The Kiss
A couple entwined in a gleaming golden cloak on a flowery meadow. Klimt’s “Golden Period” borrows from Byzantine mosaics and the ornament of Art Nouveau.
The man’s robe has angular patterns, the woman’s round ones – two worlds in the same gold.
Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss in 1907–1908, during what is known as his Golden Period. He was a leading figure in the Vienna Secession, a group of artists who broke with academic art in Vienna. Klimt’s father was a gold engraver, and Klimt himself had trained in the decorative arts. The painting was shown at the Kunstschau exhibition in Vienna in 1908 and was bought by the Austrian state on that occasion.
A couple kneel at the edge of a flowery meadow. The man bends over the woman and kisses her on the cheek, his hands cradling her face. The woman’s eyes are closed and she has flowers in her hair; the man wears a wreath of ivy leaves. The woman’s feet reach out over the edge of the meadow, where the ground comes to an end. The background is a flat golden field without depth.
The composition is square. The couple form a single shape, almost like a bell or a cocoon, in which the bodies disappear beneath the patterned robes. Only the heads, hands and feet are painted as natural parts of the body. The man’s robe has black and white rectangles, the woman’s round, colourful shapes. The patterns have been read as symbols of the masculine and the feminine. The canvas measures about 180 × 180 centimetres, so the couple are almost life-size.
Gold dominates. Klimt applied gold leaf and metallic paint directly to the canvas, together with oil paint. When light falls on the surface, it gleams differently depending on where one stands. The effect recalls Byzantine mosaics. Klimt had visited Ravenna and seen the mosaics there, and the experience has often been linked to his Golden Period.
The work combines painting and ornament in a way that is typical of Art Nouveau. The faces and hands are painted naturalistically, while the rest is purely decorative. This mixture means that the picture hovers between a real scene and an icon-like image of love.
People have often asked who the couple represent. A common guess is Klimt himself and his lifelong friend Emilie Flöge, but there is no firm evidence for this. The edge where the meadow ends has been read as a hint that happiness is fragile.
Since its purchase The Kiss has belonged to the Austrian state, and it is now displayed in the Belvedere in Vienna. It is one of the most reproduced paintings in the world and appears on posters, jewellery and souvenirs. For Vienna it has become a symbol of the city and of the art of the turn of the century. From the same period comes the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907. It long belonged to the Austrian state but was returned in 2006 to the heirs of the owning family after a widely publicised legal battle over Nazi confiscation. The Belvedere today has the largest collection of Klimt’s paintings in the world.