Kiss
- Diamond Zhou
- Feb 14
- 13 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
February 14th, 2026
By Diamond Zhou
A Valentine’s edition can afford to be lightly irreverent, but since we are always dealing with sensitive subjects, the kiss also deserves something more durable than seasonal sentiment. In art history it functions like a solvent, dissolving the boundary between the personal and the political, the sacred and the profane, the staged and the involuntary. It is an action so small that it can be mistaken for mere decoration, and so consequential that it can topple reputations, start wars, end them, sanctify marriages, betray messiahs, confirm myths of nationhood, and expose the coercions embedded in celebration. That range is precisely why the motif remains inexhaustible even for the most visually literate audience. The kiss does not become interesting because it is rare; it becomes interesting because it is ordinary, and because ordinary gestures are where cultures store their most stubborn contradictions. Even when mouths never quite touch, the kiss still behaves like an event, it can be promised, interrupted, masked, policed, erased, dispersed, or misinterpreted.
In the fresco cycle of the Scrovegni Chapel, Giotto di Bondone understands that a kiss is an event greater than an act of two people. In The Meeting at the Golden Gate (c. 1305), the kiss between Joachim and Anna is astonishingly calm: the embrace is firm, the faces incline, the hands lay where they must, and the city gate frames the act as both threshold and witness. The figures stand in an intelligible civic space, as if to insist that tenderness can be anchored, that intimacy can belong to the architecture of ordinary life.
The nineteenth century, particularly in Europe, sets the kiss at the border between private feeling and public consequence. Francesco Hayez paints Il bacio (1859) feels plausibly domestic, the embrace plausibly urgent, and then the details give way to a tale of politics: the foot on the stair, the cloak that reads as departure, the sense that a kiss can be both farewell and code, personal and national at once. The work is actually a cornerstone of Italian Romanticism and an allegory for the Risorgimento (Italian unification). Commissioned by Alfonso Maria Visconti di Saliceto, the painting symbolizes the alliance between Italy and France during the Second War of Independence, with the colors of the couple's clothing representing the Italian (red, green, white) and French (blue) flags.
Alfred Eisenstaedt’s VJ Day in Times Square (1945) is the most famous example of a work that became iconic. It shows a sailor impulsively kissing a white-uniformed dental assistant as New York City erupts in celebration of Japan’s surrender and the end of the Second World War. First published in Life magazine, the unposed photograph came to embody the country’s collective elation and release, even though the pair were strangers. Yet the picture’s afterlife now includes a necessary argument about consent, about what the camera can aestheticize, and about what a culture once felt permitted to interpret as romance. The image has been debated not only in essays and classrooms but in public policy contexts, because icons are never merely images; they are a kind of social property.
If the state once relied on certain kisses to symbolize victory, street art later learned to rely on kisses to expose the state’s contradictions. Created in 2004, Banksy’s Kissing Coppers is an iconic stencil mural showing two uniformed British police officers sharing a kiss. First painted on the Prince Albert pub in Brighton, England, it delivers a sharp, playful provocation about sexuality, power, and LGBTQ+ rights, drawing on the city’s reputation as a progressive, queer-friendly centre. The piece acquired a second narrative when the original mural was repeatedly vandalised and eventually removed; the image migrated from public wall to art market circuitry.
Political kisses are rarely polite, but mythic kisses are rarely innocent. The classical tradition gives art history a vocabulary for kisses that operate as thresholds between death and life, stone and flesh, divine and human. Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1787–1793) stages the kiss not as contact but as suspense: the lips hover in a moment stretched almost beyond physiology, and the marble behaves as if it were warm. The kiss here is a technology of revival, an instrument of transformation, yet it is also a compositional device, allowing the sculptor to bind two bodies into a single spiraling rhythm that the viewer reads as both erotic and salvific.
A few generations later, Jean-Léon Gérôme paints Pygmalion and Galatea at a different threshold. The kiss is felt even when it is not fully shown, as sculpture becomes woman, the studio becomes theatre, and desire becomes a claim of authorship. The myth is not only about love, but about control disguised as devotion: the artist’s fantasy of creating a body that cannot refuse the touch that made it. The quieter story lies in what is smoothed over, the kiss presented as proof of creation, rather than a shared act.
