The Kiss

The Kiss, executed around 1900 on cardboard, belongs to Previati's fully mature Symbolist-Divisionist period — the years when his reputation in Italy was at its height following the controversy and eventual triumph of his Maternità at the 1891 Milan Triennale. A kiss as subject matter invited maximum Symbolist intensity: the fusion of two beings, the dissolution of individual selfhood, the blurring of physical and spiritual union. Previati was deeply influenced by the Symbolist literary culture of his time — Mallarmé, D'Annunzio, and the Italian Symbolist poets were part of his intellectual world — and he translated their concerns about ineffable experience into visual terms through his distinctive filamentary Divisionism. The cardboard support suggests either a study or an intimate finished work, the medium itself creating informality appropriate to the private, inward subject. His Kiss participates in a widespread late nineteenth-century obsession with the subject that spans Klimt, Rodin, and Munch.

Previati's Divisionism differs from Volpedo's or Segantini's — his strokes are longer, more filamentary, creating a vibrating linear energy that gives his figures an almost immaterial quality. On cardboard, the technique absorbs differently, and the ground tone contributes to the tonal complexity. The subject's intimate scale suits the cardboard support's more modest format.