May 12, 2012
The Kiss ( 1896 ) - Peter Behrens
This 1898 woodcut by German artist Peter Behrens, “The Kiss,” was published in the arts and literary magazine Pan, printed in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. Pan was largely responsible for popularizing the Jugendstil (or German Art Nouveau) movement. In this iconic colored woodcut, Behrens depicts two lovers engaging in a kiss, with sinuous locks of hair framing their faces. Such undulating lines were recurrent motifs in the Art Nouveau movement, as they refer to the ever-present and sometimes irrational movement within nature. The exaggerated, wavy hair is intertwined as if to suggest the connection and oneness of the two lovers. Art Nouveau artists like Behrens employed such sinuous lines to allude to the natural, erotic and ephemeral.
Behrens’ figures are somewhat androgynous– it’s hard to determine the gender of each lover. But the theme of androgyny was somewhat in vogue at the turn of the century, and many artists and writers associated the androgyne with unbounded creativity and spirituality.
Works like “The Kiss” typify the Art Nouveau tendency toward abstraction and reduction, and the merging of fine art and crafts. Flat, legible and reductive compositions like this slowly made their way into advertisements and interior design. Many Art Nouveau artists, including Behrens, worked in a number of mediums and did not value painting more than architecture or design. In fact, Behrens worked as an architect, designer, and painter throughout his career.
As a woodcut, this work is reproducible, and therefore well-suited for book and magazine illustrations, posters, and color prints. This and many other works created in the Art Nouveau period played a role in the democratization of the arts– reproducible works like this could be enjoyed by a large part of the population.
(Source: pondicusrex)
