Heart to heart: Representations of love in SLAM’s holdings

To commemorate the season of love, we have highlighted several photographs and paintings in the SLAM collection that showcase love in its myriad forms. 

Shira and Sarah

In this portrait by Jess T. Dugan, Shira and Sarah embrace with interlaced arms that represent both physical and emotional closeness. Skin against skin and soft fabric, combined with the soft light of the setting sun behind the couple creates a tender mood. 
 
“I love the way they are holding each other. I love the shape that their arms make. I also love the tenderness in it and the way that it speaks to love and intimacy and connection and protectiveness,” Dugan said in an interview with The National Endowment for the Arts. Dugan’s work dissects the intricacies of identity, desire, and connection. The photographer was featured in a recent Currents exhibition.

Embrace

In this drawing by German Expressionist Max Beckmann, two lovers are tangled together, limbs indiscernible from each other. Harshly drawn lines imbue a sense of urgency between the two subjects. In the background, a cat sits upon a windowsill before a dark night sky.

Embrace was drawn in 1922, a year during which Beckmann was living and working in Munich. The creation of this work followed Beckmann’s traumatizing stint in the military, serving as a medical corpsman in World War I. Compared to works from the previous five years immediately following the war, Embrace is incredibly peaceful, despite its harsh edges. Beckmann emigrated to St. Louis where he went on to befriend businessman Morton D. May, who donated numerous Beckmann works to SLAM. You can learn more about Beckmann’s years in St. Louis here.

J. A. and E. A., Dorchester, MA

Radiating joy, this photograph provides a close-up view of two people in an intimate embrace. The head of the man, cropped at the upper right, leans against the neck and shoulder of the woman whose face is cropped at the middle left of the photo.

The photographer, Nicholas Nixon, combines two seemingly incompatible strains of photographic portraiture: the spontaneous, rapid tradition of street portraiture with the sharp, often ponderous approach of studio photography. Working in this way allows him to create work that is at once natural and unaffected, and aesthetically commanding.

Together with Friends

Painted by American artist Herbert Gentry, three abstracted figures and a horse are rendered in shades of blue. Red highlights against faint strokes of yellow in the background carve subjective expressions into the subjects’ full faces.

Gentry was born in 1919. His experience living during the Harlem Renaissance greatly influenced his style, one that is, according to his biography, “characterized by vividly gestural mark-making that imply calligraphic roots but can hardly be recognized as sign-writing. Gentry’s swirling lines are neither expressionistic nor tachistic, but rather evoke a direct print of movement, made up of quick dashes and elongated strokes.”

Carmen de Lavallade and her Son, Leo

Mother and son Carmen de Lavallade and Leo dance together in a small studio in 1960. Both are balanced on one foot; the joy shown on Carmen’s face is reciprocated in her son’s frenetic body language. He copies her movement, one foot and both hands in the air. Light colored sheer drapes hung loosely in the background contrast Carmen’s toned, dark-clothing-clad body.  
 
This photograph, printed in 1970, is one of a series of seven photographs of the same name in SLAM’s collection.

Lynette and Donna at Marion’s Restaurant, NYC

In Lynette and Donna at Marion’s Restaurant, the viewer is invited to share in a moment of reverie between two women. The mood is resonant with the warm color and seductive visual beauty of the scene. The central figures are grounded in the hyper-saturated orange glow of light, while the entire image shimmers and dematerializes in a lovely photographic effect of blur and selective focus.

Highlighting the people closest to her, photographer Nan Goldin dramatizes everyday moments through photography, taking on the role of the voyeur in order to explore vulnerabilities and complexities of personal relationships.