Love is the engine of everything. One of the most important poets and playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age, Lope de Vega, already said it: “The root of all passions is love. “Sadness, joy, happiness and despair are born from it.” Therefore, we could not understand Fine Arts without the concept of love, universal and omnipresent. Its strength has served to inspire the works of the greatest artists of all time. Let’s see some examples.
There are many artists who have represented love scenes, kisses in full romantic effervescence, lovers melted in an embrace, in an infinite kiss…, but in the same way unfortunate loves were immortalized, that love that never came, the one that ended, the unrequited and of course, impossible love, “forbidden” love.
And for a famous kiss in the history of art, that of the Austrian Gustav Klimt. Halfway between symbolism and art nouveau, in The Kiss, 1907-1908, the lovers’ bodies, profusely decorated, seem to merge into one. The envelope that kisses the young woman on the cheek that he holds with both hands may represent Klimt himself together with his muse, Emilie, the most important woman in his life.
Klimt painted dozens of nudes of women, constantly changing models. To capture love she uses bright yellows and golds, until then reserved for the religious, like the sweet and golden universe where lovers live when they melt into each other’s embrace.
The surrealist René Magritte, always sharp and ironic, created a fantastic, magical universe where he managed to make it night and day at the same time, magnetic skies covered in clouds. His world, full of images as suggestive as they are disturbing, in “The Lovers” (1928) where two faces covered by white fabrics kiss in profile. An enigmatic work that has always raised questions and not only about the identities of the protagonists but also in relation to those heads covered by white, wet fabrics covering in possible allusion to the trauma of the author who, in his teens, experienced the suicide of his mother. that she jumped into the river one night and her body was found with her head tangled in her nightgown.
Another of the greats of surrealism, Marc Chagall, a French Jew, portrays himself in “The Birthday” (1915) floating happily while kissing his wife, Bella, the love of his life, whom he had just married that same year. Poor thing at that moment, they only had each other, but it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, they had everything. Chagall felt happy, “flying like a balloon” with his bouquet of flowers only to deflate later in front of his beloved.
And further into the 20th century, we come to the popular kiss of the New Yorker, Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), representative of pop art, an artist who, together with Andy Warhol, popularized the art of the everyday. His iconic drawings that look like they came out of a comic with strong, flat colors are his hallmarks. In the 1963 version he appropriated the aesthetics of cartoons, but his style, which seemed simple, was based on complex approaches that he simplified.
“In Bed” (1892) by “Toulouse-Lautrec”, is one of the erotic-themed paintings that Lautrec commissioned and that he painted to decorate one of the most famous brothels in the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre, through which he wandered for a long time. part of his life fleeing from loneliness and depression, his life companions. In this painting two women merge in an embrace, in which more than passion, what they transmit is tenderness, the same that the painter would possess who, despite never finding someone to love him, did find in that environment, inspiration and peace to survive.
Another very popular kiss is that of the Venetian, Francesco Hayez, who in a simple scene, typical of nineteenth-century romanticism, served to represent his country, Italy, at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. What did it symbolize? Because in addition to the evident youthful love of the scene, the painter took the opportunity to make – in 1859 – an allegory of the patriotic love typical of Romanticism and its desire for independence served in the kiss of lovers, using it to highlight it in the clothing of the protagonists, the colors of the Italian and French flags, in clear reference to the Franco-Italian alliance in the year in which Italy supported Napoleon III in the war against the Austro-Hungarian empire, a gesture for which France would help in the unification of Italy.
If there was only one sculpture that represented the embrace of a couple, the kiss of love, that would be the very famous one by Auguste Rodin, as majestic as it is powerful and carnal. It was commissioned by the French state and exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1898. The pair of lovers refers to the story of Paolo and Francesca, characters in Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” Francesca’s husband catches his wife in adultery, kissing his lover, who turns out to be his brother. In an attack of anger he kills the couple, a whole drama that Rodin concentrates with that tension and emotional intensity that characterizes him.
Unhappy loves, Impossible loves, Unrequited loves
The sculptor Camille Claudel, who was first a student, muse and model, and then companion and lover of Rodin, an independent woman who went against the grain of the society in which she lived, molded The Mature Age, a sculptural group composed of three figures that reflects the conflict at the end of a three-way relationship. The body of a mature man lumbers forward while she struggles to let go of his arm from a disconsolate girl (Camille herself) who tries to stop her departure, leaving her imploringly on her knees, discarded by abandonment. A third figure, horrible, old, remains threatening, half-hidden, (Rose Beuret, Rodin’s wife, from whom he never separated), leading away the man (Rodin).
Cervantes’s pertinent phrase comes up now, which is more sarcastic than Lope’s, and with love as the driving force of everything, he launches one of his biting poisoned darts: “love has its glory at the gates of hell.”
A specialist in historical and biblical themes, the British Frederic Leighton in “The Fisherman and the Mermaid” represents a dramatic scene of impossible love very much in the style of the late 19th century. The face of the young man, half asleep or dreaming, ventures his tragic end while the mermaid strives to hug him by the neck, to kiss him and drag him to the depths of the sea. The mermaid’s tail curls around the fisherman’s leg, and his reduced will seems to give in. Let us remember the accurate and cruel Cervantes verse, “love has its glory at the gates of hell.”
The damage caused by unrequited love was also taught through the world of Greco-Roman mythology. This is how Titian shows us in “Venus and Adonis” (1520), a bold composition in which the Italian Renaissance master shows a daring woman, who, even though she is a goddess, throws herself in desperation after her lover, Adonis, who rejects her. without contemplation. A theme of which the Venetian made several versions, such as the one made for Philip II with small changes so that it would not be too daring given the monarch’s religiosity. A naked woman with her back to the viewer showing her buttocks, which was the part of the most erotic female nude at the time, a nude that more than sensuality overflows with eroticism, to which I know another audacity is added, which was to present her taking the initiative in the game. loving, in a last attempt to retain the loved one.
And to finish this brief account, and continuing with Roman mythology, the painful story of Apollo and Daphne that the great baroque master, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, turned into a display of emotion and delicacy. A story that originates when Eros or Cupid (in Roman mythology), tired of Apollo’s arrogance for trying to beat him in the art of shooting arrows, decides to punish him and shoots him with a golden arrow that would make him fall in love with the first person. that he saw That is the nymph Daphne, whom Eros wounds with a lead arrow so that she would feel rejection. Dafne asks for help from her father, the god of the river, and he turns her into a tree, a laurel, in order to save her; Thus, when Apollo tries to touch her, the nymph’s body will turn into a trunk and her head into the top of a tree. From this tragic story comes the fact that the laurel wreath symbolized victory for great men, in honor of his beloved.
Amalia Gonzalez Manjavacas.
EFE / REPORTS
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