For many years, the statue in the Montparnasse cemetery attracted the attention of only tourists and lovers who came here to mourn and confess their eternal love to each other. Everything changed when it became clear who the author of the sculpture was: it turned out to be one of the most expensive sculptors in the world — Constantin Brancusi. That’s where it all started…
The sculpture «The Kiss» was installed back in 1911 on the grave of 23-year-old Tatyana Rashevskaya. It is known about the girl that she came from a wealthy Jewish family, was born in Kyiv, lived in Moscow for several years, and in 1910 left the country and entered the medical faculty in Paris.
At the institute, her fateful acquaintance with Solomon Marbe, a medical practitioner, who periodically lectured to students there, took place. According to rumors, the student and the teacher had an affair, the end of which, apparently, broke the girl’s heart. When the doctor’s sister came to Tatyana at the end of November 1910 to return her love letters, she found the student hanged. The suicide note spoke of great but unrequited love.
After the funeral, Marbe, being upset, turned to his friend the sculptor with a request to create a tombstone, and told him a sad story. And so the Kiss was born. Tatyana’s relatives did not like the work, where naked lovers merged in a kiss, and they even threatened to replace it with something more traditional. But they didn’t do that.
Between 1907 and 1945, Constantin Brancusi created several versions of The Kiss, but it is this sculpture from 1909 that is considered the most expressive. It would have continued to stand beautifully in the fresh air if one day the art dealer Guillaume Duhamel had not started to find out who owns the grave. And when he found relatives, he immediately offered to help them “restore justice” and “save the sculpture”, or rather, seize and sell it. Immediately after that, several lawyers joined the case.
According to experts, the cost of «The Kiss» is estimated at about $ 30-50 million. The French authorities do not want to lose Brancusi’s masterpiece and have already included his work in the list of national treasures. But while the law is still on the side of relatives. The price of victory is so high that now the family’s lawyers are doing everything possible to return the sculpture to its rightful owners. In the meantime, the final decision of the court has not been made, «The Kiss» was nailed into a wooden box so that nothing could happen to it. And then there’s little…
It is a pity that a beautiful love story, albeit tragic, risks ending like this … nothing. And no matter how the world around changes, we still find ourselves in that reality when, in the clash of human and material values, money still turns out to be a priority for some. And only a kiss of true love is worth nothing, but at the same time it is priceless for us.