Possibly the most iconic artwork that fuses erotic and affectionate love is Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “The Kiss” from 1880, widely considered to be the absolute essence of love hewn in stone. Rodin’s sculpture has become an iconographic representation of love in art: an embracing couple. He is slightly bent over her, she swoons and is clasped in his arms. The lips are on the verge of touching, or have they already kissed? It is a very intimate moment and it sums up all we associate with the most beautiful of emotions. But what makes this sculpture even more fascinating is that it doesn’t actually depict pure, innocent love. In fact, the couple are from Dante Alighieri’s narrative poem “The Divine Comedy”. The lovers sharing this adulterous kiss are Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, her husband’s brother. Although Dante’s story was several hundred years old, Rodin’s sculpture still caused a scandal in 1880 – for showing two naked people kissing each other!
In art, love has always been either the depiction of bourgeois ideals or a breach of certain taboos. And, as a synonym for love, a kiss has been a projection surface in art for social exploration. That is one reason the 1928 painting “The Lovers” by René Magritte marks such an incisive moment in art history. Magritte’s kissing couple have their heads shrouded under veils. We cannot see the lovers and the lovers cannot see each other. They see nothing. This painting remains disturbing rather than a celebration of a positive emotion. Love in this picture feels unpleasant and unsettling. Are the lovers blind, incapable of seeing the other individual?
Love in all its facets permeates art. Perhaps even landscape paintings are an expression of love? In the romantic era, Caspar David Friedrich was a master at expressing emotions through different moods in nature. The forest, the tree, the valley, the fluffy clouds and the gloomy skies are symbols of our emotional worlds.
In the 1960s, the controversial artist Joseph Beuys went a step further, seeing art in action, in each individual’s own behaviour: “Everyone is an artist”, he proclaimed. This didn’t mean that everyone should be painting, dancing, writing, but that life itself and how we shape it, for instance through love, is a social sculpture – and hence art.
It was a revolutionary approach. But before Beuys, another man had declared that the ability to love was, in fact, a form of art. In 1956, the philosopher, psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm wrote a book titled “The Art of Loving”, which remains one of the best-selling non-fiction books worldwide. In it, Fromm dispels the false expectations of love: most people consider love something that you don’t have to learn, but which you simply feel. For these people, it is not about loving, but about being loved. In fact, loving is more important than being loved, giving more important than receiving. To learn and live this skill, love must be understood as an artform, a craft. Fromm’s social sculpture is the fulfilling true love that comes from loving all people, and hence also oneself. We can and should sketch our relationships, colour them in and gild them – just like Gustav Klimt in his painting “The Kiss”.
As we stroll through museums or visit a gallery opening, art can always shake us up, cause us to question our own taboos and encourage us to change. We can actively shape art and art history every day – without brushes, without chisels or verses, but simply by loving.
