typical presentations of airbrushed eroticism.
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