The Kiss

The one doing the kissing is the creature of Greek myth that abducts women: a half-human, half-horse centaur. But here, no one is being abducted.

For the Greeks, the centaur was a warning: a depiction of what a person becomes when consumed by wine and desire.

In the best-known story, centaurs are invited to a wedding; when they get drunk, they attempt to abduct the bride and the other women, and the wedding turns into a battle. In Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, this story is told as advice to someone who has had too much to drink: wine had driven a centaur mad, and that is how the enmity between centaurs and humans began. The Greeks even carved the centaur snatching the bride into the stones of their temples (See image 2).

In the centuries that followed, Greek art tamed the centaur not through war but through love. Sculptors placed the little god of love, Eros, on the centaurs' backs: Eros would incite the young centaur and rein in the old one. A Roman-era copy of the old centaur is in the @museelouvre today, and Eros is still perched on its back (See image 3).

In this 1896 drawing by the young Munich painter Angelo Jank (1868-1940), however, the centaur is neither incited by a god nor reined in by anyone. The woman isn’t running away; she’s kissing him too.

The drawing was published without a title the following year, in April 1897, in the Munich-based magazine ‘Jugend’. The magazine’s name meant ‘youth’; it opposed all forms of narrow-mindedness, and its pages featured naked youths, nymphs, satyrs, and centaurs roaming freely in nature. In German-speaking countries, the name for Art Nouveau also derives from this magazine: Jugendstil.

The magazine also sold its illustrations as separate prints. In the 1909 catalog, Jank’s drawing finally had a name: ‘Der Kuß’, meaning ‘The Kiss’ (See image 4). According to the magazine’s founder, Georg Hirth, these illustrations had opened up “a new world of beauty and joy of life” to thousands of people living far from art centers who could not visit exhibitions.

Jank’s own path, however, led him to the other half of the centaur: the horse. He was recognized as one of the finest painters of horses (See image 5); he was also a passionate rider himself.

The Greeks, too, had recognized the bond between horse and rider. A Greek writing under the name Palaephatus in the 4th century BC believed that the centaur myth originated with the earliest riders. According to him, horses had once been used only to pull chariots; when young men - who were the first to train their horses to carry riders on their backs - were seen from a distance, from behind, they were mistaken for a single creature consisting of a headless horse and a legless human.

Jank’s centaur, too, is the union of horse and rider in a single body. But he doesn’t kidnap; he kisses.

The signature, A. Iank · image 1