Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin turned their fierce passion into famed sculptures
and
fell in love hard and fast when they met in 1882. She was a wunderkind sculptor with a knack for channeling the virile energy of the human body into clay; he was 24 years her senior and already famous for his towering, deftly hewn sculptures. Their letters reveal the fierce passion and extreme volatility that marked their relationship. “In a single instant I feel your terrible force,” Rodin wrote to Claudel the same year they met. “Atrocious madness, it’s the end. I won’t be able to work anymore…yet I love you furiously.”
Pablo Picasso presented Dora Maar with a miniature painting on a ring
is notorious for being a womanizer and philanderer who swiftly moved from muse to muse. A heady mix of passion, altercation, and short-lived reconciliation defined most of his relationships, including his nine-year liaison with
photographer
. The two met in 1936 at the famed Parisian café Les Deux Magots. She was plunging a knife repeatedly between the fingers of her gloved hands; he was enthralled by her dangerous game and left with her gloves as a memento.
in the early 1940s, Maar kept the ring until her death.
Frida Kahlo painted a sensual flower for Nickolas Muray
had many lovers during her turbulent marriage to
, but
was one of the most enduring. Muray, a New York–based photographer, met Kahlo during his trip to Mexico City in 1931. A note from Kahlo scrawled on a doily immortalizes the first days of their passionate affair: “I love you like I would love an angel,” she wrote to him. “You are a [lLilly] of the valley my love.”
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst refused to call each other husband and wife
was helping his wife, the storied art patron Peggy Guggenheim, research artists for her upcoming exhibition “30 Women” when he first encountered fellow Surrealist painter
. Ernst visited her studio and stayed for a game of chess. Three weeks later, he left Guggenheim and moved straight into Tanning’s apartment.
and his partner, dancer Juliet Browner, in Hollywood. Ernst nodded to the event in his 1948 painting Chemical Nuptials, an alchemical term for the melding of sulphur and mercury, as scholar M.E. Warlick has pointed out. While they’d formalized their relationship, the couple resisted using the terms “wife” and “husband.” “If you get married you’re branded,” Tanning wrote in her 2003 memoir Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. “We could have gone on, Max and I, all our lives without the tag. I never heard him use the word ‘wife’ in regard to me. He was very sorry about that wife thing.”
Joseph Cornell inscribed love letters to Yayoi Kusama in his sculptures
and
progenitor
was largely platonic but deeply loving. They met in 1962, when one of Cornell’s collectors suggested Kusama as a live model, and infatuation followed. Cornell, who was still a virgin and living with his mother at age 59, began sending Kusama copious love letters and poems, some of which were scrawled inside his signature surrealistic collage boxes.
Gilbert & George fell in love at first sight as young art students
, first crossed paths as students at Central Saint Martins in 1967, quickly becoming a romantic and artistic duo. Prousch has described their meet-cute as love at first sight: “I followed like a dog,” he said of his initial attraction to Passmore. They’ve been inseparable since, translating their bond and life together into art.
Marina Abramović and Ulay walked across the Great Wall of China to mark their breakup
and
’s 12-year partnership produced one of the most influential
practices of the 20th century. The intensely physical body of work they built while living together in the confined space of a van explored the vicissitudes of human relationships and the endurance required to maintain them. For Relation in Space, a performance piece unveiled at the 1976 Venice Biennale, the two lovers ran from opposite sides of the room, their naked bodies colliding over and over again in the middle. In AAA-AAA, a video from 1978, they exchange violent screams until their voices go hoarse.