Modern Couples explores how creative couples reshaped modern art and redefined ideas of gender and love in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Romantic Gestures of 7 Famous Artist Couples
Art has long been inspired by great romances and lovers turned muses (or vice versa), so it’s no surprise that artist couples have gone to great lengths to communicate their love. On the occasion of the forthcoming bookThe Art of Love: The Romantic Pairings Behind the World’s Greatest Artworks, we share the ambitious romantic gestures of seven influential artist couples.
Auguste Rodin
Le Baiser (The Kiss), ca. 1886
Musée Rodin, Paris
Camille Claudel
Bust of Rodin, ca. 1889
Museo Soumaya
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Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel fell in love hard and fast when they met in 1882. She was a wunderkind sculptor with a knack for channeling the virile energy of the human body into clay; he was 24 years her senior and already famous for his towering, deftly hewn sculptures. Their letters reveal the fierce passion and extreme volatility that marked their relationship. “In a single instant I feel your terrible force,” Rodin wrote to Claudel the same year they met. “Atrocious madness, it’s the end. I won’t be able to work anymore…yet I love you furiously.”
During their affair (Rodin was already in a 20-year-long relationship with Rose Beuret), the two artists deeply influenced each other’s work. Claudel’s sculptures exuded humanity and sensuality, which Rodin gleaned during the years they worked side-by-side in his Paris studio. Scholars have conjectured that the rapturous, intertwined figures in two of Rodin’s most celebrated pieces—The Kiss (1882) and Eternal Idol (1890–93)—were inspired by his love for Claudel and her expert handling of clay.
Pablo Picasso presented Dora Maar with a miniature painting on a ring
Pablo Picasso
Portrait de Dora Maar (Portrait of Dora Maar), 1937
“Picasso-Giacometti” at Musée Picasso Paris, Paris
Pablo Picasso, ring with a portrait of one of Picasso’s muses, Dora Maar, late 1930s. Photo by Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images.
Pablo Picasso is notorious for being a womanizer and philanderer who swiftly moved from muse to muse. A heady mix of passion, altercation, and short-lived reconciliation defined most of his relationships, including his nine-year liaison with Surrealist photographer Dora Maar. The two met in 1936 at the famed Parisian café Les Deux Magots. She was plunging a knife repeatedly between the fingers of her gloved hands; he was enthralled by her dangerous game and left with her gloves as a memento.
Picasso painted Maar many times during their fiery romance, and often gifted the works to her after particularly angry rows. One such olive branch came in the form of ring. Where a gem would normally reside, Picasso nestled a small rendering of Maar, complete with wide, lopsided eyes and a blue striped chemise. Though the relationship went up in flames when Picasso left her for the younger Françoise Gilot in the early 1940s, Maar kept the ring until her death.
Frida Kahlo painted a sensual flower for Nickolas Muray
Nickolas Muray
Frida Kahlo With Magenta Rebozo, “Classic” (2nd Edition), 1939
Matthew Liu Fine Arts
Price on request
Nickolas Muray
Frida Kahlo, The Breton Portrait, 1939
Matthew Liu Fine Arts
Price on request
Frida Kahlo had many lovers during her turbulent marriage to Diego Rivera, but Nickolas Muray was one of the most enduring. Muray, a New York–based photographer, met Kahlo during his trip to Mexico City in 1931. A note from Kahlo scrawled on a doily immortalizes the first days of their passionate affair: “I love you like I would love an angel,” she wrote to him. “You are a [lLilly] of the valley my love.”
In their extensive correspondence, Kahlo affectionately signed letters with the nickname Xochitl, after a Nahuatl word for “flower” or “delicate thing.” In 1938, she gave Muray a painting of a flower, which has been interpreted by scholars as a creative representation of their relationship. The small canvas radiates with innuendo. Kahlo composed the flower as two unified parts: a bell-shaped vessel resembling a vagina and a phallic bundle of petals nestled within it.
ART & INTIMACY
What is intimacy? Is it Love? Sex? Sometimes, but It is not only those things. It can be expressed in many ways, and the visual arts are the perfect window to reveal [the] intimacy in contemporary society. Through art, it is possible to both analyze and gain a better understanding of this complex concept, such as when a talented artist is truly able to channel the sensation of intimacy from an innate feeling or emotion into visual expression. The truly tuned-in artist ‘speaks’ from a personal perspective that captures these intimate moments of inspiration and illuminates their universality for the world. These last few months, we’ve all been forced to be a little more intimate with ourselves/homes/families due to the global lockdowns, restrictions and uncertainty. These experiences have been an inflexion point in the creative development of artists and a source of inspiration that the art-loving public to which we are now privy.
