Stephan Sinding’s Sculpture ‘Le Baiser’: The Shape of Surrender

“But when I crawl into your armsEverything, it comes tumbling down …“

(Nick Cave, The Ship Song)

Stephan Abel Sinding, Le Baiser, vers 1889

Nick Cave’s 1990 song “The Ship Song” is a song I listen to a lot these days, or rather I should say night, these late summer nights when the spirit of autumn is already palpable in the air, and there is wistfulness and tenderness in this transitional times. One line from the song “But when I crawl into your arms, everything, it comes tumbling down” is particularly rich, I feel, in the artistic sense because it gives truth to one of love’s most unsettling truths; that intimacy dismantles us. The world ‘crawl’ here is deliberate because it suggests vulnerability and surrender. Unlike standing tall or striding confidently forward, crawling implies a sense of humility, a slow, trembling movement of surrender. To crawl is to strip oneself of pride, to admit a ‘need’. The man in the song, just like the man in Sinding’s sculpture, enters the arms of the woman not as a savage conqueror but as someone undone, almost childlike. The following line: “Everything it comes tumbling down” conveys a collapse; not a destruction on the negative sense but in the sense of stripping away everything that is a barrier to experiencing love; the walls, defences, pretences; these all fall apart in the embrace. So love here is not simply comforting, it is annihilating in the tenderest sense because it reduces the self to its barest truth. And yet, from all this undoing a strange new wholeness arises, a kind of completion only intimacy can give.

Stephen Sinding’s marble sculpture “Le Baiser” or “The Kiss”, created around 1891, enacts this very collapse in stone. The two figures here are bound together in a kiss, but what strikes the viewer is not their individuality but their togetherness. Their forms soften and spill into one another, marble dissolving into curves and sinuous, flowing lines, as if the material itself yielded to the depth of the passion conveyed. The woman leans back, surrendering her weight, while the man bends forward, drawing her into the spiral of their embrace. They are no longer two bodies but one force, one breath, one flame caught mid-burst. The nature of marble is cold, solid, and immovable, and yet Sinding here succeedes in turning it liquid, molten, as if desire itself could dissolve the hardest substance. In doing so, he reminds us that love is precisely this alchemy: the softening of the rigid self, the blurring of the boundaries, the separation yielding towards connection. The kiss becomes less an image of pleasure and more a moment of surrender; the moment when the self tumbles down into the arms of another.

Cave gives us the sound of this ‘surrender’ and Sinding gives us the shape of it. One through song, the other through stone, they both circle the same paradox: that love is not about holding firm, but about falling apart. To crawl, to collapse, to dissolve; these are not weaknesses, but acts of fierce courage because they demand trust. To let another life entwine with our own is to risk exposure, rejection, even devastation. But it is also to discover the possibility of being remade, reborn, a change to blossom and rejoice. The kiss, whether in music or marble, is a threshold. On one side, there is a separation, a selfhood, and the safety of walls. On the other side, there is a dissolution, the tumbling-down of certainties, and the frightening freedom of being known. To allow oneself to be kissed in this way, fully and fiercely, is to consent to change. It is to become more than oneself, to rise again as something greater: one body of desire, one soul of fire. Perhaps that is why art returns again and again to this moment. The kiss is never just lips touching lips. It is a metaphor for collapse and for creation. Cave’s lyric trembles with the ache of it, while Sinding’s marble curves eternalise it. But both whisper the same truth just in different medium: love dismantles us, and in dismantling, makes us whole.