JACQUES SCHNIER | THE KISS

Sold: Sotheby's, New York, June 12, 1998, lot 112

Collection of Geoffrey Beene (sold: Sotheby's, New York, September 23 - 24, 2005, lot 163)

Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

Alistair Duncan, Art Deco Complete: The Definitive Guide to the Decorative Arts of the 1920s and 1930s, New York, 2009, p. 489 illustrated

Ilene Susan Fort, “The Art Deco Sculpture of Jacques Schnier,” American Art Review, vol. 5, 1998, p. 215 another example illustrated 

Ilene Susan Fort, The Figure in American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity, Los Angeles, California, 1995, p. 133 another example illustrated

Between 1986 and 1988, the artist oversaw the production of seven wood examples of The Kiss carved in teak along with a limited edition of six bronze casts, plus one foundry proof, at the Art Works Foundry, Berkeley, California. The original carved teak model for the present work was exhibited at the Fifteenth Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at the Los Angeles Museum, from May 4 to June 17, 1934. It was listed no. 13 in the catalogue and won the grand prize. In Ilene Susan Fort's essay for the Museum's catalogue she writes:

“Because Schnier’s training in art followed his discovery of Asian and Polynesian sculptures during his two years in the Hawaiian Islands, his aesthetic assumptions are very different from those of artists trained in the academic tradition who later discovered primitivist sources. As a Californian he had been exposed to more Asian and Polynesian art than sculptors on the New York/Paris axis. The majority of his time on a world trip was spent in Asia, where he was enthralled by the cave sculpture and stone carvings in China, India, and Cambodia, particularly Angkor Wat. His preferences for the ‘sensuous rhythmic quality’ of their sculpture over the frontality and the forcefulness of African tribal art can be seen in The Kiss. This eclectic direct carving also recalls the blending of two heads as seen in Brancusi’s sculpture of the same name and the overt sexuality, if not the form and surface treatment, of Rodin’s works” (The Figure in American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity, Los Angeles, 1995, n.p.).