Ten Kisses (October Special)

Khajuraho Temple, India (c. 9-10th C. AD)

"Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last." Remy de Gourmont

Bronzino - Venus, Cupid and Time (1545)

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous." Ingrid Bergman

Kitagawa Utamaro - Lovers (1788)

"A man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves." Albert Einstein

Jean Fragonard - Stolen Kiss (c. 1788)

"That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow." George Eliot

Edvard Munch - Kiss (1895)

"May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air!" Franz Kafka

Auguste Rodin - The Kiss (1896)

"The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer." Oliver Wendell Holmes

Gustav Klimt - The Kiss (1907-8)

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul." Marilyn Monroe

Max Ernst - Une Semaine de Bonte (1934)

"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil." Victor Hugo

Roy Lichtenstein - Kiss V (1964)

"Before you find your prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs." Anon

Amelie - d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet (2001)


Kiss (lyrics) by Prince

U don’t have 2 be beautiful
2 turn me on
I just need your body baby
From dusk till dawn
U don’t need experience
2 turn me out
U just leave it all up 2 me
I’m gonna show u what it’s all about

U don’t have 2 be rich
2 be my girl
U don’t have 2 be cool
2 rule my world
Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your

Kiss

U got to not talk dirty, baby
If u wanna impress me
U can’t be 2 flirty, mama
I know how 2 undress me (yeah)
I want 2 be your fantasy
Maybe u could be mine
U just leave it all up to me
We could have a good time

U don’t have 2 be rich
2 be my girl
U don’t have 2 be cool
2 rule my world
Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your

Kiss

Yes
I think I wanna dance
Gotta, gotta
Little girl wendy’s parade
Gotta, gotta, gotta

Women not girls rule my world
I said they rule my world
Act your age, mama (not your shoe size)
Not your shoe size
Maybe we could do the twirl
U don’t have 2 watch dynasty
2 have an attitude
U just leave it all up 2 me
My love will be your food
Yeah

U don’t have 2 be rich
2 be my girl
U don’t have 2 be cool
2 rule my world
Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with
I just want your extra time and your

Kiss

Flesh And Fantasy: Part One

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) - The Bather, 1808

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Roland Barthes

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

John Berger

Just because we're sisters under the skin doesn't mean we've got much in common.

Angela Carter

Resources

Ingres' Character and Personality (Grove Art Online):

Ingres was the staunchest, most conservative defender of the classical tradition, preaching an inflexible, if sometimes contradictory, doctrine of ideal beauty and the absolute supremacy of line and pure form over colour and emotion. He described himself as generally affable but with a ‘white hot’ temper if he felt himself wronged. His personality, like his art, was marked by a preference for the order of a familiar universe. He adjusted slowly to changes in daily habits and remained the worst sort of provincial traveller, comparing everything that was new to him unfavourably with the home equivalent.

According to Charles Blanc, Ingres’s friend and biographer, ‘Here was a man for whom invention was painful, but who bent his faults by a prodigious love of the beautiful’. In times of stress, Ingres was likely to react with a whole variety of physical symptoms, for example boils and atrocious headaches during the last few months of 1833, while he was working on the Apotheosis of Homer. There were times, however, when the pleasures of work were sweeter than ever before: ‘Every day I am shut away in my studio from morning to night. I am love struck by painting, I don’t possess it, it possesses me’. He was not at all the 19th-century bohemian artist; he loved every bourgeois comfort and expected his wife to look after his domestic needs.

In a letter of 7 July 1862 to Hippolyte Fockedey Victor Mettez described ‘le Père Ingres’ as ‘choleric, impatient, obstinate, good, naive, righteous, lazy . . . by moments eloquent and sublime...an incredible mélange’. This ‘mélange’ was echoed in an intimate sketch of Ingres by the composer Charles Gounod: ‘He had an enthusiasm which sometimes approached eloquence. He had the tenderness of a child and the indignations of an apostle. He was naive and sensitive. He was sincerely humble before the great masters, but fiercely proud of his own accomplishments’ (Mémoires d’un artiste, Paris, 1896).

Ingres’s passions for music (Gluck, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven), for literature (Plutarch, Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Vasari) and the visual arts (Raphael and Michelangelo) were deep and lifelong. His friends were friends for life, unless they crossed him, and nothing pleased him more than his favourite music in the company of a select circle of friends. As a student, he was seen as too serious, intolerant of the usual studio antics; as a teacher, although he often acted as a father figure to his favourite students, he brooked no opposition: ‘Discussion was, unfortunately, not possible with M. Ingres’. And M. Ingres he remained, even to his family and closest friends.

More images by this artist can be accessed at:

http://www.wga.hu/index1.html

Reading:

Ways of Seeing - John Berger

The Female Nude - Linda Nead

Visual and Other Pleasures - Laura Mulvey