Member-only story
What 8 Masterpieces Reveal About Love and Desire
Mysteries and seduction in paintings
Does love make you float with pleasure or plunge with despair? Or does it unfold in more complicated ways?
It’s a question that artists have long entertained and revelled in. They have explored love’s nuances, laying out how our hearts’ exultations and uncertainties arrive and shape us.
One of my favourite paintings about love, The Birthday (1915) by Marc Chagall, offers an unmistakable answer. Painted in his folk Cubist style — off-kilter, purring with colour — it shows two lovers sharing a kiss that is so light and heady that they spontaneously lift off the ground.
The painting arrived after Chagall’s wife, Bella, visited him in his studio on his birthday in 1915, bearing flowers and food — the scene captured in the image. The man’s serpentine body curves through the air, bending into impossible shapes to meet with his beloved’s lips. His airborne contortions seem nothing other than natural, deliberate and utterly desirable.
Oh, but love is rarely so simple. As the English poet Philip James Bailey wistfully reminds us, “The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.”
