​Let’s end with as much heat as we can! Embrace, a 7-story hollow wooden sculpture, took most of a year to build. It was designed by Matthew Schultz and executed by the Pier Group, “a diverse community of artists, engineers, and free thinkers,” at the 2014 Burning Man festival in the remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Roughly 67,000 people attended. Inside each figure was a large fiberglass heart. Yes, at least two firefighters are present and visible, down right. When ignited at dawn, flames shot out of the eyes and head almost immediately, as you see here. Embrace burned completely, as intended.

                                     I have so enjoyed your insightful comments. Many thanks!
 
                                                So long for now from The Art of Love,
                                                                 art for the heart.
                                                          See you in 2026, I hope.
                                                   Happy Valentine’s Day, Everyone!

Born of sea foam and the severed testicles of the god Uranus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty arrives at the island of Cyprus in The Birth of Venus, c. 1485. Above fly Zephyrus and Chloris, blowing roses. To her other side, the Hora (Hour) of Spring, a minor goddess, races to cloak her. Painted by Botticelli (probably as a wedding picture for a Medici bedroom) he chose as his model one Simonetta Vespucci, a local celebrity for her beauty. But how would Botticelli dare show her nude? A hanging art history question…. It was said that she and Giuliano (Lorenzo TM’s handsome brother) were lovers. Sadly, Simonetta died at 23 of TB. On exactly the same day two years later, Pazzi assassins dispatched Giuliano in the Duomo during Sunday Mass, stabbing him 19 times.

I suppose this image was inevitable….sooner or later? Believed to be the work of the irrepressible, invisible street artist Banksy, Mobile Lovers appeared in a darkened doorway in an old stone wall in Bristol, England in 2014. For over 20 years, with stencil and spray paint, Banksy has challenged society in the UK and around the world, including Gaza and Jamaica, with his art. The nearby Broad Plain Boys’ Club, a charity, quickly removed the door, and with a sale to a local philanthropist of $670,000 (American) managed to endow the club handsomely.  

Now, don’t we know these two are having a LOVEly time on their picnic by how brilliantly they appear? French artist Niki de Saint Phalle was well-known for her large, buoyant figures. (She may be most famous for her 82 foot, pregnant, reclining SHE – a Cathedral, 1966, shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Visitors entered through a 6’ vaginal opening.) Here in this duo from The Tarot Garden, 1968, the self-taught sculptor once again presents a powerful figure of an exuberant woman. She is enjoying life to the fullest with, as one critic puts it, her characteristically “gleeful eroticism.” When you visit the sprawling garden in Capalbio, Tuscany, you will find numerous enormous figures like SHE to walk right into, covered with colorful mosaic tiles and towering over this couple. Send us  a selfie, of course...!

​Frida Kahlo’s father described the 1929 marriage of Diego Rivera and his daughter as “the unlikely union of an elephant and a dove.” Rivera stood over 6 feet and weighed 300 pounds; Kahlo was 5’3” and less than 100 pounds. It was art that brought them together in 1922, when Rivera worked on his "Creation" mural at her school. She was 15, he 35. A friend, art historian Luís Cardoza y Aragón, described them as “two volcanoes.” Kahlo once said, “I had two grave accidents in my life: a streetcar knocked me down, [and] the other accident was Diego.” They separated in 1935, divorced (both had many affairs) in 1939, but remarried in 1940. Amor vincit omnia? (Martin Munkacsi photo, 1934.)

​French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois fashioned this Couple, hanging in Eskelun Park, Oslo, in 2003 from cast aluminum. It was just one of many Couples she made over the years, exploring the relationship of lovers. What is close? Too close? Not close enough? With care you can see the arms (the legs are easy) but not the faces. Perhaps these two stand for EveryCouple. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art said of this work: “Bourgeois suffered from a lifelong fear of separation and abandonment…her suspended sculptures, [with] the capacity to spin in opposite directions, exist in a perpetual state of fragility and ambivalence.”
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Special Note: Yesterday Vic Henningsen wrote in from Vermont with a personal reminiscence about Leyendecker. Thank you, Vic! “I had to smile at today’s image.  Leyendecker was one of many illustrators….who lived near the shore of Long Island Sound in the Mount Tom neighborhood of New Rochelle and Pelham Manor, New York, where I grew up.  When Leyendecker died in 1951, his estate was something of a mess and his house, studio and grounds were purchased for a song by another artist, the not-well-known Molly Guion, who in turn leased it to a pre-school, which I attended from 1953 – 1955.  The studio was the center of all of the pre-school action, and I have vivid memories of playing there amid Leyendecker’s props (Greek and Roman helmets, all sorts of other headgear, swords, spears, and who knows what else)….Lots of dark corners, velvet-covered furniture, riding apparel – the odd polo stick – and the like.”

Here an intimate gaze between two striking, elegantly dressed men at a fancy affair may bring them even closer as the evening wears on. The 1911 painting is in fact a magazine ad for Cluett Dress Shirts. Between 1895 and 1951 the artist, J. C. Leyendecker, revolutionized magazine illustration and advertising. With his partner and favorite model Charles Beach, he produced the stylized “Leyendecker Man:” impossibly handsome, groomed, fit, sexy, well-dressed (--and white.) Creator of the famous “Arrow Collar Man,” Leyendecker also mentored Norman Rockwell, produced 322 Saturday Evening Post covers, and made numerous images of college football heroes, muscular oarsmen, and swells in boaters. The “collegiate look” was all the rage for a while. His secret recipe of oil and turpentine allowed him to work with great speed. 

​Who says an Abstract Expressionist painter can’t portray the art of love? A major figure represented in numerous museums internationally, Helen Frankenthaler shows off her “soak-stain” technique here in Flirt (1995). Washes of paint on unprimed canvas, it elaborates on Jackson Pollock’s “floor painting” style. The pink background, boosted with tangerine and plum, suggests the warm frisson of a romantic play.  The soft, fragile edges may reflect its transience: a flirt, of course, hasn't the duration of either an “affair” or a “relationship.” However, although briefer and lighter, a flirt may, like this work, be fun, surprising, even memorable. "...did my heart fly to your service." (W. Shakespeare, The Tempest)

Joachim Henne was a German sculptor and miniaturist about whom little is known. But this is certainly one of the liveliest depictions of Venus and Adonis (c. 1670) out there. As Cupid looks on (sicherlich!), two turtledoves play below. Adonis’s hunting dogs complain. But Adonis has discarded his spear for the arms of the goddess. See how their limbs whirl as spokes on a wheel of dizzying physicality and passion. The center of the work is the center of their fling. Their almost 3-D bodies—especially hers—seem to burst from the ivory. Physical. Erotic. Lively. That’s amore! (Alas, despite Venus’s efforts to delay Adonis, warned by a dream, he is killed by a wild boar.) 

​No photographs by Vivian Maier appeared until after her death. Only when two collectors purchased boxes of her negatives at a 2007 self-storage auction, sight unseen, and started printing them, did the street photographer’s remarkable work of more than 150,000 images become known. Quietly shooting mainly in New York and Chicago, she supported herself as a nanny for most of her adult life. Destitute in old age and unrecognized as a major artist, she died in a nursing home found by her former charges. Note the careful composition of this image, with the pale struts overhead leading to the bright hat, to which the white shirts of the couple, from beneath, also direct attention. Do you think the young man’s gaze plays a role in our view of the sweet couple under the hat?