To illustrate the different approaches of intimacy, we have selected four unique artists: Betsy Podlach, Buket Savci, John Mazlish and Jason Hatfield, each with unique ways of expressing intimacy. (All four artists have participated in several SeeMe competitions and have been selected due to the force their artwork conveys).
The term intimacy has its origins in the Latin words “intimus, intimare, intimatus”, which mean to impress, make familiar or have an affectionate personal relationship. By definition, the word intimacy implies a feeling of closeness to another person and/or acknowledgement of another person, in general it involves two or more parties, but an individual can also be intimate with itself – not in a physical way. Therefore, we must think about it as a deep connection between two subjects involving consciousness, acceptance, appreciation and compassion. Intimacy comes with time, the sum of experiences carries out these intimate moments.
The concept of intimacy has evolved, and though some individuals tend to think of intimacy with sexual overtones, sex is only one way of initiating an intimate moment.
The main type of intimacy encompasses familiarity and caring, which can also develop into deeper feelings and attachment, such as love. It is in those details of caring that a person can build deep and memorable moments. John Mazlish, a natural adventurer, seeks to reveal unique fleeting moments in life. His photograph, “Joy”, below represents an intimate moment between two individuals – Mazlish captures familiarity, caring, and trust rendered timeless and universal through black and white treatment.
Physical or experiential intimacy shares a blurred line with emotional intimacy as sometimes demonstrations of love come with shared experiences. Physical intimacy is developed when the subjects are involved in activities together such as walking together, painting, or sex; however, this association is not always a sufficient condition to ensure a moment of intimacy, as for example, one of the persons involved does not consider this moment meaningful.
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PaJaMa, “Margaret French, George Tooker and Jared French, Nantucket” (c. 1946), collection Jack Shear (image courtesy of Gitterman Gallery, New York)
LONDON — When Lee Miller broke off her three-year relationship with Man Ray in 1932, Man Ray reacted by making a series of sadistic, voodoo-like works. “Indestructible Object” (1933), for instance, featured a sultry black-and-white close-up photograph of Miller’s eye stuck to the top of a metronome’s pendulum. On its first showing, Man Ray invited the public to smash it with a hammer.
The Miller and Man Ray relationship is just one example of the 40 relationships included in the Barbican Centre’s rich, sometimes sprawling exhibition Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy, and the avant-garde, which explores how creative couples — whether romantic, platonic, unconventional, life-long, or fleeting — reshaped modern art and redefined ideas of gender and love in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí in Cadaqués, 1927 (courtesy of Foundation García Lorca)
Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, who were together for 10 years, beginning in 1882, are the first relationship to be featured. Claudel was Rodin’s pupil before she became his lover and muse; desire was at the center of their work. Delicate clay maquettes of entwined bodies — made by both artists side-by-side in their studio — went on to inspire Rodin’s “The Kiss.” In between the maquettes are some revealing letters about their relationship. In one, from 1886, Rodin addresses Claudel as “My savage sweetheart.” In another, dated four years later, Claudel signs off a letter to Rodin with “All my love, Camille. Please don’t be unfaithful to me anymore.” Watching over this display case are two busts of the artists: In Rodin’s modest sculpture “Mask of Camille Claudel” (c. 1989), made from white plaster, Claudel’s hair is scraped back and tied in tight braids above her ears. Her head is slightly tilted and her eyes look away from the viewer. Rodin has left in the join lines from the casting process on her face, perhaps demonstrating her potential to shatter, or his role as god-like creator. Claudel’s red plaster “Portrait of Rodin” (1888–9) is bigger, though no less intimate. Beyond the chiselled cheekbones, outlined by a rough beard, you can see wrinkles across his forehead and beneath his eyes.
Dora Maar, “Picasso en Minotaure, Mougins” (1937), Paris, Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art modern – Centre de creation industrielle (© ADAGP, Paris Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat)
Another erotic dialogue — between the Brazilian artist Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp, whose affair lasted from 1943 until Martins returned to Brazil with her husband in 1951 — is in the same room. Duchamp’s striking bronze and plaster casts of Martins’s body look like ergonomic, hand-sized stress toys. For example, “Not a Shoe” (1950), which is an imprint of Martins’s anus, is a small, bulbous boot-shape. “The Wedge of Chastity” (1954), a negative of her vagina, is a concave shape nestled into flesh-coloured dental plastic. (Duchamp later gave it as a wedding present to his wife, Alexina Matisse.) Martins’s bronze sculpture “Le Couple” (1944), meanwhile, depicts a man and woman enveloped in plant-like tendrils sprouting from their arms and the ground. Their hips are pulling away from each other, but their arms are locked in an embrace. From one angle, the whole sculpture takes the form of female genitals.
