Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 9, 1992 TAG: 9202070092
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOAN BRUNSKILL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
AN OLD STORY TOLD AS ART
It would be an oversimplification to say that secular love arrived in Western painting with Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" (now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence), some time after 1482.Let's say it, anyway - it's a graceful welcome to the goddess of love in a Valentine's Day story.
As galleries of Old Master paintings and later works show, since then painters have not been shy of showing the human figure, especially female, romantically unclothed. And that led inevitably to the complementary presence of the male figure. The two get together. It's an old story and now it could be told as Art.
The first owner of Titian's ravishing "Venus" (1538) referred to the painting simply as "the nude woman," so they say.
In the "Jewish Bride" of 1665 Rembrandt achieves his usual miracle. In this work, every angle in the tender pose and attitudes of a heavily and stiffly clothed couple emphasizes their love for each other.
In the works of many artists in earlier times, human dalliance was given both glamour and respectability by being presented in the guise of divine or mythic passion. Nymphs and satyrs gambol and romp through the ancient world. Endless seduction scenes, often gods visiting their charms gently or ungently on humans, have been the excuse for covering acres of canvas with gorgeous color and sumptuous brushwork.
Paintings became fertile breeding grounds for innumerable floating families of rosy and dimpled putti - those baby Cupid figures that defy laws of gravity and often any kind of seriousness at all, on close inspection.
They were special favorites in rococo art. Boucher sums it up in "Jupiter in the Guise of Diana Seducing Callisto," 1759, showing the romantic pair, plus plenty of putti.
The putti were still gleefully in the picture for Cabanel's "Birth of Venus," in 1863, sans seashell.
And on through the ages . . .
Sculptors engaged in energetic parallel exploration of the visually attractive imperative of the love thing.
There's Canova's chaste white marble feigning classic cool but ending up as "Cupid and Psyche" (1783-1793), a warmly sexy couple giving a glow to a corner of the Louvre.
At the other end of the stylistic seesaw is the textured granite of Brancusi's endearingly understated early 20th-century "The Kiss" - he produced several versions.
In between came the heroic Rodin, whose bronze and marble interpretations of "The Kiss" stand for a whole period of say-it-loud-and-clear expressiveness.
Moving toward more recent times, Klimt several times painted a decorative "Kiss," with his slightly decadent air. Even Edvard Munch - notwithstanding "The Scream" - portrayed an entwined couple that was his vision of "The Kiss."
Picasso's "Les Amoureux" in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., is sweetly romantic, but that was 1923, an early work. He went on to create innumerable ferociously energetic variations on the theme, of course.
Postmodern art prefers irony and enigma.
A recent take on the ancient story by Dennis Oppenheim, 1991, is called "Kiss." There its resemblance to previous art ends.
It's a large, freestanding construction, installed in a show at P.S. 1 Museum, Long Island City, N.Y. It consists of two circular cage shapes joined by two tires, pouty and liplike. Inside the cages are live birds: six white doves in one, six black pigeons in the other.
New York magazine's art critic felt its "hints of Duchamp and Brancusi, of empty-headed couples, of antagonisms between the sexes give `Kiss' a vampire's bite."