Even in explicitly erotic myth, the kiss can be displaced into atmosphere. Antonio da Correggio’s Jupiter and Io (c. 1532–33) is a painting of contact that almost erases the mechanics of contact: bodies dissolve into smoke, the god is less a figure than a force, and the woman’s face registers not narrative clarity but bodily overwhelm. This is a kiss by proxy, a kiss as engulfment, where the mouth is not a focal point because the entire scene behaves like a mouth.
The nineteenth century, which loved myth, also loved stolen kisses, kisses taken as narrative trophies. The Stolen Kiss (French: Le Baiser à la dérobée), painted around 1787–1789, is a celebrated late Rococo work by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806). It captures a brief, clandestine exchange between two young lovers, reflecting the era’s theatricality, sensuality, and the cultivated tastes of the French aristocracy on the eve of the French Revolution. The picture’s pleasure is inseparable from the choreography of secrecy and surveillance, from the sense that the kiss is valuable precisely because it occurs while someone else is nearby and not looking.
Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss (conceived c. 1882) carries its own concealed origin. It was first conceived as Paolo and Francesca, a pair borrowed (again from Dante’s Divine Comedy: discovered in the instant of their first kiss and killed by Francesca’s husband, the lovers are damned to drift through Hell for eternity. Designed early in the planning of The Gates, the group was originally placed prominently on the lower left door, facing Ugolino, until 1886, when Rodin decided that its warmth and sensuality clashed with the larger project’s bleak subject. He separated the figures into an autonomous sculpture and exhibited it in 1887, where its sleek, flowing modelling, energetic composition, and irresistibly appealing theme made it an immediate public success. With no narrative details to pin the lovers to a specific story, viewers simply named it The Kiss, a title whose very abstraction suited its universal pull.
With Constantin Brâncuși, the kiss becomes a problem of reduction: how little can be shown while remaining unmistakable. In The Kiss (1916), the bodies compress into a block, and the kiss is no longer a romantic climax but a structural seam, a joining that holds the sculpture together. The motif survives abstraction because the kiss, as a sign, is already abstract: it is one of the few gestures that can be simplified without losing its recognition.
Gustav Klimt’s Der Kuss (The Kiss), painted in 1907–1908, is the defining work of his “Golden Phase” and an emblem of romantic intimacy within the Vienna Secession. Drawing on the visual language of Byzantine mosaics, it combines oil paint and gold leaf on canvas to show a couple locked in an embrace, often identified as Klimt and his companion Emilie Flöge, set against a flowered meadow. The work is beloved precisely because it appears to resolve everything: gold, ornament, devotion, eroticism, the world held inside a single square.
In The Lovers (1928), cloth interrupts contact, and the kiss becomes an impossible insistence: mouths press where mouths cannot meet. This is not simply surreal provocation; it is a statement about the distance that desire cannot dissolve, about how intimacy can be staged while remaining fundamentally unknowable. Although the work is often connected to Magritte’s childhood experience of his mother’s death by drowning, he resisted straightforward psychoanalytic readings, insisting instead on the primacy of mystery.
A kiss can also be made to feel mechanical, not by cloth but by reproduction. Man Ray’s rayograph titled Rayograph (1922), often associated with the “kiss” motif in his experimental photograms, turns contact into trace. The kiss, in this register, is less an exchange between people than an imprint left by bodies on light sensitive paper. It is intimacy translated into process: a private act made legible through technique, with all the eroticism of touch and all the impersonality of chemistry.
The Surrealists understood that the kiss could be both erotic and ominous, and Max Ernst’s Le Baiser (The Kiss) (1927) is a Surrealist painting that revels in uninhibited, almost unruly sexuality, shaped in part by his intense relationship with Marie-Berthe Aurenche. The work shows entwined, distorted bodies formed through chance procedures such as dropped-string drawings, then methodically translated onto the canvas using a gridded transfer. In this work, the kiss stops functioning as an emblem of union and starts functioning as a symptom: of compulsion, of fantasy, of the mind’s ability to turn tenderness into something darker without changing the basic gesture.
Domestic interiors bring the motif back down to earth, but earth is never neutral. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Au lit: le baiser (1892) is frank without being crude. The bed is an environment with its own economy of fatigue, repetition, and negotiated closeness. In the brothel context he knew intimately, a kiss can be affection, and it can also be labour, and it can also be a rare moment in which the labouring body reasserts its own desire.