Other highlights in the show include Oskar Kokoschka’s tragic obsession with Alma Mahler, who was “one of the most charismatic and dazzling figures of European artistic and cultural life”, the curator’s write in the accompanying catalogue. After the death of her first husband, composer Gustav Mahler, in 1911, Alma had several partners, including Kokoschka. “Never before had I savoured such convulsion, such hell, such paradise,” she said of their three-year relationship (quoted in the catalogue). Increasingly intolerant to Kokoschka’s consuming passion and jealousy, she reconnected with her former lover, architect Walter Gropius. Kokoschka was bereft; he sent Alma seven paper fans (three are on display here), which he covered with exquisite watercolor illustrations. In the corner of one, he paints himself as a knight on a horse, spearing through the chest of a beast standing behind Alma, who is depicted as a medieval maiden cradling a similar beast in her arms. Kokoschka also commissioned a life-sized version of Alma, with skin made from fur, by the Viennese doll-maker Hermine Moos. A few of Kokoschka’s black-and-white photographs, displayed on the wall, picture this doll in strange portrait set-ups, such as reclining naked on a sofa, like Titian’s “Venus of Urbino.”
Auguste Rodin, “Mask of Camille Claudel” (1889) (image courtesy Musée Rodin, Paris)
Not all relationships were so tragic. Within a room based on André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto Mad Love (1937), there is the intriguing, politically charged artwork by Jindřich Štyrský and Toyen, who spent their lives collaborating and exhibiting together. They founded the Czech Surrealist Group in 1934, which challenged aesthetic and moral constraints, and subverted gender expectations (Toyen, born Maria Cerminova, chose her pseudonym from the French word “citoyen”). One stand-out charcoal and pencil drawing by Štyrský from 1940 features two serpents morphing from a pair of human breasts (it is unclear whether they are men’s or women’s). For his collage portrait “The Travelling Cabinet” (1934), the face is made from an image of a red boxing glove, which is shrouded in black, chin-length hair. Toyen’s delicate watercolour illustration, “Young Girl who Dreams” (1930), portrays a woman asleep on a sofa, naked apart from an unbuttoned blue cardigan. Inside the comic-strip-style thought bubbles encircling her head are penises.
Around the same time in America, Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French formed the artistic collective PaJaMa. All three met at the Art Students League of New York. Paul and Jared were lovers; after Jared married Margaret, he continued his sexual relationship with Paul. A few of their co-authored black-and-white photographs are on view, many of which stage arresting, sometimes homoerotic beach scenes. (These photos were originally circulated among friends, and were only made public in the 1980s.) In one, three mostly naked men are arranged in a triangle around a wooden cruciform sculpture. Two of the men twist their bodies away from the cross, whereas one, wearing a yarmulke with a triangular pattern, lies on his stomach, staring intensely at it. Though the caption tells us that the image was taken in Provincetown in 1947, it transcends any sense of time and place.
PaJaMa George Platt Lynes, Stoneblossom, c. 1941 Collection Jack Shear
Throughout the exhibition, the curators foreground women. Dora Maar looked to Pablo Picasso as a muse, for instance, just as much as he looked to her. In their shared room, her powerful, experimental photos dwarf his work. Several intriguing photos by Maar show Picasso wearing swimming trunks on a beach in the south of France in the late 1930s, his face often obscured by driftwood sculptures or animal skulls. It turns out, too, that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Barcelona Chair was a joint creation in 1929 with his design partner, Lilly Reich. A wall text quotes him as saying of Reich, “Her intellect was like a beacon, which lit up my emotional chaos. She taught me to think.” A shame, then, that the wall caption next to the chair on display contains his name alone.
The show’s vast scale is both its strength and weakness: over 80 people working in various media and genres of art are represented — Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt, Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay, Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, among them — which means that some appearances are cursory. Its overall message about collaboration, though, is important. As Federico García Lorca put it in “Ode to Salvador Dalí” (1928):
But above all I sing a common thought
that joins us in the dark and golden hours.
The light that blinds our eyes is not art.
Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.
Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy, and the Avant-garde continues at the Barbican Centre (Silk Street, London, UK) through January 27, 2019.
