Kiss 1913

Curator: This is Vsevolod Maksymovych's "Kiss," painted in 1913, an oil on canvas now residing at the National Art Museum of Ukraine. What's your first impression? Editor: Intimacy, but also a slight suffocation. The heavy figures and dense patterning, the restricted color palette… It feels both passionate and claustrophobic. Curator: The artist was working within a cultural moment wrestling with new modes of representing sexuality. Do you see echoes of Klimt or the burgeoning Expressionist movement in the materiality? Editor: Definitely Klimt, but less opulent, less… decorative in the conventional sense. The repetitive circles feel almost industrial. I am wondering about the social and political currents swirling in Kyiv at the time. Art Nouveau ideals were challenged by an increasingly industrialized world. Is the “suffocation” maybe due to socio-political constraint rather than the subject’s love? Curator: Possibly both. It is important to think of the impact of technological advancement on traditional means of art-making here. The use of circles gives the work an almost mass-produced aesthetic—despite the likely deliberate nature of each mark. Editor: And think of the potential tension between portraying genuine human connection versus representing an ideal… whose ideal are we even seeing? Curator: Exactly. Perhaps this approach, and his chosen materials, are making that interrogation possible. Consider, if the patterns surrounding the figures do suggest production, what were Maksymovych’s audience and contemporaries’ relations to production, labor and capital like? Editor: The painting style definitely pulls it away from sentimentality, it poses some distance from the subject’s romance by not painting the lovers too lovingly. Makes me question, does a painting like this shape views on sensuality? How are things like censorship playing a role? I suppose we are bringing a certain cultural lens too. Curator: I think you hit the mark when you say cultural lens: Maksymovych challenges us, even now, to think of our relations to intimacy, production and what both really look like. Editor: Precisely! "The Kiss" isn’t just an intimate moment, but a conversation about the pressures of that moment. I’m walking away with many more questions about its first viewers and their social climate than I thought I would.