Brancusi arrived in Paris the summer of 1904 after walking halfway across Europe from his native Romania. He enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and produced at least 50 known sculptures in his first three-and-a-half years in Paris, many of them heavily influenced by Rodin, whom he greatly admired. At the end of 1907, perhaps with the definite intention of escaping Rodin's domination, Brancusi abandoned modeling and adopted direct carving as his technique for the rest of his career. One of the earliest such carvings was the first stone version of The Kiss of 1907 (Muzeul de Arta, Craiova) (fig. 1). The present sculpture is a plaster cast executed before 1910 by the artist from the original stone.

With the carving of The Kiss, Brancusi, by a
supreme effort of will, intelligence and imagination,
leaps out of his past: Nothing, or very little, in
his earlier work prepares us for it, for its special
poetry, its unobtrusive, densely packed invention.
(S. Geist, Brancusi, The Kiss, op. cit., p. 1)

Whether Brancusi's Kiss challenges in some way Rodin's famous version of the same subject or not, it must have been in the artist's mind as he worked. The Kiss was a theme much used at the turn of the century in all media by artists as diverse as Munch, Peter Behrens, Picasso, Steinlen and Dalou. Perhaps the most direct influence on Brancusi was André Derain's 1907 carving, Crouching Figure (Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna) (fig. 2), which Brancusi would probably have seen exhibited in the fall of 1907 at Kahnweiler's gallery in the rue Vignon.

Brancusi moved beyond the powerful yet simple interlocking forms of Derain's worthy experiment and imbued his small sculpture with a deeply poetic universality.

Its gentleness of expression, tender theme and
modest scale set a mode from which he will rarely
stray. The blending of the personal and the
universe, like the mixture of external influence
and independent invention, is typical of much
that will follow. Unique in the oeuvre are the
absolute stability and low center of gravity of
this piece. (S. Geist, exh. cat., Brancusi,
New York, 1978, Guggenheim Museum, p. 41)

The subject matter of The Kiss was to remain central to the artist's work throughout his life. He carved a second slightly larger limestone version (Ht: 12 1/2 in.) in 1908 (ex Collection Mr. and Mrs. Harold Diamond, New York) (fig. 3) and in 1909 made a much larger
(Ht: 35¼ in.) stone variant incorporating the full figures of the lovers. When a young Russian medical student, Tanya Rachewskaia, committed suicide in 1910 following an unhappy love affair with a doctor, the large 1909 Kiss (fig. 4) was chosen to surmount a tombstone in her memory in the Montparnasse Cemetary where it stands to this day.

In 1912 Brancusi exhibited the fourth version of this subject (Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, fig. 5), reverting to the half figures of the present original Kiss. Even more stylized variations evolved in 1916 into The Column of the Kiss (whereabouts unknown) by which time the concept had become as Geist says, "an abstract design of mysterious potency" (Brancusi, The Kiss, op.cit., p. 57). These were to culminate in the artist's designs for a First World War Memorial at Tîrga Jiu in Romania, whose central structure, Gate of the Kiss (1938), employed elements of the 1916 columns.

In the 1940s the artist made another half-length version (Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and returned once more to the subject in 1945 with his Boundary Marker in which the column supporting the capital shows four pairs of incised lovers around the shaft.

The Kiss not only marked the opening of Brancusi's
mature phase, it was a seminal work which excited
continuous and various influence on the development
of the oeuvre. The piece initiated, as we have seen
a long series of variations...The Kiss is, indeed
the cornerstone of a major body of sculpture of our
time. (S. Geist, Brancusi, The Kiss, op.cit., pp. 83-83)

From the original Craiova stone carving of 1907-08, Brancusi made eight plasters: Kunsthalle, Hamburg; A.J. Latner, Toronto; Private Collection, Delaware; Private Collection, California; The Edward R. Broida Trust, Los Angeles; Chokuku Mori Bijutsukan, Hakone, Japan; the present cast and one whose whereabouts are unknown. The artist refers to this cast in a letter to Walter Pach in 1916, (on the subject of John Quinn's purchase of the 1912 Kiss). "The (Quinn) Kiss is a little larger than the one of which you have the cast" and it was Pach who lent the present plaster to the celebrated and influential Armory Show of 1913 (fig. 6). Walter Pach, the first owner of was an American post-Impressionist painter as well as an important art critic and he was instrumental in organizing the landmark Armory Show.

The first Kiss had to wait over fifty years
becoming available to a large public. In a series
of exhibitions held between 1961 and 1970 it
was belatedly acclaimed on all sides and entered
in the canon of key works of early modern
sculpture. This Kiss - the tenderest version
of Brancusi's tenderest theme - has an intimate
appeal to the viewer, whom it attracts by spiritual
force. (Ibid., p. 90)

Curiously, in none of the later versions of the
Kiss did Brancusi achieve the simple, radiant
grandeur and above all the poetry of his first
Kiss of 1907. Equally important, however,
is the fact that, beyond the interplay of
conflicting forces and the tremendous, unchanging
tension between the lovers, the triumph of the
Kiss results from the hieroglyphic stress of
the surface incisions that externalize in stone
the dark, ardent palpitations within. (R. Varia,
Brancusi, op.cit., p. 134)