“The Kiss” by Constantin Brâncuși to be exhibited at Art Safari Love Edition

The Kiss by famed Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, the first from the famous cycle of works dedicated to love, is on display at Art Safari Love Edition, for only 10 days.

The Kiss, with an insured value of EUR 22 mln, will be transported from the Art Museum Craiova to Bucharest under maximum security conditions by a specialized fine art transport company and will be escorted by the Romanian Gendarmerie. The masterpiece will be continuously guarded at Art Safari.

“This is a premiere for Art Safari, as well as for the capital. On this occasion, Art Safari will have a special visiting schedule, open daily so that the public can admire it in large numbers. They say the first kiss is never forgotten, so we invite you to see it at Art Safari,” Ioana Ciocan, CEO of Art Safari and Romania's commissioner at the Venice Biennale, said.

The Kiss, exhibited at Art Safari and part of the collection of the Art Museum Craiova, was crafted from marble in 1907 and is the first sculpture from the beloved Kiss series that Brâncuși worked on for 40 years. It is one of the most well-known masterpieces of the artist, alongside Sleeping Muse (1908), Prometheus (1911), Mademoiselle Pogany (1913), Newborn (1915), Bird in Space (1919), and The Endless Column (1938). The artwork was sculpted in an apparently simple manner, devoid of anatomical details and capturing the essence of the message.

Brâncuși employed a personal technique of stone carving. The Kiss is more a kiss of gazes than of lips. The visual field of each character includes only the eyes of their partner, an accent of strength expressed through the incredible proximity of the characters' eye sockets. In Brâncuși's Kiss, neither partner dominates the other; there is an equal relationship between them. This can be observed from the perfectly identical dimensions of the two silhouettes, which, in physical terms, express an equivalence of status. Throughout the entire Kiss cycle (1907-1945), Brâncuși even affirmed that women and men are equals.

A version of the Kiss from 1910 serves as a gravestone in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, France, while another version can be seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The masterpiece will be exhibited as part of the "Love Stories" exhibition, created in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, London, and is part of the Romanian art section dedicated to love. Art Safari also displays the love letters between Constantin Brâncuși and his muse, the American dancer Florence Meyer, 35 years his junior. On one of them, Brâncuși even drew a sketch of the Kiss.

For this temporary exhibition, Art Safari has a special visiting schedule: daily, from August 21 to 30, 12:00-21:00, and the usual Night Tours schedule (Friday and Saturday, 22:00-1:00).