The Kiss

The Kiss, also catalogued as Kiss on the Beach, is an oil-on-canvas painting by Edvard Munch, signed and dated 1921, showing a couple embracing on a moonlit shore among pine trees; it belongs to the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and is displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (BF.1968.1).

The kissing couple was one of Munch's most persistent motifs. He began exploring it in 1888–89, and in paintings and woodcuts of the 1890s, above all the 1897 Kiss in the Munch Museum, the lovers' faces merge into a single shape inside a dim room. The motif became part of the Frieze of Life, his cycle on the stages of love between men and women. Later Munch moved the couple outdoors: Kiss on the Beach appears in the Reinhardt Frieze of 1906–07, painted in tempera on unprimed canvas, and again in Kiss on the Shore by Moonlight of 1914, both listed by the Munch Museum as related works.

In this 1921 version, 88.3 by 100.8 cm, the embracing pair stands at left, their heads and bodies fused into one dark, flowing form. Behind them the sea stretches to the horizon under a full moon whose reflection falls as a pillar of light on the water. Tall, thin trunks rise across the picture, the pine branches bending in the wind, and a band of pink and orange shore runs behind the green foreground. A much larger, upright Kiss on the Beach, 205 by 156 cm and unsigned, is dated 1921–1923 and belongs to the Munch Museum, which also catalogues this canvas as Woll M 1405.

The 1921 canvas belonged to the collector Rolf E. Stenersen and then to Ludvig G. Braaten in Oslo from 1948. After passing through Hammerlunds Kunsthandel and the Galerie Roman Norbert Ketterer in Campione d'Italia, it was bought by the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation in 1968 and has been lent to Munch exhibitions in the United States.