Félix Vallotton, by contrast, paints the kiss under the pressure of bourgeois silence. In Intimate Couple in an Interior(1898), the room itself seems to listen in silence. The kiss is folded into a larger mood of secrecy and containment, a reminder that social respectability is often built on the careful management of private acts. Vallotton’s genius is to make the kiss feel less like release than like complicity.
In Edvard Munch, the kiss frequently becomes a site of dissolution. In Kiss by the Window (1892), faces blur, bodies merge, the outside world presses in as reflection and darkness. Later, in The Kiss (1897), the motif intensifies into near annihilation: two figures fuse into a single shadowed mass. Here, the kiss is not a promise of union so much as a loss of boundary, an act that can be read as yearning or as erasure depending on the viewer’s appetite for romantic risk.
When the kiss enters Pop and becomes louder. Roy Lichtenstein’s Kiss V (1964) renders the act as an explosion of graphic language: stylized lips, stylized emotion, the kiss packaged as a consumable drama. This becomes a diagnosis of how modern culture trains its audience to feel, quickly and recognisably, on cue. A kiss, in this register, is a brand of intensity, as standardized as typeface.
Pablo Picasso’s The Kiss (1967), in graphite, offers a kiss as contortion: faces collide, features press into one another, and the act reads as both comic and brutal. Picasso does not grant the viewer a stable emotional footing. The kiss is not necessarily tender, and that ambiguity is the point: closeness can be love, it can be appetite, it can be domination.
If modern painting can turn the kiss into a formal problem, modern photography can turn it into public myth. Robert Doisneau’s Le baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville (1950) became famous decades after it was taken, in the era of posters and dorm room romance. The work’s later controversy, including the revelation that it was staged with models, does not diminish its charm so much as clarify its function. It offers a kiss that belongs to the idea of Paris more than to any particular couple, which is precisely why it could become a global emblem of romance.
Elliott Erwitt’s California Kiss (1955) performs a related operation with a different flavour: the kiss is framed through a car window, Hollywood in the background, glamour and privacy mutually teasing. Erwitt’s gift is to make the kiss feel both candid and perfectly timed, as if the world itself had conspired to produce a single wry, sunlit sentence about desire and spectacle.
Not all kisses in art history are erotic. Mary Cassatt’s Mother and Child (The Goodnight Hug) (1880) treats the kiss as care, and the intimacy is not performed for an audience, it is organised around the daily seriousness of attachment. The kiss, here, does not announce itself as an event, it is a practice and love, repeated until it becomes the texture of a life.
Julia Margaret Cameron’s The Kiss of Peace (1869) moves in another direction, using the kiss as moral image. Cameron’s soft focus is not an escape from meaning but a way of pressing the scene toward reverence. The kiss becomes a sacrament of reconciliation, an emblem of what the social world ought to be. In a century that often used women and children as carriers of virtue, Cameron’s photograph is also a reminder that the kiss can be assigned, rhetorically, to innocence, thereby making it a tool for instruction as much as affection.
Marlene Dumas’s The Kiss (2003) returns to paint’s capacity for psychic ambiguity. Dumas does not treat kissing as a stable sign of romance, she treats it as a condition that can look like longing, hunger, grief, or exhaustion. The kiss becomes a smear of intimacy, a blur between tenderness and need.
Finally, the kiss can expand beyond the scale of bodies altogether and become civic image again. El mundo nace en cada beso (2014), by Joan Fontcuberta and Antoni Cumella, is a photomosaic made of thousands of small images contributed by citizens, assembled into a monumental kiss in Barcelona. From afar, it is a kiss that belongs to everyone and no one; up close, it dissolves into many private moments, each with its own context, its own risk, its own claim to freedom. This is the kiss as archive, the kiss as public surface built out of personal fragments. The work offers a tidy rejoinder to any attempt to treat “the kiss” as a single theme with a single meaning. In reality, the kiss is an infrastructure: it links bodies to histories, lovers to laws, devotion to betrayal, care to spectacle. It is endlessly legible because it is endlessly unstable.
The most sophisticated images of kissing do not ask viewers to choose a single reading. They allow the act to remain what it often is in life: an unstable negotiation conducted at the edge of language. In one century, the kiss is the seal on a clandestine message; in another, it is the merchandise of romance; in another, it is a sacrament; in another, it is evidence in an argument about consent and public display. Artists return to it because it is never merely about love, and never merely about sex, and never merely about the body. It is about the social meaning of closeness, and closeness is the one subject history never stops rewriting.
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